In this hour of national hysteria over Roseanne Barr’s latest outburst of racism, who knew we’d be turning to former President George W. Bush for words of perspective?
But here they are. In last year’s aftermath of Charlottesville, when neo-Nazis marched through the streets spewing their hatred and President Donald Trump somehow found “good people on both sides,” it was Bush who delivered a speech in which he sadly declared, “Bigotry seems emboldened.”
The direct reference was to Charlottesville, but indirectly it included remarks by Trump about “Mexican rapists” and Muslim immigration bans and kneeling pro football players Trump wants to banish from the country for protesting racist police shootings.
In such an atmosphere, should anybody be surprised by Roseanne Barr’s remark comparing former President Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett to an ape? Bigotry was emboldened. Maybe the surprise is that it cost Barr her job, and maybe her career, and cost ABC-TV untold millions in dollars and viewers.
After all, Trump’s made a career out of repugnant remarks, and it got him elected president.
Barr’s got a similar history. She’s accused George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire/progressive philanthropist, of being a Nazi “who turned in his fellow Jews … in German concentration camps” – a contemptible lie, based on zero facts.
She’s falsely accused young David Hogg, a brave survivor of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., of giving a Nazi salute. She’s issued crazed conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C.
Hell, it’s a list that could go on for days.
But how about this one? Remember Barr’s off-key ballpark rendering of the national anthem some years back? When the crowd booed her performance, Barr grabbed her crotch and spat.
Perhaps Trump forgot that piquant moment when he was dissing NFL players for their gestures during the national anthem – silent, dignified expressions of pain over police shootings of unarmed young black men – and saying these players should be sent out of the country.
Trump’s been unusually silent in the aftermath of Barr’s latest outbursts (including more than a hundred tweets since her firing was announced). Some of us are waiting for the president to say she has a right, under the First Amendment, to say or do whatever she wants.
Don’t football players have the same rights of expression, Mr. President?
But the current atmosphere isn’t strictly the creation of our Tweeter-in-Chief. The mouthing of hate comes from the bottom, too – from all those millions of comments sent in to websites in which the language is guttural, hateful – and anonymous.
In the old days, when newspapers were still our primary means of mass communications, anyone hoping their Letter to the Editor would be printed had to include a phone number, so that the letters editor could confirm the authorship – and then print the writer’s name in the paper, along with the letter. That simple gesture helped ensure a level of civility that now seems vanished.
Today, any lowlife with an attitude can get published, and nobody knows who’s behind it.
At least Barr had the courage to sign her name to her hatefulness.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.
Also see:
Roseanne’s other problematic tweet was about George Soros
Trump congratulates Roseanne Barr on ‘unbelievable’ ratings
Roseanne Barr calls Hillary Clinton ‘anti-Semitic,’ says top aide is ‘filthy nazi whore’
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