With streets to maintain (and plow), Taj MaCityHalls to fund, infrastructure to plan and emergency services to provide, what pressing issue is the Whitefish City Council about to plunge into? A non-discrimination ordinance – NDO for short.
Good luck, council. Last year Billings council wasted eight months bickering over an NDO, only to vote it down. But supporters are still hammering away – taking time from the kind of things small-city leaders are elected to do.
Frankly, I don’t care how much time Whitefish wastes putting together an NDO, even if it passes or fails. Yet I must admit a sense of being down this road before, of watching a classic political bait and switch.
I’m half Jewish, born on Manhattan Island, “Noo Yawk.” As a little kid, I’d play chess in the park out front of my grandparents’ place in Washington Heights. My opponents were old geezers with tats they didn’t get in the Navy.
With my mom’s second marriage, I became part of the Air Force family. Now, at a big base like Malmstrom, there’s definitely some rank (class) separations. Like the clubs (officer, NCO, enlisted), officer housing was definitely a step up from NCO or enlisted family housing – but we all went to the same Great Falls schools, especially Loy Elementary.
At Kalispell AFS in Lakeside, all ranks lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools – white, black, brown, red and yellow. We made each other bleed, and ate in each other’s kitchens. It was a neat way to grow up.
The net result is, I’m unfond of neo-Aryans or bigots of any kind.
While working in Colorado, I’d heard about a conference on “human rights” in Colorado Springs that featured activists who’d been going up against Aryan Nation leader Richard Butler’s bums in Hayden Lake. So – I took the human rights bait, happy for a chance to hate on neo-Krauts.
I knew I was in the wrong place when this lanky-but-interesting brunette stood up to speak. She/he sounded just like James Earl Jones. The rest of the day was pretty much the whole “rainbow” of left-wing “diversity.”
So, here we are in Whitefish. Our bait is one Richard Spencer, who got in some kind of chairlift tizzy with one Randy Schuenemann. These fellows are both Washington DC Beltway political veterans – for them to meet in boonies Montana is strange enough.
Spencer had worked as an editor for Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, while Schuenemann’s history included John McCain’s presidential campaign. Buchanan was a strong opponent of Gulf War Two during the timeframe when Schuenemann was promoting the same war.
Knowing that, I’m not surprised the esteemed gentlemen had words on the chair – and I’m sure they both ran home and Googled each other. Well, Schuenemann learned that Spencer had moved on from conventional Buchananite conservatism to, um, ah, “identitarianism.” For “Europeans.”
Ah – the Prussian Blue mindset, just fancier. Most of us would note and file such information for future reference: “Do not associate.” But Schuenemann decided to “out” Spencer publicly – and it didn’t take long for the baiting to start.
So, with the Whitefish council promising some form of “action,” here comes our switch. The discussion has jumped off a topic (racism and neo-racism) where most everyone agrees and run off into the more-expansive matter of “non-discrimination.” Hey kids, if you want to convert Whitefish into a snowy version of the Castro in San Francisco, say so. If you want Big Mountain to be Rainbow Atheist Peak, let’s discuss that.
The part that irritates me the most is how difficult it is to call a spade a spade in politics. Everything is in code: “Gun safety” is code for gun control. “Identitarianism” is Aryan code for white nationalist. “Non-discrimination” is progressive code for gay rights. Every word seems to mean something else.
The way things are going in Whitefish, I must ask: When will “pothole” become code for something else? What will a Whitefish NDO argued in code, mean in reality?