Michael Tomasky is a lifestyle product.
I mean, sure: He’s the laziest hack in American political journalism, and getting lazier by the day. But he’s also a living embodiment of the instinct that leads people to feel proud of their Prius or the fully organic contents of their pantry. He’s a great big box of lifestyle differentiation, a cultural posture with typing skills.
Take his contempt for the South, which he doubled down on in a column this week. Tomasky spurts bile at the region with the regularity of a bad ulcer. “There is a long and appalling history in this country of the rest of us having to act like bigots and enforce bigotry because of the South,” he wrote last year. “It has existed in legislation — the GI Bill had to be written in such a way that it wouldn’t benefit blacks too much, or the legislators of the South said they would kill it. Before that, much of the New Deal legislation had to be written in the same way.”
But Tomasky has a solution to the problem of Southern backwardness: “Go form your own stupid country. You aren’t America anymore.”
This is back-patting, or apple-polishing, or the urgently simultaneous performance of both brands of cheap flattery: Racism in American history is Southern, full stop. Vanished from American history is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Chicago Campaign. Los Angeles? Never been segregated at all, and never had a smidge of racial conflict. White flight, white flight… Give us a minute… Hmm, yeah, never heard of it. Stupid backward Southerners.
Endlessly dirtying the South with a past that apparently never stopped or changed in any way, Tomasky washes the rest of the country clean. You never had a white working-class school busing crisis, Boston. Nativism? Must have been Mississippi, because nothing like that would ever happen in California or Pennsylvania.
And so that mean old GI Bill had to have racism in it because the South made us do it, and the New Dealers really really wanted full racial equality for everyone, but Arkansas jumped in and rubbed its hate all over our purity. The eleven states of the former Confederacy ganged up on poor helpless Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Connecticut and Massachusetts and New Hampshire and New York and Rhode Island and Vermont and Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Maine and Michigan and Iowa and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Oregon and Kansas and West Virginia and Nevada and Nebraska and Colorado and Idaho and Wyoming and New Mexico and Utah and Arizona and poor little California, and what could the rest of those poor helpless states do? They were outnumbered, I tell you. There is a long history in America, remember, “of the rest of us having to act like bigots” because of the South, and I definitely blame Alabama for the Modoc War.
Later, Alaska and Hawaii became states, and the South was right there waiting for them, leaning on a lamppost with a switchblade in its hands. “We’re gonna make you be racist,” the South sneered at poor Oahu, which just wanted to embrace diversity.
But anyway, why is Watts a black neighborhood? Must be an accident, and let us all celebrate the rich history of racial integration on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
More recently, Tomasky has repeated his claim that the South is worth abandoning altogether, suggesting that “the more advanced and innovative states” may eventually just have to let the stupid rednecks go. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” he writes.
Imagine finding yourself trapped in the big nuclear waste site of the appalling Museum District in Houston, or the nightmarish Garden District of New Orleans, or the living hell of the San Antonio Riverwalk. Picture yourself imprisoned in the choleric swamp of Texas A&M, or Tulane, or LSU, or Duke, or Rice, or UNC-Chapel Hill, or UT-Austin, or the University of Alabama, or Emory, or the University of Georgia. Do they even wear shoes at the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences?
In any case, if they do, you can count on Michael Tomasky to never find out. It would ruin his brand.