Financing The Hermanator's Sad Minstrel Show

On December 2nd last year Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans, a notorious moneybags for extreme right-wing causes and candidates, wrote a check for $5,000 to the Hermanator PAC. So did his wife Janice. That's the maximum a couple can legally give a PAC like the Hermanator PAC. This year Janice McNair wrote the Hermanator another $5,000 check for his PAC. Jeff Fettig is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of one of the top job outsourcing firms in America, Fred Upton's Whirlpool Corporation. They've shipped tens of thousands of middle class manufacturing jobs from Michigan and the rest of the Midwest to low wage hellholes around the world. Fettig's #2, Whirlpool President Michael Todman, also sent the Hermanator PAC $5,000 last December. The Fettig family is among the top donors to Herman's Hermanator PAC. On December 14 and 15, 2010 Jeff and his wife Marcia each wrote a $5,000 check to the PAC. Two Wisconsin-based Fettigs, David and Robert, both of Lake Geneva and both officers at Tank Craft who have contributed huge amounts of money towards the political career of Paul Ryan and towards the fascist takeover of Wisconsin, sent the Hermanator PAC $5,000 each. So what makes all these wealthy extreme right conservatives help finance a campaign that has no chance whatsoever of leading to the presidency?

Herman Cain is a well-spoken African American who-- if you'll pardon the offensive expression-- knows his place in the white male Republican Party hierarchy. His jive-ass bullshit is music to the racist ear. In his own autobiography be bragged about how he "moved to the back of the bus" (his own words) during the Civil Rights Movement. That might sound fabulous to Fettigs and McNairs and teabaggers but its nothing to brag about in front of a normal audience. When confronted by Lawrence O'Donnell about it, Cain flat out lied and said he was just in high school, never imagining that O'Donnell had pre-fact checked that and knew Cain was a student at Morehouse College from 1963-1967, the height of the Movement. No matter how hard you fight the impulse, there is virtually no way to listen to Herman Cain without coming to the conclusion that he's a perfect Uncle Tom for the new century.



Chauncey DeVega isn't likely to buy the Hermanator's pronouncements that parrot right-wing dogma about African Americans being brainwashed. He reported on Cain's disgraceful appearance at CPAC, which GOP racists found so entertaining.

Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries at CPAC of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice.

Let’s consider the routine. First, Cain enters the stage to Motown music. Then Cain feigns swimming after rolling up his sleeves to show them his black skin and how he is a hardworking negro (not like those other ones). Cain bellows in a preacher affected voice and channels the folksy negro down home accent of his late grandpappy. In the money shot, Cain gives the obligatory “black folks who are not Republicans are on the plantation” speech to the joyous applause of his White benefactors. And he doubles down by legitimating any opposition to President Barack Obama as virtuous and patriotic regardless of the bigoted well-springs from which it may flow.

In total, CPAC is a carnival and a roadshow for reactionary Conservatives. It is only fitting that in the great tradition of the freak show, the human zoo, the boardwalk, and the great midway world’s fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, that there is a Borneo man, a Venus Hottentot or a tribe of cannibals from deepest darkest Africa or Papua New Guinea on display. For CPAC and the White Conservative imagination, Herman Cain and his black and brown kin are that featured attraction.

We always need a monkey in the window, for he/she reminds us of our humanity while simultaneously reinforcing a sense of our own superiority.

Sadly, there are always folks who are willing to play that role because it pays so well.

Especially when the object is selling books and hoping for some table scraps from the Republican Party Establishment table. As Corey Robin explains in his brilliant new study of The Reactionary Mind, "the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders." What conservatives all have in common is "the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality." Who better then, than Tea Party booster Herman Cain to rush to the microphones and immediately denounce the OccupyWallStreet movement as "unAmerican" or to poo-poo racism on behalf of plantation owners like the Fettigs, McNairs and, of course, the Kochs?