The Code Breakers

       Dan Brown made a fortune devising a very elaborate tale of intrigue and conspiracy that dated all the way back to the early church. The DaVinci Code was a fun read and a blockbuster film. The tale goes that the Knights Templar held a secret that would be devastating to the church. Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendents still live today. Leonardo DaVinci was an insider who knew this but could not just come right out and tell people. Being the genius he was, he hid the secret in codes sprinkled throughout his paintings.

Dan Brown unmasked that old myth about Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead. He actually married, settled down in a quiet village, raised a family and opened his carpenter shop. Okay, I made that last part up, but the story is something like that. It was a very ingenious and elaborate tale. Many people came to believe it, to lesser and greater degrees. My own son almost bought some of it because the story was told so well.

We have a new group of Dan Brown’s who have cracked a different code: the Race Code. One of the more recent code-breakers is the inimitable Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. She was able to see the code clearly when Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled, “You lie,” when President Barak Obama lied about the health care plan not covering illegal aliens. What Dowd heard that others missed was the implied racist word “Boy.” What Wilson actually was saying is, “You lie, Boy.” I know nobody else heard it. It was not really verbalized, but a good code-breaker understands the latent racism behind such seemingly racially benign comments. And when Dowd speaks she is cloaked with the imprimatur of the Gray Lady herself. It is very close to speaking ex cathedra, or as close to it as secularists come. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html.)

That opened the door for more code-breakers to speak up about what they have detected in the protests from the Right. Ignore what they are saying. It is all a racist enterprize aimed at the first black president. (Okay, he is really only half black, but all the same…)

Protesters marched on Washington last weekend–“tens of thousands” became the number to the mainstream press, others estimated it to be over a million–to protest a whole dog’s breakfast of budget-busting, extra-constitutional policies being pushed through Congress, from Health Care Reform, to cap and trade, to government takeover of industry. But all the left heard was: these people are racists who hate the president because he is black (or half-black, but we already mentioned that).

The always provocative ex-president, Jimmy Carter (who created an economy as anemic as this one) is the latest racial code-breaker to offer his incredible insight. He determined that Wilson’s comment was based on the racism that, in Carter’s view, still dominates the Southern white mentality. So, when a southern white man calls a half-black president a liar, it is a racist statement. When congressmen like Pete Stark called Bush a liar, it was just an example of robust debate and speaking truth to power.

Carter further stated that he believed “an overwhelming portion” of the protests at the tea parties and last weekend’s 9/12 Protest in Washington D.C., was tinged with racist overtones. White people just can’t accept that a black man is president.

Of course you never hear any overt racial comments coming from the president’s critics. You see, they are much smarter than to speak plainly about their true concerns. Instead they use code. Nobody is sure where and when this racist cabal got together and created the code that is universally understood by its adherents, but Dowd and Carter are now totally onto it. The jig is up! (To be clear there are no racial overtones intended in that last sentence.)

I am listening  on the radio right now to Leo Terrel intone that using the term “radical” is another racist code word. He agrees with Carter “one trillion per cent.” Asked to name these racists, he says simply that they are everywhere. Asked for specifics, he finds none. It doesn’t matter. Facts are irrelevant in the face of such rampant racism. It is all in the code.

Or just perhaps the truth is to be found in one wag’s sign from the Washington event: It doesn’t matter what the sign says, you will still call it racist.