Let’s start with the Bible. “Whatsoever a man soweth,” says the King James Version, “that shall he shall reap.” I doubt the Apostle Paul would mind if this verse was clarified for 2008 as “Whatsoever a politician sayeth, that shall he also reap bigtime.” For the past week, as Wall Street was dodging fire and brimstone economic news, the McCain/Palin campaign let loose the doggone attack dog one-liners, claiming that Obama was “pallin’ with terrorists,” mocking the idea of an American with a middle name of Hussein, and asking rhetorically “Who is Barack Obama?” For the vast undercurrent of racist attitudes in America this was red heifer meat, fear mongering in raw form. So who do at least a few (and it seems more than a few) of those listening to McCain and Palin think Senator Obama is? Why, he’s an Arab, of course.

To his credit, John McCain stepped back from the flames of the fire he himself set and set the record straight that his opponent is a “decent man” and a family man and not a scary man. To his discredit, this racist comment is the logical conclusion of many who have listened to his “I am John McCain and I approve this ad” campaign spin. While the government was scrambling to bail out the major financial institutions, in some of the redder side roads off Main Street the Straight Talk Express was spewing out Rove-driven poisonous carbon-copy monoxide. If the past week is any indication of what it means to “take the gloves off,” the Bush-Cheney handler hands need a good washing in Lava soap (and not just their hands).

In a country where race has always mattered, at times shattering the lives of individuals solely because of their skin color, there is a great chain of being racist that stretches back to the Declaration of Independence. It is not unpatriotic to recognize the historical fact that the founding fathers did not include black men and women when the lofty phrase “all men are created equal” echoed back across the Atlantic. For almost two thousand years the dominant way of looking at the world followed a notion called the Great Chain of Being. Aristotle defined it and medieval Christian theologians overdefined it. If God had created man a little lower than the angels, as the Psalmist said, then the idea of a social pecking order was divine. For centuries this justified the brutal mistreatment of native peoples, especially those with “red” skin in the Americas and “black” skin in and out of Africa. The reality is that this played out historically as more than a Platonic ideal.

The great chain of being racist has not been broken. When the woman in McCain’s Town Hall yesterday said that Obama is an Arab, the unspoken part is that Arabs are not as good as her. By Arab she probably meant Muslim, since this hardly makes a difference when prejudice trumps judgment. But, of course, Senator Obama is also black (and being half-black is the racially tinged same as being all black). Linked together, even though unspoken in the Town Hall, is the fixed chain of epithets that can be seen as the same. In this case, Arab=Muslim=Black=Jew=Nigger=Dego=Spic is the negative chain reaction that fuels hate. To many of us this chain long ago ceased to have any greatness, but it is grating in this campaign none the less.

Luke R. E. Publican