Village of a Million Spirits by Ian McMillan

Horror.  Ian Macmillan has revealed true horror.  In his 1999 novel Village of a Million Spirits he transports the reader into a primitive production line of death, Treblinka.  

 Set in eastern Poland in 1943 and 1944—during the year of the camp’s existence—the reader is introduced to the SS, their collaborators, local Poles, and “work Jews” whose detail includes stripping bodies of every conceivable valuable—teeth, hair, rings, stamps, and cash.   The "work Jews" are forced, under pain of death, to dispose of their own families and tens and thousands of bodies.  Some scholars argue a million people died in Treblinka's remote and subsequently destroyed cite, teams of workers reducing the evidence to “bones and gold.”

Simon Schama sent up a warning flare about excessive or at least indulgent use of graphic horror in his Financial Times review of the 2011 novel Emperor of Lies.  What Schama argued was at that "tedious" novel's core was an "emotional void."  And with the amazing histories and diaries from Lodz, Schama argues that the event was unnecessary to fictionalize.
Meanwhile, the traces of Treblinka are now all but rubbed out.  To date, only two of the death camp's inmates survive.  Nothing of the camp remains except a rock memorial.  Claud Lanzmann's Shoah excellently chronicled the camp, using interviews with survivors and guards.  Even recent documentaries ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xnAWWlf_RE) gives new insight and perspective. 

McMillan's novel is brutal, to be sure.  Little is spared but the author does not seem to relish the horror.  Instead, the work allows characters to respond to the horrors as a way of demonstrating the effects of the black world of the camp.  As the Russians approach after the collapse of the Eastern Front at Stalingrad the Germans busily prepare for the end.  Deep death pits are transformed into “grills” used to “roast” the traces of the enormity.   

McMillan offers an arc from the transport, the Himmelstrasse or "road to heaven," and to the pits; from inmates and guards; from survivors, sadists and cynics. It was a hell run by gangsters and populated with broken and terrified men.   

Kurt Franz, a real-life Nazi nicknamed “The Doll” because of his beautiful face, joyfully murders inmates with his dog and takes special pleasure in his “work.”  Other fictional characters, such as Voss, represent the conniving and completely selfish motives of fascist functionaries.  Voss, whose face is a “swollen mask of alcoholic poisoning,” is not a true believer in some Jedeo-Bolshevist plutocracy.  He’s an opportunist; a thief and a war profiteer, nothing more.  Most terrifying  is Schenck who reveals that inside Treblinka—a “wonderland of nightmares”—sadists enjoyed absolute freedom.  Considering the Taiping Rebellion—a civil war that consumed million—during his nightly boredom, Schenck muses:  “How many of us remember that?”

Treblinka became, writes McMillann, a place where “even shame is dead—it hardly even prickles the skin.”  Starved and half-delirious with fear and disease, the “work Jews” cheer after a slump in “transports,” even while their own families burn in the nightly pyres.  The Germans and their collaborators don’t just rob them of their families and goods they rip out the ability to feel.  After his family is murdered, one character realizes he is alone:  “…his attitude should be some kind of grief, but he does not feel grief.  He feels hunger, and thirst, and his skis is irritated with dirt and sour body oil.”

One of them, Janusz is slight and ignored, allowing him to steal in preparation of an armed rebellion.  McMillan mentions, though does not focus on, real characters like Rudolf Masarek, who planned and initiated the rebellion.  Meanwhile, characters like the Ukranian guard, Anatoly, whose Polish girlfriend is pregnant, smuggles the Jews guns.  He hates the Germans—though his presence represents the fact of widespread and brutal fascist collaboration. 

When Janusz enters the camp, Treblinka is not the efficient factory that Auschwitz became.  Bodies lie in the road and SS guards do not take great care to deceive Jews about their fate.  Instead of arbeit macht frei, horrified passengers are greeted by mauling dogs and the truncheon.  Before Janusz is separated from his family, his grandmother thinks, “The guards have apparently struck (the children) as they passed.  It occurs to her that such meanness could indicate that they never had any intention of killing them.  Mistreatment makes little sense.”   

Treblinka was not the efficient factory of death that Auschwitz became.  Its early leaders were inefficient and sloppy.  Bodies piled up and whole transports were left in gas chambers to suffocate—not because of purposeful brutality in this case—but because guards simply forgot about them.  With a change in leadership, Treblinka is “beautified” with paths and flowers and a new goal of orderly, efficient killing.  Even the death pits are sprinkled with flower seeds.

Janusz cares for others in the camp, nicking gold and offering candy to his comrades.  Though, they don’t understand why he does it, considering his behavior irrational and almost inappropriate considering the circumstances.  And in collaboration with another inmate, Dr. Herzennberg, Janusz picks gold and goods from the bodies—even becoming a “dentist” removing the teeth from corpses—and prepares for escape. 

Hovering over each page is the real feeling of doubt that no revolt will occur, the miserable inertia of survival will roll out into death atop the pyres.  McMillan excellently transports you into the experience of those wedged in the vice of fear and those beyond its clutches.  

 Treblinka’s guards have only contempt for the Jews, a people with “fatalistic resignation.”  For the Ukranian Anatoly, the Jews “seem to him like pigs in a slaughterhouse yard, gazing at the fence and scheming while, one by one, they are butchered.”  Even the inmates doubt that their liberation will come, some choose suicide or a trip “to the hospital” a pit with a rude shack front and bogus Red Cross flag. 

But in the broiling hours of August, 1943, a few dozen starving prisoners fight back. 

David Nasaw's The Patriarch

The Patriarch:  The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, The Penguin Press, Nov. 13 2012, $40.00, 834 pp. 

The Patriarch dispels the false “facts” that continue to orbit Joseph P. Kennedy’s story.  Nasaw argues that Kennedy really wasn’t a bootlegger, wasn’t his sons’ puppeteer, and didn’t steal any elections.  The truths about Kennedy—like how a New York Times columnist was ghostwriting for him while praising him unbeknownst to readers—are arresting.  Slow to politics, Kennedy supported Republican Hoover over Al Smith in 1928 (even though he was later indignant that fellow Catholics didn’t vote in large numbers for his son John in 1960!)  Interestingly, Kennedy only chose not to become a Republican because of somnolent Governor Calvin Coolidge’s decision to remove an Irish American from public office as a sop to the Protestant establishment. 

Joseph made his millions on Wall Street because “no one knew how to play the angles as well as he did.”  As he says himself in one of many letter excerpts, “I knew all the angles of trading…I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation….I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas—when to duck and when to hit.” 

In fact, he knew the scams of the so-called “free market” we hear so much about—the pools, corners, wash sales, match orders—and was brought into the Roosevelt administration as the SEC chairman to help institute the regulatory state conservative business-types like he now dismantle! In effect, Kennedy regulated himself out of the stock market.  Roosevelt handled more than collaborated with Kennedy even dismissed the patriarch as a “temperamental Irish boy.”

Later he made Kennedy ambassador to England, a regrettable choice given Kennedy’s tendency for isolationism, his suspicion of the English, his hope that the British would just lie down and accept defeat, and his false belief that Hitler was a rational actor.  His notorious interview—“democracy is all done”—is given special attention and while Nasaw doesn’t dwell on the “hundreds of affairs” in which Kennedy indulged, he does highlight Kennedy’s tendency to raise the Jewish question where it didn’t belong.   As everyone knows, this engaging and enormous book cannot end well:  Kennedy outlived four of his nine children.  Three were killed (two on television), his daughter Rosemary was lobotomized, and young Edward fell into scandal. 

Joyce E. Chaplin's Round About the Earth

Chaplin, Joyce E. Round About the Earth:  Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit.  Simon & Schuster, $35.00.  560 pp.  Publication Date:  Nov. 13, 2012.

Even the feel-good cliché “Think globally, act locally” reveals the modern tendency to interact with the Earth in a totalizing way:  You can and do make a difference, goes the belief.  From Magellan to John Glenn humans have attempted to see, exploit, conquer, experience, and now protect our “globalizing” world with the terrifying result called Modern History. 

Joyce Chaplin has written a heavily-researched and alluring book detailing five centuries of “globestruck” humanity.  She begins with the “ruthless thug” Magellan who brutally subjugated and converted indigenous peoples from East Africa to India and she later discusses what one later circumnavigator called his subsequent “honorable imitators.”  But the point of travelling is not only commerce or experience it is regaling the world with new stories:  “Survivors shared misadventures, crisscrossers of each other’s paths, the men created one final traffic jam at London’s printing presses, where each was determined to get his story out first,” Chaplin writes. 

Her pages are packed with dozens of wild globe-trotting stories—even the marooned basis for Robinson Crusoe who survived on a desert island according to one traveler, “cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them.”  Despite the yawns elicited by the later Apollo mission and recent Mars landing, like a hungry Alexander the bright and eager forever seek new worlds to conquer:  scientists plumb the pits for extremophiles and larger telescopes peer across the universe at distant quasars.  Enlightenment rationalism has produced a hunger.  “The overall sense was that mastery of the planet had been achieved, and that humanity had always been meant to achieve it,” Chaplin writes.  “The new impulse—which still exists—is to fulfill an us-too ambition, to join the club of nations able to go round about the Earth, as if humanity might be united in planetary dominion.” 

Yet humanity has now achieved dominion but finds itself boiling in its own bathtub.  Instead of stories of heroism our travelling contemporaries produce cautionary tales of falling ice, disappearing forests, and a heating world.  Chaplin quotes one, regretful of the transformed world:  “So much of what had fascinated me on my first voyage through the world was disappearing—cultures, customs, animals, whole ecologies, all diluted, muddied or driven to extinction.”  

"Surviving Progress"

             When Jane Goodall spoke at a book talk in New York she was wrapped in a silk scarf and her hair was pinned in her trademark gray tail.  Her latest book Hope for Animals and Their World described the many successes of the conservationist movement--the reintegration of species like the California condor into their habitats--detailing the extraordinary rescue efforts scientists and advocates make for the smallest progress.  As she concluded she removed a single condor feather from a leather tube; it seemed to stretch longer than one of her own legs.  The crowd, mostly urban and young, roared with approval.  Hope.  It is not just possible, it sells books, too.
              The memory of that talk and her beautiful book came to mind as I watched "Surviving Progress," not just because she is interviewed in the film, but because when confronted with the bleak realities of 21st century's globalized free market capitalism, one needs to hold on to something (even a single feather) of hope.  As she says in her interview, "Humans are a problem-solving species."
               In the documentary scientists, intellectuals, and writers take on the major concern of the next century:  Will humanity change its ways or ask for a bigger shovel?  For cynics, it should be said up front, humans aren't going anywhere.  No matter how much eco-freaks and God-botherers howl at an empty sky.  In Curt Stager's excellent book Deep Future we learn sure enough that we can't kill off the species through climate change, but we can make it miserable for the weakest and poorest among us; we can kill off huge portions of the population; and we can deplete (for us and our progeny) the natural abundance of resources in and on the Earth.  Yet it must be admitted that "Market fundamentalism," or the blinkered faith in progress, has tethered all of us to the crazed horse of a global economy with no stable of regulations and rules large enough to house it.
              One flattering problem the film reveals is that humans have been too successful.  It took 1300 years to add 200 million people to the world's population, now it takes 3 years.  With 6 or 7 billion people, some argue that this is too many by half.  But I don't see the ruling elite changing their behavior or the bottom half of the planet living much better just because there are less people.  Our numbers are going up, space and resources are limited, and as one interviewee says, "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
             An intriguing and reoccurring topic in the film is the "progress trap."  In learning and making progress 'we' saw at the very limb on which 'we' sit like the cavemen who discovered that charging a herd of animals over a cliff was easier than hunting them individually--smart but self-defeating if taken to extremes.
             Author Margaret Atwood preempts conservative arguments saying that we should think of the earth not as some holy abstraction but as a finite system.  "Unless we preserve the planet," she argues, "There isn't going to be any 'the economy' left."  Her comments carefully juxtapose with the experience of a middle class Chinese tour guide, made comfortable by the rising industrialism in his country, but one who self-silences:  He refuses to confront the problems of the environment directly for fear of retribution even when he and his own family recognize the drawbacks of development.
              Of course the greatest part of this film is blame.  It is not a conspiracy to speak of an international elite who literally dictate world policy.  It does exist.  And their instruments in the banking industry--who so excellently ensnared the developing world in debt obligations they could not possibly repay--have prepared the track for the great collisions of the 21st century:  Who will pay the debts?  Who says 'we' have to?  What will happen if 'we' don't?
              There are deficits to this sleek and beautiful film.  The pseudo-scientific babbling of Robert Wright never ceases to sound like a mad-chemist's parrot set loose on camera:  "Now more than ever you could argue that there's a unified social brain."  What nonsense is this?  And his imperative that we must make "moral progress" is as fantastical as it is a-historical.  As is one interviewees notion that "we're up against human nature...we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves."  While he wasn't mentioned, philosopher and Enlightenment critic John Gray's recent (exceedingly bleak) arguments and historical work on this point are fairly conclusive.  (For more see The Immortalization Commission.)  Such a ridiculous frame for change as 'human nature' (whatever that turns out to be) will offer up human nature itself:  mercurial, uncertain, radically alternate.
              More convincing is the notion that we need to "prove nature wrong," as one scientist argues.  In this vein, we must prove that "making apes smarter is NOT a dead end."  (The experiment of civilization could topple, the film purports, unless we shore up our world.)  Human beings may not have a "united social brain" or be able to individually transform "their natures" but humans can arise to a challenge.  They can act collectively.  Perhaps the next challenge of societal progress--as opposed to human progress--is a collective decision to overcome impulses to greed for generations as yet unborn.  It will take reclaiming a simple word:  "We."
         

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln"

                    For those looking to experience a movie that has all the visual quality of the best Civil War films and the charming character-driven plot of the best historical drama, check it out.  Daniel Day-Lewis's story-telling as the chatty Lincoln has a Brando-like quality:  you cant take your eyes off him (and neither can Lincoln's male helpers with whom he has several intimate moments.)
                  Of course the best kept secret of the film (and of the American history of Reconstruction) is Thaddeus Stevens--the powerful Pennsylvania Radical Republican--who has the precise amount of acid and scorn for the House's yokels, cynics, and hucksters.  If few contemporary educated and conscientious voters have an outlet to spout rage at the moronic inferno blazing in Michele Bachmann's district or at a Rand Paul stump speech, Stevens seems to act as a delightful proxy for us--albeit in the 19th century.  He lays waste to 'em!  Tommy Lee Jones, as ever, is masterfully patient in a stern and focused portrayal that could have been ruined by bluster.
                  My only issue is a historical one:  Where was Anderew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice President who, after inheriting the presidency, became our worst President?  Wasn't he, impeached and disgraced, worth seeing since he is the darkest decision in Lincoln's legacy?  And while I thought the dreamy sequences that illustrate Lincon's nightmares were haunting and unexpected, seeing Lincoln's face in a flame with a flashback to his second inaugural (after his assassination scene) was a bit much.  But Spielberg never can give up on the happy endings, can he?
                  The critic for The New Republic made a crucial argument for those who enjoyed this movie:
"That is the real lesson for now, in these few days. Being a nobleman or a saint is not enough in a leader. We need someone who can stoop to getting the job done, and wheedling the necessary votes in any way it takes. Lincoln the movie may look archaic and nostalgic in time—even in quite a short time. But for a few days or weeks now, it is the moment in a way few modern movies have managed. It’s very good, but that’s not the point. It’s necessary. Make sure your children take you to see it."
                  Of course, the 13th amendment passed and the movie does a strong job of illustrating the art of the bribe and the suspense of high-pressure negotiations.  But it also neglects the century blacks had to wait in order to gain political equality.  And it neglects to confront (rather than merely reflect) the dysfunctional and outmoded institutions that can allow such grievous injustices to be perpetuated.  While I would recommend this film to anyone, what our culture needs after Lincoln, a soothing movie about political healing, is a film about Reconstruction:  The moment when the best hopes of federal action were dashed by conservative "small government" types; when bought senators and paid representatives knowingly subsidized private industry; when black rights were buried under the flummery of "states rights"; when Lincoln's notion of a government by, for, and of the people disappeared for a generation into a Gilded Age.  

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry

                Cities like Gary, Detroit, and Newark with majority African-American communities have had little luck with mayors.  Kwame Kirkpatrick, Marion Barry, Tony Mack, Ray Nagin, Sharpe James, Pete Mandich and George Chacharis.  Big plans and lofty talk result in reoccurring tragedies, American-style.  Tales of racy sex, public dead ends, corruption, and scandal.  Yet, the tragedy--in which one's greatest strength results in self destruction--these communities devotedly support the very charismatic but deeply flawed men doing little while taking a lot.  Families in these cities feel the pinch of neglect and the crunch of choked budgets.  But the critical element of tragedy comes from the cynicism of men like Marion Barry who prey upon a feeling (real and imagined) of persecution to propel them listlessly onward, wasting our time.              

                 "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" follows the four-times elected mayor, who was born the son of sharecropping cotton pickers in Mississippi.  A school board member, City Council President, and business-friendly candidate.  (Incumbent Mayor Walter Washington considered a franchise tax to close the budget deficit.  Barry, his opponent, helped scupper the tax and made friends in the white establishment, though they abandoned him in his 1978 run..)  Handsome, charismatic, and quite sharp (Barry was working on a PhD in chemistry before he joined the civil rights movement).  As the film's black and white shots demonstrate, Barry had potential.  According to the Feb. 19, 1990 Nation "Barry's accomodation to the city's moneyed interests was matched by a commitment to delivering services and employment to the city's black majority."
                 Barry's greatest sin was not his personal hubris, it was allowing an excuse for the conservative establishment and reactionary prosecutors an opportunity to topple participatory democracy in D.C.  To, in a sense, use the spectacle of his failed leadership as an excuse to disenfranchise thousands of poor and struggling people.  These forces used the drug laws to selectively act to pick off political opponents.  Barry was not a victim, but he allowed his troubles to marginalize his own community and allow moral crusaders an issue.
                  Journalists and authors speculate about his possibilities, one going so far as to compare Barry's potential with that of Martin Luther King.  But the footage we see of Barry from the 1970s belies such gauzy assertions.  Even then he was vain and pompous--a mercurial demagogue who would drop "dig" and "jive talk" in his dashiki just as soon as a he'd down highballs with the D.C. elite in a silk suit.  The compiled footage is astonishing:  Barry sermonizing to schoolchildren about the danger of drugs; a lithe Barry unable to walk up the steps to his apartment while running for city council in 2004.  They are the images of a shaky, sweaty, and swaying addict (with a city burning around him) speeding towards the wall.
                The film's frame is an election for Ward 8, a poor black district in which Barry notoriously won with 58% of the vote.  Because the make of a tree is its roots, the film follows Barry's structure from youth through the present day.  The charmer of the post-60s "empowerment" movement quickly leaps into the top spot of Reagan-era Washington as the bright gleam upon black politics.

                 In fact, his first term glowed:  He was viewed as a competent leader whose administration is a model of smart and savvy leadership, African-American leadership.  But with few funds and Republican Washington wedded to big business, Barry burns up dollars through contracts and large and crony-ridden public employment.  Promises became mere rhetoric, governance a sham.  And by his third term, his only policy is patronage; Barry loses control of himself and the city.
                 Quite dramatically, his downfall coincides with the degeneration of urban black life--from the idealism of emergent equality to the brutalities of coke-fueled post-industrial blight.  By 1987 more than half of the 400-plus homicides in Washington were classified as drug related.  Seventy-five percent of the victims and 86 percent of the assailants were black males.  The 80s brought disenchantment with government but it also ushered in a flood of drugs and mass incarceration. As Barry made his way from the mayor's office to the courthouse (charged with a misdemeanor) and back, the documentary shows how the Gingrich Congress stripped the re-elected mayor of his financial powers, rendering him little more than a figurehead.

                  The film skillfully captures the collapse of an individual life swinging from tragedy to farce.  Mayor Barry, who in 1978 described a government "for us by us," withers into a lonely fiend:  diminished, shameless, and unbowed.  But while Barry becomes a more transparent fraud the closer we lean, he is visibly magnetic, even at his most depraved.  In a major speech in his 1990s comeback, there is a  model of the man embodied in his rhetoric.  The bombast when read, like Mencken's word-by-word analysis of Harding's soothing "Gamiliese," exemplifies energy and style trumping substance:   "Our entire city can get itself off its knees and do for itself again, and bring itself out of where we are now again.

                  The hardest part for me was watching those in Barry's oribt--his intelligent godson and many admirers--consistently disappointed by his inability to shake personal vices, or even to control the last remaining pieces of his broken life.  He tells the camera "I don't think too much about the past."
                   How could he?
                   How could he allow himself to remember the grainy video of him smoking crack with a former mistress?  The wan face of his long-suffering wife?  D.C.'s chalked outlines, like a city-wide Pollock painting?  The increasing dropouts?  The endless murders?  AIDS? Public housing?  To dwell on a past he helped to produce would admit some level of culpability, of shame.  But as we see,  Barry has none.     

                The film's story is a cautionary one.  Americans are too often pulled by the star of the most powerful, charismatic, or even redemptive personalities:  Smooth Clinton.  Cool Obama.  Friendly Bush.  Lovable Reagan.  Yet the policies and product rarely match the packaging and the sucker left with the check, especially in the case of Mayor Barry, is the guy with few hopes and many needs.  But let it never be said that Washington is an unforgiving city.  Truman's line was that one seeking friendship in the nation's capital should buy a dog.  This might, in fact, be excessively harsh.  Ex-mayor, ex-prisoner, twice-divorced, and permanent addict, Councilman Barry, won reelection in 2008 by a landslide.  In fact, he has never lost an election in Washington D.C.
               

Bobby Jindal: We've heard it all before

              Governor Bobby Jindal is a shape-shifting fraud and a gross and habitual liar.  His stump speeches for Romney this year were deployed with his usual awkwardly wooden style--one that even gave GOP hacks the incentive to ignore him during VP selections.  Jindal, occupied by Hurricane Isaac, didn't make it to the RNC debacle, though Clint Eastwood saved him a chair.  "The Gre't State's" governor did, however, go to the usual stage-managed gatherings where he could play the color-blind individualist.
                "President Obama is the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter!" he never tired in hissing.  As if such a statement is something profound, clever, or even accurate.  It had all the intellectual depth and probity of Dan Quayle's son bellowing "President Obama is the worst president in history" before being ousted by the loons in a conservative primary.
              The "liberal" charge is an old but still useful tactic.  Jimmy Carter was no liberal--ask the PATCO union who grew so frustrated with his feckless leadership that they endorsed Reagan in 1980.  (The Republican hero notoriously rewarded them with pink slips after their failed strike.)  In 1978, the stock market was at its lowest point in three years, the trade deficit was growing, and inflation was quickly rising.  While Carter was accurately called the "last victim of the Vietnam War" he was also hostage to America's lack of an energy policy.  So how did the pious peanut broker and supposed "liberal" respond?  He urged Congress to cut spending and reduced federal job programs.  This, despite the opening tremors of de-industrialization, layoffs, and the ignored liberal coalition's demand that everyone deserved the dignity of a job.  
              Carter openly declared in 1978 that inflation not unemployment was America's greatest dilemma.  How is this, combined with no action on a health care bill and continued subsidies to conservative farmers on the federal dole, a liberal Presidency?  That Carter was followed by the tax-raising Reagan and Bush as well as the budget-balancing Clinton is not news, but it perplexes me why Jindal thinks "he's a liberal" attacks are at all interesting, vital, or accurate?
             In a CNN editorial ( http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/15/opinion/jindal-gop-election/index.html?hpt=hp_t3) Jindal mused on new ways to "move forward."  (While using obviously using no new ways to write.)  Of course these played-out tunes are simply sad re-giftings of conservative herd words.  They range from the cliche: "Stop looking backward." To the inane:  "Compete for every single vote."  There is some honesty:"stop being the stupid party."  In fact,  I was reminded of J.S. Mill who said in a Parliamentary debate in 1866, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."  
             Jindal also encouraged his fellow budget cutters to "reject identity politics."  Though this should more accurately be read as "stop with the racism."  The recently released Lee Atwater interviews demonstrate how the enduring use of linguistic subterfuge as a strategy to instigate latent racism is so well sewn into conservative rhetoric that what once was simply a Southern strategy is now a national strategy.  One built on the twin pillars of resentment and self-delusion.  If the rhetoric doesn't repeat racist language, it surely rhymes with it.  (Here's Atwater's "Nigger, nigger, nigger" statements:  http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy)  
              Though, admittedly, it's nice to see Jindal tip the conservative kabuki mask, we've heard the dialogue before.