The White Vote: Here We Go

Not Since LBJ . . .

I early-voted yesterday so that I can head down to the Confederacy today to join my daughter and grandson in South Carolina (don’t ask) for Halloween. My costume will be a nightshirt, a bathrobe, a woolen cap, and a pillow: I’ll be a sleepy old grandpa.

This year the gruesomeness of Halloween feels too true to life, because, like all of my friends, I’m anticipating the worst in this election. Yet somewhere in the back of my mind I’m fantasizing that my fellow Americans will come to their fucking senses and understand that the Republican Party is the enemy of nearly all of their interests, regardless of their race or religion or ethnicity, and that anger, fear, and blatant lying are no way to motivate a country towards its future.

Also lodged in the back of my mind is the fantasy, which always comes towards the warm, balmy end of October, that it won’t snow at all this winter in the Northeast . . .

Nu, in the portion of the Torah that was read in synagogues this weekend, the so-called “Curse of Ham” is invented in a scene in which Noah is out cold, stone drunk, after the Flood, and “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his brothers . . . When Noah woke up from his wine and learned what his youngest son had done to him, he said. ‘Cursed be Canaan/The lowest of slaves/Shall he be to his brothers.’”

As I write in my new book, American Torah Toons 2, this “Curse of Ham” (though it’s actually Ham’s son Canaan who is being cursed, though he’s done absolutely nothing wrong) “was invoked throughout American history as ‘proof’ that African people were meant by ‘God’ to be enslaved. As recently as the 1960s, Southern segregationists were citing it to condone their racist policies, and even half a century after American apartheid was abolished, some evangelical Christian leaders were still invoking the Curse to explain their tolerance for white supremacist policies.”

Anyone who thinks this commentary is irrelevant should contemplate two facts about next week’s midterms: fact one, that the Republicans have so easily exploited the fear of crime (that is, the white fear of black people, of Black Lives Matter, of bail reform, of culture diversity); fact two, that no Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Baines Johnson has won a majority of the white vote.

Interesting, don’t you think, that the American Jewish vote has tilted nearly three quarters Democratic during the same era? Seems that we’re still not quite white . . .

Below is the Torah Toon from my book that bluntly illustrates the portion I’ve just discussed. Please buy the book for yourself or as a gift at the ALTE website for only twenty bucks (free shipping). It might console you and/or your friends through the snowstorms.