Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class By Ian Haney Lopez

Review by Marilyn Howard

Election night 2008 was a heady mixture of triumph, hope, disbelief and pride. A black man had been elected to the presidency of the United States of America! (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to be honest and admit I never thought I would live to see the day.) Who can forget the sight of Oprah Winfrey laying her head on the shoulders of a total stranger, or the tears being shed by the old civil rights warrior Jesse Jackson? That the eve of his first inauguration fell on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day merely added to the belief that many Americans thought we had finally banished that old bugaboo, racism, and stepped into a post-racial America. They were as wrong as two left shoes. America has never been in a post-racial society; racism had merely been swept under the carpet.

According to Christian doctrine, Calvary is where Jesus died for our sins.

By naming his new film Calvary, writer-director John Michael McDonagh is suggesting a dark metaphor: Father James (Brendan Gleeson), an Irish Catholic priest, is being called on to die for the sins of others.

Specifically, for the sins of the Catholic Church.

The first scene finds James in the confessional booth opposite a man who tells him that as a boy he spent five years being raped by a priest. James asks if he’s sought counseling to deal with his trauma, but the man isn’t interested in healing. He wants vengeance.

On the following Sunday, the man vows, he will meet Father James on the beach and kill him. Why take his anger out on James? The man explains that his attacker has long since died, and anyway, killing a bad priest would accomplish nothing. The only way to send a message about the horror he endured is to kill a good priest like James.

Our Hometown Heroines gave a long lesson in adding up point totals on August 16 in a double header that resulted in a pair of triple digit wins against the Cincinnati Roller Girls and their B-team the Violent Lambs. Both the All Stars and Gang Green were in top form both offensively and defensively as they launched towards wins with astronomical totals.

OHRG All Stars vs Cincinnati Roller Girls

The first jam of the first half of the first bout set the tone for the entire bout. Penalties gave OHRG jammer Smacktivist both a track advantage and a power jam right from the beginning which she deftly exploited for three grand slams and an opening 16 to 1 score.

Our kills are clean and secular; theirs are messy and religious.

“In their effort to create a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria,” CNN tells us, “ISIS fighters have slaughtered civilians as they take over cities in both countries.

“In Syria, the group put some of its victims’ severed heads on poles.”

Stomach-churning as this is, the context in which it is reported – as simplistic maneuvering of public opinion – numbs me to its horror, because it quietly justifies a larger, deeper horror waiting in the wings. To borrow a phrase from Benjamin Netanyahu, this is telegenic brutality. It’s just what the U.S. war machine needs to justify the next all-out assault on Iraq.

“In another instance caught on camera,” the CNN report continues, “a man appears to be forced to his knees, surrounded by masked militants who identify themselves on video as ISIS members. They force the man at gunpoint to ‘convert’ to Islam, then behead him.”