Barak Mugabe

I posted below a longer version of the following as a letter to the editor of the Billings Gazette. The edited shorter version is available at the Gazette:

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_2075134d-72ae-516c-ab0c-acb5d9987548.html

Following this letter on line are some 60 blog comments. Anyone can join in the fracas.

Barak Mugabe

First our guns

Then our land

I read these phrases on a sign above the manager's desk at a Billings business last week, one that markets wholesale to constructions companies and farmers. The sign was easily visible to me and the public from the sales lobby. It first struck me that this must represent a perspective of the management at this otherwise reputable business establishment. This business has served me and Greenwood Farm very well, so it is disappointing.

Let me correct the manager publicly, since these surprising and offensive phrases assaulted me in public.

1. Robert Mugabe is the brutal dictator of Zimbabwe. Barack Obama is the democratically elected president of the United States of America. To combine those names is deeply anti-American and slings mud on our nation's honor and values.

2. Our president, unlike Mugabe the tinhorn dictator of Zimbabwe, has neither done nor said nor promoted anything remotely like confiscating my Remington, Savage, or Winchester. The comparison is totally ludicrous, even though the NRA is famous for pushing any paranoia that will sell more guns, even guns for criminals.

3. Our federal government funds our Montana land's productivity. Without federal government subsidy for commodity production and other land use by farmers, most Montana farmers would be driven off their land. The President is strongly dedicated to protecting the family farm, in words and actions.

4. A strong majority of citizens of this nation elected the current president. They affirmed his African descent, along with 100 million or so other citizens born in the USA. The constant barrage questioning his citizenship and legitimacy is racist to the core.

This carefully deniable inflammatory language is what I encountered first from Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society literature in Mississippi in the 60's. What's unprecedented and shocking in America now is mainline commercial media's pundits who encourage such language. This is tantamount to insurrection, with money media giants turning a blind eye.

I would be the first to say such speech is protected by the first amendment. But that doesn't make hate speech patriotic. Such attitudes are just a step away from flag burning, which also is protected speech, but is similarly anti-American.

I'm too old to be tolerant of such inflammatory speech and veiled personal attacks against our president, regardless of the party. I spent two years beginning 2001 as an American language specialist on the faculty of the foreign language department of XiHua University, near Chengdu in China. I can guarantee Chinese citizens were arrested and worse for using much milder language against their government leaders. That doesn't happen here, thank God. But pushing the limits on our 1^st amendment rights should not be the business of an otherwise reputable firm in Billings.

I like America, and I like the company where I do business. But I don't like anti-American speech couched in inflammatory false phrases attacking our president personally in my face when I shop there.

Maybe the minority extremists there would identify better with the hate-America agitators in the Middle East. There's plenty of oil pumped there, and plenty of work for people who do pipes and inflammatory propaganda on both sides of the conflagrations there.

--
David Graber


406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org