by José de la Isla
HOUSTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has attracted considerable public attention by bringing up the specter of hateful political speech, making the historical connection to violence in the San Francisco community she represents in Congress.
She did so by referring to the killings 31 years ago of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in that city at the hands of former Board of Supervisors member Dan White.
She brought it up because now is looking a lot like then.
In ’78 the Board was split 6-5 over pro-growth, pro-neighborhood positions when White resigned. Then he wanted his job back. Moscone, a liberal, would make the decision about conservative White’s political future.
White was the lone vote opposing San Francisco’s landmark gay rights ordinance which had passed that year. Time magazine referred to Milk as “the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.” White and Milk had previously sparred over a group home that Milk favored in White’s district.
Ten days before White killed Moscone and Milk, California Congressman Leo Ryan, while on a fact-finding mission to Jonestown, Guyana, was murdered by cult members of San Francisco-based People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones. Ryan was a critic of Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and destructive cults, religious groups that cause harm to their own members and others. Nearly a thousand people committed mass suicide or were murdered in Guyana.
Jonestown was the largest loss of U.S. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster up to that time. Ryan became the only congressman ever murdered in the line of duty.
The moral lessons from the two incidents did not stay on the surface like a good tattoo. Instead, they faded away.
November 1978 was the perfect storm of political issues, polarized world views and hysteria from Armageddon-preaching pulpits.
Together they created a fever that preys on people who can barely hang on, or whose neuroses takes the form of an egomaniacal heroism.
The pulpit calls, the thin philosophies and fear-evoking, end-of-life-as-we-know-it ideologies provide the atmospherics that give license to individuals on the brink of committing some out-of-bounds act of defiance. You can feel the seething.
Exaggerated, you say? It’s really not that bad right now? Oh?
The classic example about lynch-mob blinded rage is found in Dallas, 1963. In his book Death of A President, William Manchester noted that 110 murders had occurred there the year before President Kennedy was killed. The city had led the nation in homicides. Through his meticulous research, Manchester came to believe that the political climate there had been a factor in Kennedy’s death.
On hearing the news that the President had been killed, a fourth-grade class in a wealthy Dallas suburb burst into applause. As a teenager in Houston, I witnessed
a crowd do the same. A docent at the Texas Book Depository Museum told me five years ago he understood Dan Rather had reported something similar.
The infraworld — Jonestown and 110 murders in Dallas — are underlying signs that things are getting out of control.
Another is the license many people and their political leaders are taking to permit harm to come to others, deny undocumented immigrants drivers licenses, restrict places they can live, encouraging family disunification, permitting dragnets and prohibiting access to schooling. These are signs of an unnatural national coarseness. All are about the moral code breaking down and decency escaping the body politic.
Yet, one demonstration sign the mob holds up is true, however: “They Are Taking Our Country Away!”
The ones who seethe with anger, demean the presidency, talk smack, believe guns are good and follow slogans like sheep are taking good parts of our country away and making it look like a destructive cult.
[José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.] ©2009
