This one ended with a burp. The debate about which brew would best give President Obama Joe Six-Pack cred in his White House beer op with Harvard’s town-and-gown antagonists hit the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Had Obama picked a brand evoking an elitist whiff of John Kerry — Stella Artois, perhaps? — we’d have another week of coverage dissecting his biggest political gaffe since rolling a gutter ball at a Pennsylvania bowling alley.
Q: Why is Bud Light like sex at the beach?
A: Because it's fuckin' near water...
(Rimshot)
It’s also stupid to look at Harvard as a paradigm of anything, race included. If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.
Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, [...]
Duh.
What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. [...]
Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.
Story within a story. Here's how "real America" Myrtle Beach is: they don't like motorcyclists. White or black.
MB has had two separate motorcycle rallies for years. The city council decided to 'cancel' both of them.
“Myrtle Beach is no longer the location for two long-running motorcycle events. After many years, our residents grew weary of three weeks of noise and traffic congestion each May, and they asked City Council to end the events. As a result, the Harley-Davidson Dealers Association Spring Rally and the Atlantic Beach Memorial Day Bikefest will not be held in Myrtle Beach,” Rhodes wrote.
To discourage bikers, the city has implemented stricter noise and muffler rules, will be enforcing a helmet law within Myrtle Beach itself, has established rules against large parties in parking lots and has tightened curfews on juveniles. Increased police DUI checkpoints have been mentioned as possible points for sound emission tests as well. All this with the disclaimer that Myrtle Beach is not “anti-biker or anti-motorcycle.”
The Harley-Davidson Dealers Association Spring Rally is brand-specific and mainly for white riders, but everybody is welcome.
The Atlantic Beach Memorial Day Bikefest is AKA "Black Bike Week".
I guess that's democratic, after a fashion. Throw the blacks out, ya gotta throw the whites out too to make it look good. After all, they're all just scooter trash.
Not everyone agreed:
[...] “The City of Myrtle Beach has initiated a media campaign designed to deter the good, law abiding motorcycle riders from coming to our area. The information being disseminated by the Grand Strand Chamber of Commerce and City of Myrtle Beach does not accurately portray the views of the people of Horry County. The majority of people and businesses look forward to you visiting and desperately rely on your visiting to make it through the year.”
It states that most of the businesses that cater to bikers are in Horry County, which has not adopted the new ordinances enacted by the city of Myrtle Beach. The Harley dealer will soon have maps of the area and routes to avoid Myrtle Beach up on its site. [...]
Bikes ain't motorhomes. They don't have room for beds, kitchens, refrigerators, etc. What bikes have room for is money and credit cards, and riders spend! And local merchants from Daytona to Sturgis (happening as we speak) love it!
Here's the real America: The bikers, white and black alike, told Myrtle Beach to stuff it. Yo, Myrtle Beachoids, hear that rumblin' in the distance? That's thousands of riders ridin' around yer burg to spend their money somewhere they're appreciated. Hope ya enjoy all the peace and quiet.
Atlantic Beach and the Grand Strand hosted Black Bike Week this year, but the Carolina H-D Dealers moved their run up to New Bern NC (Oh swell. That's just north of Camp Lejeune. You thought bikers were trouble? Now yer gonna get Marines!). Myrtle Beach done screwed the pooch for the whole area on this one, and especially screwed is the local Harley-Davidson dealer. The dealerships love rallies with lots of out-of-towners. They won't be hiring extra temps either.
I've got no idea what the black biker set is gonna do. They're resourceful folks and I'm not gonna worry about 'em. They'll think of something. Ride on, brothers and sisters. For more on black bikers, go see this older post of mine.
Back to Pops:
As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today’s variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates — Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.
Sometimes the most revealing expressions of this resentment emerge in juvenile asides — Bill Kristol (on The Weekly Standard’s blog) ridiculing Gates for writing a flowery travel magazine article about his privileged vacation home of Martha’s Vineyard, or Heather MacDonald (in National Review) mocking Gates as a “limousine liberal” for his supposedly hypocritical admission that he has a “regular car service” and a “regular driver” to fetch him at the airport. Who does Henry Louis Gates Jr. think he is, William F. Buckley Jr.?
The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.
I'm better with down-and-dirty motorcyclists than I am with elites, but Pops does a good job with 'em.
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