Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

(About Maureen Dowd)

In a piece intriguingly titled “White Man’s Last Stand,” Maureen Dowd (New York Times, July 15, 2009) gives the reader the benefit of her viewing America through the prism of contempt she holds for a Supreme Court “stocked with white men.” But now, with President Obama’s choice of a “wise Latina woman”, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, on the cusp of approval for elevation to our Supreme Court all that is going to change (hence the title). Still, there remain in the legacy of our great country a few points to be made on behalf of some white men, to wit

• The gentlemen who wrote The Declaration of Independence
• The men and boys that whipped the pants of the mighty British army
• The gentlemen who conceived, wrote and had ratified our Constitution
• The same group then gave us our Bill of Rights, which gives Ms Dowd her inalienable right of dissent

I believe the reader now knows where I’m coming from, but still, history demands a few more talking points: two world wars fought by my father’s and my generation to make the world safe for democracy; the Marshall plan which fed, clothed and housed half a billion people; Reagan’s tearing down of the Berlin wall which freed close to a billion people. True that (some) white men were the putative father of slavery, yet it is also true that several hundred thousand white men died fighting to end slavery.

In a way I feel sorry for Maureen Dowd, I truly do. For all too many years she has been swimming in sea of journalistic bile, too busy struggling to keep from drowning in it or to pause, for even a moment, to smell the roses growing all around her. And one of the blooms she is missing is that over 40 million whites voted for Obama. Ergo, it is statistically inevitable and with the certainty that day follows night that someday one of those white men will be eligible for a Supreme Court appointment! What then Maureen? What then?

(Published in the Sun-Sentinel’s Reader Forum, July 23, 2009)