Djelloul Marbrook

They’re not like us. So, who’s us?

They‘re not like us, they don’t look like us.

Those are the operative political and cultural code words in America. Why else would the government look as if it had been exported from Northern Europe while the rest of us look like our army? Why else  would a nation that is now but 24 percent white Protestant and Anglo-Saxon still act as if WASPs were the overwhelming majority? What are the culture wars about if not them and us, them being the way most of us look and us being pretty much the way the Founding Fathers looked?

Our lives have been gerrymandered to a fare-thee-well so that our government resembles a ruling elite, an elite that cynically plays the elitist card by accusing anyone who thinks for himself of being an elitist. They’re not like us was the underlying impetus of the southern strategy that put the South in the Republican column. It was driven by fear and contempt, and our army is in a certain bitter way a reflection of our prejudices: we send an ethnically diverse army to defend an unjust order. The Army actually looks like the nation, but the government does not.

Who is this “us” that more than 75 percent of us don’t look like? Not African-Americans, not Hispanics, not Asians, not Native Americans, and not the many people who could “pass” for “real” Americans, like the Russians, but haven’t been sufficiently acculturated.

Thinking about those who are not like us and wrapping oneself in the flag go together. It’s a way of saying some of us who live here and love this country do not belong here, and the touch-screen politicians and chicken hawks are going to do everything in their power to make sure that government never looks like the people we send to die for it.

It’s not just that our voting districts have been gerrymandered—counting prisoners in the counties where they’re imprisoned instead of where they come from, for example—it’s that politicians have been working hard to gerrymander our thinking so that we think in terms of them and us. What else was Gov. Sarah Palin doing when she suggested some parts of the country are more American than others? Aside from her questionable grasp of geography, the statement is deliberately divisive, designed to nurture paranoia in some and alienation in others. How does this squalid tactic parse with our history of coming together for a common ideal? It doesn’t.

Having decisively repudiated the McCain-Palin-Clinton effort to divide us, we must now remember that our voting process, our voter districting and our way of thinking about each other (i.e. questioning who is American enough to suit us) has been corrupted by politicians who run on sneaky appeals to prejudice rather than good ideas.—DM