From the Dept. of It Just Doesn’t Matter

[babylonsister]

http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77216/barack-obama-muslim-public-opinion-racial-fear-paranoia-islamaphobia

From the Dept. of It Just Doesn’t Matter
John McWhorter
* August 26, 2010 | 12:00 am


Who cares whether one in five people think Barack Obama is a Muslim?


snip//

To wit: what historical imprint will people who think Obama is a Muslim have? Granted, to many of them, “Muslim” is an insult, associated with reductive views of Islam just as much of the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is. But the insult and the feelings behind it are mere—in current as well as future significance.

In seeking an analogy, it occurred to me that almost certainly, there must have been widespread rumors that Franklin Roosevelt was Jewish. Legions hated him as passionately as many today hate Obama and often even more so. In Roosevelt’s time, the Jewish charge would have been the precise equivalent, in implications, of the Muslim one today.

And wouldn’t you know, it turns out there was exactly such a rumor—which didn’t matter one bit in terms of Roosevelt’s legacy. It was a product of ignorance a long time ago. Today we’re dealing with some more ignorance, a hallmark of this thing called humanity. But today will be a long time ago before we know it. The Obama folks are to be applauded for their relative lack of interest in “combatting” this silly rumor. The rest of the media should follow suit, and Obamaphiles at functions and play dates should find something to share disillusionment about that actually matters.

In fact, ideally Obama would go as far as to do something he has studiously refrained from in public: speaking Indonesian. He spoke it as a child and certainly can hold a conversation in it now (the most authoritative discussion on this is here). He is one of our few presidents to be fluent in a second language: Martin Van Buren was raised in the Netherlands and slipped into Dutch when angry, and Herbert Hoover could speak some Mandarin—and now we have an Indonesian-speaking President.

Almost certainly we never see it because Obama feels that speaking it would fuel the fires of the Muslim rumor. Well, he should care little enough about such foolishness as to go ahead and speak a good paragraph of it with cameras rolling. It would mean that he is comfortable showing America and the world that he spent formative years in a Muslim country, was integrated deeply enough into it to speak its language, and is aware enough of the impotence of the rumor that this makes him a Muslim to feel no need to hide any of this. The clip would roll on assorted chatter sites as further evidence that he is a Muslim—the quintessence of the mere. Meanwhile Obama could continue in the larger, and realer, task of leading the free world.