You’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.
The parents of one of the most popular girls in our junior high school class of 1950 owned — wonder of wonders! — a record changer and several albums of Broadway shows. Though its theme utterly escaped us, South Pacific was our favorite. The music was catchy, to say the least, and we cherished the naughty pleasure of singing the line, “Ain’t that too damn bad!” in the song, Bloody Mary Is the Girl I Love.
The song, You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught, meant nothing to our innocent ears, but in recent months, as a wave of white nationalism has swept the United States, it has become especially poignant. When I saw the videos of the angry, vacant-eyed, torch-bearing white faces shouting hateful slogans, I couldn’t help but wonder — in the original sense of the expression — “Where in hell did that come from?”
There have been almost as many attempts at answers as there have been commentators, and most of them have grabbed at least a piece of it. Given that anger — especially as virulent as that expressed by the burgeoning fascisti — is the child of fear, I have to wonder what’s become of the Home of the Brave.
A popular internet meme pictures an empty helmet capping a post, implying the death of a serviceperson, with the slogan, “Home of the Free, Because of the Brave.” There’s a vague implication there, as well, that those thus protected by their military forces are slightly unworthy.
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.
In this land of the free, our greatest national obsession seems to be security; and our hottest (and stupidest) arguments are often over the inclusion of the words, “under God,” in our Pledge of Allegiance and standing at attention during renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner. Lockstep patriotism, I call it; hardly free. Ever since Sen. Joseph McCarthy insinuated his malignant worm into our national apple — the fear of communists among us — and Ronald Reagan created millions of mischiefs with his comment that government couldn’t solve our problems because it was itself the problem, our alienation from our own institutions, and from each other, has burgeoned. In the wake of the weekend’s so-called Unite the Right night march and the daytime beatings, all officialdom is breathing justice and fire and brimstone. “Dialogue” is the liberal word of the day. But what is actually being done about the fears that are the parents of the anger?
Many decry the “atmosphere of violence nurtured by our current president,” and there’s something to that; he certainly encourages folks at his rallies to manhandle protesters and members of the various media. But far more influential, I think, are the talk-radio hosts, grown wealthy by throwing raw meat to the vaguely disgruntled, who daily inject poison into the national discourse. They’re nothing new; back in the late 1930s, Father Coughlin could fill Madison Square Garden and reached 30 million radio listeners with his anti-Semitism and admiration of Hitler. In that sense, we’re just repeating history, instead of learning from it.
When last weekend’s marchers chanted “You (or alternatively, Jew) will not replace us!” they were expressing a deep anxiety born of America’s shifting demographics. White Anglo-Saxons’ long reign as the most numerous of American racial types will indeed come to an end by mid-century. For some reason, lots of us have found that threatening. But rather than learning to accommodate that inevitable change (and maybe even, God forbid, learning a second language), many of us seem to be standing on the beach and daring the tide to rise. It will.
President Barack Obama, challenged to deal more forcefully with ISIS (remember Ted Cruz suggesting we bomb them till the sand of the Middle East glowed in the dark?), often maintained that ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States. Few people seemed to believe him — mostly, I suspect, because they didn’t know what “existential” means. But it’s true. Without minimizing the effects of occasional terrorist attacks, the real existential threat to our democracy lies in our internal dissensions, and at the feet of those who incite those poor souls we’re watching on television this week, attempting to recreate the days of National Socialist glory in clouds of citronella rising from their Polynesian tiki torches.
Nelson Mandela has it right: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” I hope that’s true, but I’m not so sure. How can we teach our kids not to fear — and who will do it? — when so many of those who would lead us know that fear, hate and anxiety are the greatest motivators they can employ to persuade us to follow them?
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
