Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire
If you were awake on Tuesday, you heard or read or divined something about what Richard Cohen wrote on Monday.
Cohen writes a weekly political column for the estimable Washington Post, WaPo to the in crowd. And on Monday he said this:
“People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)”
That caused the pundits, bloggers, tweeters — and columnists — to hit their keyboards with a fervor not seen since Miley Cyrus got cheeky with Robin Thicke. Even fellow WaPo columnist Ezra Klein, jumped in to critique his colleague’s piece.
Why the uproar? Because Cohen, arguing that Ted Cruz would beat Chris Christie in the Iowa caucuses, also suggested that New York voters are uncomfortable with a mixed-race couple at City Hall. Cohen’s context was that the Republican Party as a whole is not racist; rather, he contends, a faction of the party hasn’t yet come to the 2013 soirée, where the host is the child of a black man and a white woman. But those in attendance, the pollsters say, support not only marriage without regard to race, but marriage without regard to sexual preference (insert 1959-vintage gasp here).
The tweets were merciless. Reteurs columnist Jack Schafer tweeted that, “Cohen just wrote his resignation letter.” Syndicated advice columnist Margot Howard tweeted, “Richard Cohen AND his editor should be let go. Cohen only has 2 options: to plead dementia or that he was drunk.” And from Matt O’Brien, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, “Who doesn’t have to repress a gag reflex when they read Richard Cohen?”
Cohen’s word choice, two words in a column of nearly 800, twisted about themselves to form the noose. He may long remember the pairing of “conventional” and “views” even longer than the joining of “you’re” with “fired.”
Did he mean the conventional views of Americans in 1839? “Bigoted views,” “intolerant views,” even “outdated views,” might have gotten his point past the firestorm. “Conventional” says that Cohen believes most Americans think that way. One would presume that Cohen, born in 1941, is old enough to know there was a time when a marriage between a gentile and a Jew was stupidly scandalous too.
“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall,” wrote Jodi Picoult in Salem Falls. “Conventional views” landed smack on Cohen’s puss.
Cohen pleaded purity of heart, claiming he was expressing the views of some people in the tea party. In the past, he has said those who call him a racist do so for lack of a point more thoughtful than his own. That’s how he responded in July when he was criticized for a column about Trayvon Martin’s death that ended, “The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason.” That time “understandably” was the slipknot in the rope.
As Richard Kadrey explained it in “Kill the Dead,” “conventional” and “understandably” are bricks: “It doesn’t matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don’t say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it loud enough and it becomes a wall you can’t get through.”
One tweeter suggested a fitting assignment would be to make Cohen the beat writer for the Washington Redskins, since the team is mired in its own racism swamp over its nickname and mascot.
Racism is racism, no matter how someone tries to disguise or justify it, no matter if it turns up in the NFL or the Washington Post.
