Move over, Gov. Paul LePage. Make room for Archie Bunker.
In a 1974 episode of the television classic “All in the Family,” black neighbor George Jefferson asks America’s favorite bigot to sign Jefferson’s petition to run for Republican County Committee. While wife Edith looks on, Archie takes a long, hard look at the clipboard …
George: It ain’t an IOU; just go ahead and sign it.
Archie: Hold it, hold it, Jefferson. I don’t go around signin’ political documentaries just like that, y’know. I mean, even Abe Lincoln, as smart as he was, he read the Declaration of Independence before he put his John Hancock on it.
Edith: Archie, are you sure Abraham Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence?
Archie: Sure, fourscore and seven years ago.
The live audience roars. Good old Archie has mangled U.S. history once again.
“All in the Family” was a revolutionary sitcom through which creator Norman Lear held up a mirror to American society and forced us to laugh at ourselves.
Paul LePage, on the other hand, is a cringe-worthy reality show.
Just like Archie, LePage wears his stupidity like a badge of honor. But unlike Bunker’s weekly descents into the absurd, there’s nothing even remotely funny about Maine’s governor.
“I will just say this: John Lewis ought to look at history,” LePage fumed Tuesday during his weekly chat with the ever-obliging Bangor talk-radio hosts George Hale and Ric Tyler.
LePage was incensed over last week’s comment by Lewis, a civil rights icon before he embarked on his 30-year (and counting) career as a congressman from Atlanta. In an interview with NBC, Lewis said Donald J. Trump is not “a legitimate president” because of “a conspiracy on the part of the Russians, and others, that helped him get elected.”
LePage’s “history” lesson for Lewis? That Republican presidents are the best thing ever to happen to blacks in the United States.
“It was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, it was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant who fought against Jim Crow laws,” LePage said. “A simple thank-you would suffice.”
Somewhere in TV heaven, Archie Bunker is standing and applauding. All by himself.
LePage’s attack on Lewis is, first and foremost, an appalling insult to a man who suffered greatly at the hands of white oppression.
The scar still visible on Lewis’ head bears testimony to the fractured skull he sustained from an Alabama state trooper’s billy club during the “Bloody Sunday” march into Selma on March 7, 1965. It will forever define Lewis as a man who, even when faced with certain physical injury, courageously refused to back down.
But LePage’s personal attack on Lewis, as egregious as it may be, is only one part of the picture here. Another is the governor’s stunning ability, once again, to make an absolute fool of himself.
Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant “fought against Jim Crow laws?”
A quick Google check is more than enough to demonstrate that Jim Crow laws began to take root at the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in 1877, after President Grant left office.
And why did those pillars of “legal” segregation – denying the so-called “freedmen” of their rights to vote, to unrestricted travel, to public accommodation, to a decent education – spread like wildfire across the South?
Because President Hayes, locked in a squeaker of a presidential election in 1877, cut a deal with Southern electors: They would install him in office in exchange for his withdrawal of all Northern occupying troops from the South.
Hayes, in his letter accepting the Republican nomination, at least put in a good word for the newly freed slaves.
“What the South most needs is peace, and peace depends upon the supremacy of law,” he wrote. “There can be no enduring peace, if the constitutional rights of any portion of the people are habitually disregarded.”
To which Southern states responded by passing the Jim Crow laws right under Hayes’ nose. They would remain a blight on our democracy until 1965.
In short, neither Grant nor Hayes “fought against Jim Crow laws,” as LePage so authoritatively claims. Grant pre-dated them, and Hayes, in what would forever be called a “corrupt bargain,” set the stage for their enactment.
You’d think LePage might have researched all of this a bit before popping off on the radio. And now that he’s being widely dismissed (once again) as that dimwitted idiot from Maine, you’d think he’d be a wee bit embarrassed.
Yet, just like Archie Bunker, he’s oblivious to all but the fawning praise from supporters who celebrate any factual error, any ridiculous claim, as their hero “not being politically correct.”
Really? How about “not being factually correct”? Does that matter for anything anymore?
Not to some people. They accept whatever comes out of Trump’s or LePage’s mouth on the premise that if their man said it, that’s good enough for them. (Say what you will about poor Edith Bunker – at least she did the occasional double take.)
And what say these willfully ignorant folks to anyone who takes the time to do a little fact-checking? In today’s toxic political environment, five minutes on Wikipedia is enough to get you labeled “intellectual elitist.”
LePage, in an interview later Tuesday with Portland Press Herald reporter Scott Thistle, insisted for the umpteenth time, against reams of evidence to the contrary, that he is not a racist.
In fact, he said, “Some of us (white people) are abolitionists. I’m a strong abolitionist …”
It’s enough to make you laugh. Or scream.
He also snarled, “The NAACP should apologize to the white people, to the people from the North for fighting their battle.”
Did you hear that, fellow Americans? Not “our” battle. “Their” battle.
Those gasps we can all hear from near and far are of horror, not admiration. Maine’s chief executive has reached what Archie Bunker once referred to as “a new high in lowness.”
So please, Gov. LePage, enough. Try keeping your trap shut at least until you know of what you speak.
Or as Archie himself once advised, “Don’t talk like an ignarosis.”
Bill Nemitz can be contacted at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com
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