God Help America

If you are not sure what “hypocrisy” means, or what Jesus meant when he spoke of the mote in your brother’s eye and the beam in your own, ending with the famous and commonly deceitfully decontextualized passage “judge not, lest ye be judged,” we have a perfect example in the recent news.

The Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Yankees have declared that they will no longer play Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” at their games. This had become such a sports tradition that the Flyers even had a statue of Smith outside their arena. It is now, like so many other statues in America, covered in black. Down the memory hole with Kate.

Her crime is that she recorded two songs back in the 1930s that they consider racist: “That’s Why Darkies Were Made,” and “Pickaninny Heaven.”

Those titles no doubt sound terrible to the contemporary ear. But that is because the terms “darkie” and “pickaninny” have changed their connotations since the 1930s. There is nothing in the literal meaning of either word that is pejorative. They have come to be considered pejorative only because we endorse the wider premise that there is something morally wrong with having dark skin (darkies) or being small (pickaninny). When Smith sang either song, she sang in sympathy with African-Americans: the first to lament the discrimination against them in employment, the second to console the many black orphans.

So who is the racist here, Smith, or the current management of the Yankees and the Broad Street Bullies? Who is saying there is something wrong with being dark-skinned? Who, conversely, was trying to help?

But wait—it gets worse. What were the New York Yankees themselves doing in the 1930s? Systematically discriminating; famously refusing to put African-Americans on the team. If Smith deserves to be banned from the ballpark for innocently saying now-unfashionable words, surely the New York Yankees too must be banned from the ballpark.

More generally, this current pogrom against the past has been extremely politically selective. Ancestors targeted seem, on the whole, to be those remembered fondly by conservatives, and perhaps too figures important to the general culture.  If the left were honest, they would admit that they hate Kate not for any sentiments legitimately found in "That's Why Darkies Were Made " or "Pickaninny Heaven, ' but for the sentiment "God Bless America." Hector Langevin, Conservative Cabinet Minister, for example, is targeted for merely supporting residential schools. Never mind that this was generally considered the progressive solution at the time, and would have been endorsed as heartily by any given political figure to his left. Why do we still have universities named after Laurier?

If we applied the same standards consistently, Paul Robeson also recorded one of the songs for which Kate Smith is condemned. Why is he still revered?

Why are we still displaying, in Canada, statues of the “Famous Five”? These, as everybody by now surely knows, were five women who campaigned for eugenics and for sterilizing those of “inferior” races. More broadly, the early feminist movement, including most prominent leaders, was opposed to black emancipation and objected to citizenship for Indians/aboriginals/First Nations. Why no outrage or shrouding of statues?

For that matter, why does nobody care that Charles Darwin openly assumed and advocated white supremacy? Why is he still so widely respected? Why has this fact, indeed, been generally suppressed?

A few years ago, CBC proclaimed Tommy Douglas the Greatest Canadian. Why does no one care that the founder of the left-wing NDP was also an early advocate of eugenics? Why does no one care that J.S. Woodsworth, his predecessor as founder of the CCF, who has so many public buildings named after him, wrote a book that, while sympathetic to immigrants, presumed white supremacy, “Strangers at our Gates”? Or that he, like many on the European left, opposed going to war with Hitler?

When Justin Trudeau stands in the Commons and demands that Andrew Scheer, who has no connection with them, condemn white supremacy, why does Scheer not respond by demanding that Trudeau first condemn the white supremacist views of Woodsworth, Douglas, and the Famous Five?

Or, for that matter, of his own father? Marc Lalonde, who knew the father, has said that in his student days Pierre Trudeau was a supporter of the regimes of Francisco Franco and Marshal Petain. That means he was supporting Fascist governments when Canada was already at war with Hitler and Mussolini—Petain only came to power at this point. Ignorance is not a plausible excuse; everyone by then had a pretty clear idea of just what Fascism really meant. Other reports, heard since he first ran for the Liberal leadership, but ignored ever since, had young Pierre Trudeau riding a motorcycle around Montreal during the war years wearing a German helmet. Will Justin publicly condemn and disavow?

Youthful indiscretions, you will say. People change, you will say. I agree. It is fundamentally hypocritical as well as unchristian to either scapegoat the dead, who cannot defend themselves, or to hold people responsible for views once held, rather than for present views. That is something we once condemned as McCarthyism. But then why are any youthful indiscretions on the right permanent and unforgivable? Why is the behavior towards women of Jack Kennedy, or Ted Kennedy, who was actually responsible for the death of a woman, or FDR, or Martin Luther King Jr., forgivable and forgettable, but not that of, say, Roy Moore? What about Bill Clinton, accused of violent rape? Why did Bill Cosby’s behavior only become an issue, and instantly, once he came out of the closet as a conservative?

And I have not even touched on leftist support and fondness for genocidal regimes falling within the Communist spectrum: China, Cuba, North Vietnam; Che, Ho, Mao.

“Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged. For with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye,’ and behold, the beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

(Matthew 7: 1-6, WEB)