JAMES N. writes:

After some reflection, I’ve developed some nuanced opinions about this story of the police commissioner in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. This guy was sitting in Nolan’s, a family restaurant with a small dining room and bar. When you dine at Nolan’s, your fellow diners are not far away.

Excuse the profanity, but he called Obama a “f***ing nigger,” and when a person close by demurred, he snapped back something to the effect, “Yeah, I said it!”

Now when I was growing up, people, particularly our elders whom we were taught to respect, didn’t call anybody a f***ing anything in public. That remains a standard to which we should aspire. If this man had called Obama a “f***ing asshole,” for example, he should have been embarrassed at the least, especially if, as is quite likely, there were children within earshot.

So he’s not in trouble for the adjective, but for the noun. This is an important “social X-ray,” to borrow from Tom Wolfe, which should not escape our notice before Mr. Copeland’s upcoming inevitable decision to spend more time tending his roses.

The recent, and thankfully more well-known Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling cases, as well as this minor local contretemps, all illustrate the moral panic brought on by the compulsive need to “discover the white racist”. Why has this become so intense in the second decade of the 21st Century, when white racists are so rare?

It has happened because the predictions of the great and the good about what would happen in America when the “freedom struggle” was won have not come true. Since it is no longer possible for what my mother used to call “people of good will” to ignore the evidence before their eyes, they have latched on to a narrative that ascribes all the growing disorder and dysfunction, the failure of everything they wanted and everything they have done, to “white racism”. Since real white racists are so hard to find, when one is (supposedly) discovered, he stands as proof of the theorem.

As with so much else, Lawrence Auster had the subject covered at VFR.

Anyway, Mr. Copeland, who was raised at a time when the concept of being a gentleman was widely taught and practiced should at a minimum apologize for foul language in public, especially in a family venue. Given the nature of his civic responsibilities, perhaps he will see the wisdom of tending his own garden, even at the cost of a small victory for the local leftists. His “principle” which he is defending isn’t really worth it.

Laura writes:

Well said. I have no sympathy for the commissioner. Any public official who talks about the president in such language is a disgusting low life and is not deserving of a public position.

— Comments —

George Weigenbaum writes:

I disagree. Until comments like the police commissioner’s are regularly made, we have no chance of ending BRA. Who do you think Obama is anyway? He’s your and my employee. We pay his salary. He’s just incompetent hired help.

Laura writes:

He’s more than just a hired employee. He’s a duly elected president and there are other ways to insult him without resorting to profanity.

Mr. Weigenbaum writes:

I am open to suggestion. How would you insult Obama? Have you seen his “birth certificate”? It’s an obvious forgery. I conclude Obama is no more legitimate in his office than the “Pope” is in his.

 Laura writes:

Agreed, but it’s wrong to use that kind of profanity in referring to either. The N-word, which blacks use all the time to put each other in place, is not the worst of it, but still there’s something low about a white using it toward a black.

I don’t know. I’d have to think about a good insult that gets across that he is a fake, a phony, a liar and a demagogue.

Mr. Weigenbaum writes:

Again we disagree.  I have seen Negroes, that’s what I call them, call each other “Niggah.”  What do I think when I see a Negro greet another with, “Hi niggah”?  I think they use this word which you find objectionable, and even I am uncomfortable with, the way members of a church say, “Hello Brother Dan.”  Or “Hello Sister Laura.”

Hello Sister Laura.

Laura writes:

I think you’re exaggerating how much I disapprove of the N-word. I’ve defended its use before for the very reason you cite — blacks use it all the time. I certainly don’t think it should be a public crisis when a white uses it. At the same time, it does have a different connotation when whites use it and there is something crude about it.

Please follow and like us: