White Power is Not OK

Many’s the time we have touched a hand’s index finger to the tip of its thumb and held up the other fingers to indicate to someone that things are “OK.” That’s been the universally understood meaning of the gesture for most of our lives, but lately it’s taken on a more sinister connotation as a symbol of the white supremacy movement.

The latest controversy to arise from this change occurred at Friday’s annual renewal of the longstanding football rivalry between the Army and Naval military academies, where at least two of the West Point cadets on the Annapolis midshipmen were caught on camera flashing the sign behind a sideline reporter. A surprising number of viewers noticed, and they raised enough brouhaha about it that both academies have promised an investigation.

We wouldn’t be surprised if it all turns out to be much ado about nothing, as previous brouhahas about the gesture have been. President Donald Trump frequently uses the gesture, but so did President Donald Trump and President George W. Bush and countless other people less credibly accused of white supremacist sympathies, and we’re quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the two women who were photographed making the gesture in the gallery at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.

This time is slightly more suspicious, though, as the cadets and the midship were making the gesture from the hip with the hand down. We’ve always made the gesture with the hand upright above the shoulder, where it looks somewhat like an “o” and a “k,” but it’s become common on the “alt-right” to do it with a downward motion and the thumb at the index fingers first to digit to look like a “w” and a “p,” symbolizing “white power” to those in the know. That’s what the white supremacist who shot up a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, did when he was photographed in a shot seen around the world while wearing a waist chain and handcuffs, and since then a number of prominent white supremacists have adopted it. Enough of the white supremacists leaders around the world have been photographed flashing the sign that the Anti-Defamation League lists it on its long litany of hate symbols, although they caution that someone might just be signaling a happy “OK.”

White supremacists tend to be fascinated with symbology, and have already appropriated everything from ancient Norse tokens to the “Pepe the Frog” cartoon character, and the people who make Tiki torches and the New Balance sneaker company had to sue them for improper use of their brands. We hope don’t they appropriate the Republican party’s brand, although they have already sullied it, and we especially hope they don’t rob our rich American language of the good old “OK” sign.”

We also hope that no one in America’s military academies is flashing a “white power” sign.

— Bud Norman

Talkin’ ‘Bout Our G-G-Generation

According to such ancien regime media as The Washington Post and The New York Times, the latest catchphrase among the young folks is “OK, boomer.” Apparently that’s what the millennials or post-millennials or Generation Z or whatever you want to call these raw-boned and tattooed and nose-ringed ragamuffins are sarcastically saying whenever some old fogy dispenses his seasoned “baby boom generation” advice.

Although we’re technically “baby boomers” ourselves, we can hardly blame these young punks for their insolence. We arrived at the very end of the post-World War II “baby boom,” and were among the first of the self-proclaimed young “punks” who were just as cynical about the hippy-dippy counter-culture revolution as we were about the culture it was revolting against. The date of one’s birth somehow permanently affixes a certain worldview for the rest of one’s life, and we arrived at an unusually discombobulating moment of cataclysmic change.

We started reading the newspapers and watching the evening news and eavesdropping on adult conversations at an early age, and it was all full of a bloody war and bloody anti-war protests and civil right marches and church bombings, and women were burning bras outside the Miss America pageant and some people called homosexuals were rioting outside a New York City bar, among other daily outrages. Even for the most precocious child it was hard to make sense of, as was the decidedly different fare suddenly on offer at the local movie theater and on the FM radio dial.

There was a lot about it we liked. We wanted peace with honor in Vietnam, and still believe it could have been achieved and spared South Vietnam from communism if the Watergate scandal hadn’t emaciated the Republican party, but we shared the hippies’ desire for peace. The negroes, as they were once known, were quite right to demand their equal rights under the law and proper respect from the broader culture, no matter how contentious that has often been. The womenfolk also had some reasonable complaints, even according to our fiercely Church of Christ Mom, who insisted on a respectful code of conduct toward women. At the time we didn’t know much about homosexuals, but in retrospect we can understand why the queers in New York were rioting outside that bar. A lot of the rock ‘n’ roll music was irresistible to our youthful ears, and still sounds good after so many years of listening to the great jazz and country and popular artists of the 20th century, and a lot of those disturbing ’60s and ’70s movies still hold up well.

Even so, we want to keep our place in the old world we born into. The post World War II global order that the “greatest generation” imposed seemed to work well enough in the long run, and still strikes us as useful. So far as we can tell fairly regulated capitalism is the most productive economic scheme mankind has come up with so far, and makes more sense than what the self-described socialists of the current Democratic party are peddling. Our old-fashioned Church of Christ Mom’s notions of how a gentleman should treat a lady should should satisfy even the most feminist sensibility of the #MeToo moment. As far as we’re concerned race relations would go easier if people were only more polite to one another, and we miss the days when someone’s sexual predilections were nobody else’s business.

By happenstance we spent much of Thursday with some even older fogies than ourselves, though, and were reminded how the “Generation Gap” of our youth still persists. Our favorite aunt was in town to visit her sister and brother-in-law, along with her excellent husband and our beloved uncle, and naturally politics came up. While the wives were doing some woman thing or another our Dad and Uncle were both yearning for the good old days of President Harry Truman and expressing amazement that the Democrats were even considering nominating an admitted homosexual for president, not to mention all that high-tax socialism they were peddling, and over an excellent dinner at the folks’ retirement home both couples agreed that the damned Democrats were out to get President Donald Trump for no good reason.

Our dinner companions were among the very finest people know, each having been born in the Great Depression and raising themselves into prosperous and honorable and respectable lives, but with all due respect, having been born a few decades later we saw a lot of things differently. We’ll go along with the old-fashioned idea that marriage should ideally be between a man and a woman, no matter how that might annoy our gay and younger friends, but not the newfangled idea that marriage is between a man and three women and a a porn star and Playboy playmate, as Trump insists. We don’t want a socialist president, but only because we don’t want any president telling Harley-Davidson where to makes its motorcycles, as Trump has done. The greatest thing Truman ever did from our historical perspective was to lay the blueprint for the mostly peaceful and prosperous post-War world order, carried out so well by President Dwight Eisenhower and more or less maintained until recently.

The even older fogies and the far younger punks probably don’t share our perspective on this impeachment matter, either. Our parents and aunts and uncles were all preoccupied with making an honorable and respectable living when the Watergate scandal unfolded, but we were insolent young junior high punks with nothing better to do all summer than watching it play out on live television, and unlike our elders we weren’t at all surprised when the facts piled up so high even the most senior Republicans forced President Richard Nixon to resign. This time around the damning facts of presidential misconduct seem to be piling up just as high agains the sitting president, and even if a majority of Republicans and our most respected elders are fine with it we do not approve.

Which is not to say we want anything to do with these tattooed and nose-ringed ragamuffins we run into at the hipster dives and their outright socialist and open-borders and electronic music and free love poppycock. At this point in our postlapsarian and post-modern ives we put no faith in princes, only in the most time tried and true principles that have lasted over the centuries and millennia, and from our cynical seat on the sidelines between generations the old standards seem hard to maintain. Things have gone so far so good during our 60 years, though, and as lonely as we are we’ll hold out hope for the best.

— Bud Norman