The words are from the musical "South Pacific". I thought about them tonight during the discussion about the yelling out of "kill him" and "terrorist" at the McCain/Palin rallies.
It is not accidental at all. It is a tactic they have used for years. It is the legacy of
Lee Atwater, featured in the new film, Boogie Man.It is the legacy of Atwater's protege, Karl Rove, and all the little Atwaters and Roves coming down the pike. They preach a message of fear and hate, and they are very open about it.
From
South PacificYou’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
That site makes an interesting comment about that song. It says "early audiences didn’t care for the song You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, and recommended it be taken out of the show. Apparently, audiences were familiar with racial prejudices, they just didn’t like being reminded of them. Michener, Rogers and Hammerstein all agreed that to remove the song would remove the guts of the show."
The song remained.
Seattle PI had a column yesterday reminding us of how well the hate has been taught through the years. This paragraph jumped out at me.
But it is also true that Wallace indeed fomented rage and anger when he ran for president as an independent candidate in the hate-filled presidential campaign of 1968.
I covered Wallace's campaign as a young Newsday reporter and I've found myself thinking of those hateful days in 1968 when people in McCain and Palin crowds would hear calculated hate-fomenting rhetoric (such as Palin's claim that Obama was "palling around with terrorists") and would shout out "Kill him!" or "Get him!"
Remember 1968. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Then Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee, running against Republican Richard Nixon and the independent, Wallace. America was rife with Vietnam War protests. Wallace spoke contemptuously of the government ("pointy-headed intellectuals") and the liberal news media. His crowds shouted angry epithets. In Cicero, Ill., outside Chicago, two young men and one young woman unfurled a small sign that said "Peace Now" -- and the crowd began shouting "Two queers and a lesbian! Get them!" -- and their sign was ripped down. Another shouted at a note-taking reporter he assumed was Jewish: "Hey Jew! You writing backwards?"
Ken at Down With Tyranny has an excellent post about seeing the new Atwater movie.
I'll bet Young Johnny McCranky lied his fool head off. Lee Atwater would have understood, and applauded The blogger says he went to see Boogie Man as he had said he would.
I don't want to write about the film in detail without the benefit of a transcript or a DVD or a second viewing. But a couple of things popped out at me. First was the reminder of how young the "boogie man" was. His ambition was limitless, as was his willingness to do absolutely anything to win an election.
We are reminded of this forcefully by Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan's presidential reelection campaign in 1984 and afterward took the audacious step of hiring Atwater, with his bare minimum of experience, as his deputy. Rollins tells us that people warned him seriously not to hire Atwater, that he couldn't be trusted, and sure enough, Atwater almost immediately repaid the man who gave him this extraordinary opportunity by attempting to ruin him. Rollins provides a vivid description of their ensuing conversation, in which he informed the young man that if he ever did anything like that again, he would kill him. There is a strong suggestion that Rollins wasn't speaking metaphorically.
..."I've also had to replace my image of Atwater as a master strategist with one as a master innovator. Give him a set of circumstances, and he could come up with a stratagem that probably nobody else would have thought of -- or would have had the gall to actually do. Polls, apparently, were an Atwater specialty. Somebody in the film points out that if Lee needed a poll, he would just go in the next room, and half an hour later he had the poll he needed.
Related to this is the point I wanted to get to: the casual acceptance of lying in campaigns. As several commenters in the film point out, there is really only one standard in campaigns: winning. And the stakes don't get any higher than the presidential level, where Atwater found himself competing at such a remarkable age. But when it looked like he had blown the 1988 Bush campaign, he was on his way to becoming a pariah. We're told that GHWB was perilously close to firing him.
It is as though the Republican party is in a vicious cycle that they can't seem to stop...the hate and vitriol is the only way they know to try to win. They don't know how to stop it.
The arrival of Sarah Palin has caused a renewal of the ugly tactics. She seems to take pleasure in using methods that arouse anger and hate....and it appears to be carrying over to John McCain.
Maybe it won't work this time, I certainly hope it won't. If it doesn't work, it will be because our candidate has such a mellow temperament and high level of intelligence.
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