On Monday the online realm of the mainstream media reported that
a group of Scott Brown supporters and staffers
made vile racist hand gestures and hurled racially-charged
epithets at Elizabeth Warren supporters near the Eire Pub in
Boston, Massachusetts. “Casual
racism and sports collide in Massachusetts,” reported the
Pulitzer Prize-winning publication the Huffington
Post.
“Supporters of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown are seen at a
rally doing tomahawk chops and war whoops in an apparent attempt to
mock Democrat Elizabeth Warren… The Brown supporters laugh as they
mimic Native American war cries” reported Huffington,
citing a video disseminated by a group linked to Warren’s
campaign.
Clearly, if HuffPo’s word is to be taken at face value,
it was yet another case of the drunken Irish-Catholics getting out
of hand, inflicting their backward cultural views on the good,
progressive people of Elizabeth Warren Nation. We all know that
when booze and broads are involved, those Scott Brown supporters
can turn any Boston political rally into a genuine race riot.
Shameful behavior, but not exactly surprising considering their
reading comprehension level (why are they still supporting Brown
even after HuffPo reported on the first debate with the
headline “The
Professor and the Jock”? Don’t they know that a
professor is better than a jock?)
But here’s a fact not mentioned by the Huffington Post
or
Rachel Weiner at the Washington Post: It was Scott
Brown’s campaign event.
The Elizabeth Warren people ambushed it, angrily and
methodically chanting “Warren! Warren! Warren!” sticking their
signs in the faces of the Brown supporters, taunting and
intimidating them in the hope that somebody on the Brown side would
say something off-color that could be captured by the pro-Warren
filmmakers infiltrating the rally.
The Warren people got their wish.
Confronted with a swarm of dead-eyed warriors right off the
Daily Kos blogroll, a couple of Massachusetts guys in
backwards baseball caps tried to lighten the mood. After trying out
the chant “Yankees suck,” the pro-Brown guys started doing the
Atlanta Braves tomahawk chop, smiles on their faces. It was a
lighthearted reference to Professor Warren’s most publicized
embarrassment.
They were not insulting Native Americans, the way Warren did
when she co-opted their heritage on a job application or talked
about their “high cheekbones” — actions that caused a good deal of
pain in the Cherokee
community. No. They were lampooning Warren’s actual
relationship to Native American culture, pointing out that
Professor Warren is about as much of a Native American as the
Cleveland Indians mascot or any other shallow white mainstream
appropriation of the American Indian people.
They were noting that on the list of important Native American
events in this country’s history, Elizabeth Warren’s Senate
campaign ranks somewhere alongside “Come And Get Your Love,” Ed
Ames’ tomahawk throw on the Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson, and Jane Fonda’s awkward participation in the Turner
Field rally cry during the 1991 World Series. Elizabeth Warren, in
a sense, is the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chop.
They were only mocking one Indian — the fake one.
Stop taking yourselves so seriously, the Brown guys
were saying in a language imperceptible and unacceptable to the
overeducated radicals confronting them. It’s a nice day
outside. And, hey, it’s just a political race.
But the Warren people practice a different breed of politics —
the politics of Occupy. The Warren people came armed with high-tech
video cameras and a take-no-prisoners agenda. Within minutes, the
pro-Warren activist organization BlueMassGroup was frantically
tweeting their video to every mainstream media reporter in
Washington.
For the Gen-Y liberal bloggers sitting in front of their Twitter
feeds in our nation’s capital, it was like their non-denominational
holiday of choice came early this year.
This video had it all! Racism! Quasi-violence! And, unlike at
Zuccotti Park, this time it was the Republicans, not Warren’s
students, ostensibly misbehaving.
Our friends at Buzzfeed and Talking Points
Memo (etc., etc.) typed out their faux-outrage with
unrestrained glee, their hyphenated last names and Ivy League
headshots popping up across the blogosphere beneath sensational
racially-charged headlines.
The Massachusetts sense of humor — the very thing holding
together that proud, beautiful old state — was being assailed by a
bunch of folks not only ignorant of the state’s unique culture but
openly hostile to it.
And after the scandal had been created, promoted, and
acknowledged by Senator Brown — “I’ll tell that (staffer) to never
do it again” he said — the communications director of the
Massachusetts Democratic Party, Kevin Franck, took a quick break
from his righteous outrage to make clear on Twitter what had just
transpired.
“Thanks for your help today,” Franck
tweeted at Scott Brown’s Twitter supporters, who were defending
their senator with humorous but not altogether Harvard-appropriate
gusto. “Please keep doing what you do.”
The Yankees won.
