April 5, 2006
Of Sickles, McKinney, and Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST You can say one thing for Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia congresswoman who can’t seem to go 10 minutes without doing something vicious, malicious, or altogether stupid. At least she’s no Dan Sickles. Last week, Rep. McKinney struck a Capitol police officer who stopped her from circumventing a metal detector inside the Capitol complex. Members of Congress are permitted to walk around security stops, but the officer in question didn’t recognize McKinney. According to police accounts of the incident, the officer asked McKinney—who was not wearing her congressional lapel pin, which identifies members to Capitol staff—to stop a total of three times. When she refused, he tried to block her way physically, and she hit him. That’s pretty deplorable behavior, but mild stuff when compared with the actions of Dan Sickles, a Democratic congressman who, in 1859, right in front of Lafayette Square, shot and killed Philip Barton Key, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., and son of Francis Scott Key. Philip Key, it seemed, had been carrying on a tryst with Sickles’s wife, Teresa Bagioli, and none too inconspicuously. Little matter that the congressman was a notorious womanizer himself. In the spirit of the old double-standard, he seemed to many of his friends and constituents a completely sympathetic character. In a brilliant maneuver, Sickles’s legal team even managed to earn their client an acquittal, based on a plea of temporary insanity—the first time such a defense was ever invoked successfully in the United States. Ironically, it wasn’t the shooting that derailed Sickles’s political career; it was his public decision to forgive his wife, a decision that polite New York society regarded as unforgivable. But back to Cynthia McKinney and, by indirect association, my ongoing exchange with John Steele Gordon. I know, I know—I said that I regarded our exchange as closed. But that was before Mr. Gordon called me (or my writing) “nasty, humorless, morally self-congratulatory, and intellectually dishonest.” I actually do have a sense of humor (ask anyone who knows me!) and can only assume that Mr. Gordon was playfully goading me into further discussion. Mr. Gordon is a funny guy, in fact, with a keen sense of irony. He called me intellectually dishonest, but he also dismissed Sesame Street as “politically correct,” even though he admits to never having watched one episode of the show, and he dismissed historians Tom Sugrue, Matt Lassiter, Stephen Meyer, Matthew Dallek, Thomas Edsall, Mary Edsall, and Dan Carter as “liberals,” even though I’m pretty sure—correct me if I’m wrong—he’s never read their work. If that’s not irony, what is? So what of Mr. Gordon’s contention that “the people who prefer a society that brands and jeers make up, at most, a tiny fraction of the American population today. They are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, religious zealots, and assorted other fanatics . . .”? In his March 31 broadcast, the prominent conservative radio impresario Neal Boortz, whose show is syndicated on Cox Radio, and who claims several million loyal listeners, had the following to say about Rep. McKinney, who is black (other than Boortz, participants in the dialogue were the show’s producer, Belinda Skelton, and the talk-radio host Royal Marshall): BOORTZ: For instance, or for goodness sakes, jump in and I’m gonna say—I’m gonna start out with something controversial. I saw Cynthia McKinney’s new hair-do. Have you seen it, Belinda? SKELTON: No. BOORTZ: She looks like a ghetto slut. SKELTON: Well, how is it? BOORTZ: It’s just—it’s hideous. SKELTON: Is it braided? Or— BOORTZ: No, it’s not braided. It just flies away from her head in every conceivable direction. It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. It’s just hideous. To me, that hairstyle just shows contempt for—no, it’s not an Afro. I mean, no, it just shows contempt for the position that she holds and the body that she serves in. And, I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to—it’s just a hideous and horrible looking— MARSHALL: Her hairstyle? BOORTZ: Yeah, the hairstyle. It just, it looks like an explosion. Have you seen it? MARSHALL: Yeah, I like it. BOORTZ: Oh, jeez. MARSHALL: It looks better than the braids she was wearing. BOORTZ: No, the braids had some dignity. They had some class. MARSHALL: The braids had dignity? BOORTZ: They had more class than this thing. MARSHALL: This says, you know, kinda 2000s, you know, stepping up to the plate. Contemporary look, you know? BOORTZ: She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence. MARSHALL: OK, so you don’t like her hair. BOORTZ: Yeah, OK, I don’t like her hair. I’m sorry. MARSHALL: That being said, I think a lot of people would say it looks a lot better than those cornrows she was wearing. You can’t tell me that’s dignified. BOORTZ: Well, I’m not a big cornrow fan but I got used to her with that. OK? MARSHALL: So she’s staying the same for you? BOORTZ: She looks like a shih tzu! Now, I’m sure that John Steele Gordon will accuse me, as he has before, of being typically humorless, or, he’ll accuse me, as he has before, of reading race into a story that simply has nothing to do with race, or he’ll accuse me of cherry-picking an extreme and unrepresentative example from the lunatic fringes of the right. But Boortz is a popular conservative commentator, and I think it’s fair to say that when he refers to a black woman as resembling a “ghetto slut” and a “shih tzu,” race is very much on his mind. (Did I mention that Neal Boortz got his start in life as a speechwriter for Georgia’s segregationist governor Lester Maddox?) What’s particularly pathetic—yet typical—about Boortz’s incendiary comments is that Cynthia McKinney is a loathsome character who should probably be expelled from the House of Representatives. Is it not enough for conservative commentators to say, ”Cynthia McKinney is out of control?” No. Typical of the burning hatred that infects much—but certainly not all—of American conservatism, Boortz feels obliged to call her a “ghetto slut.” How this all turns out is anyone’s guess. Maybe Cynthia McKinney will weather this storm. Dan Sickles certainly weathered his. He went on to serve in the Union army, in whose service he lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg. After the war, he served in numerous high government posts and even returned briefly to Congress. At his request, his leg was preserved and put on display at a medical museum. Sickles, the ever-aging Lothario, liked to impress his lady friends by taking them to the museum to see the tattered limb. If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is. I sure hope John Steele Gordon agrees.
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