The hardest part of returning home is not actually driving through East New York; it’s turning on cable news and seeing what new stupidity grips the land. I have been watching news through the international filter the last few weeks, in Amsterdam and Prague: BBC News and CNN International. CNNI is to US CNN what good espresso is to Maxwell House coffee — though they also read viewer email, which is every bit as dull-witted as the stuff you’ll hear in the states. 

But you miss all the really appalling stuff. Of course we heard about the arrest of, and subsequent commentary by Obama and others about, Henry Louis Gates — though what’s this “Skip” shit? When did he go from distinguished Harvard professor to a drummer in a California surf band? That seems one of those telling moments when we remind ourselves, and in this case the world, that we are not really one nation, or certainly don’t all see things the same way or come from the same experiences. When we left the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was hinging on the same sorts of issues, with Republicans saying, How dare you say your background might influence your actions!

But we missed the seemingly exponential growth of the “birther” movement: those people on the right that don’t necessarily believe Obama was born in the US. And it was only watching MSNBC last night that I saw the list of GOP congressmen who won’t say they believe the president is a US citizen, abetted by people in the media like CNN’s own Lou Dobbs. 

I can’t think of an exact correlative in political history. Some might say those on the left who insisted on the illegitimacy of Bush’s election, but they didn’t get much traction in the mainstream media, and when they raised their heads post 9.11 (and then after the second election) they were routinely dismissed. It was the sort of sour-grapes reaction a liberal would reach for at the end of an argument, as a sort of parting shot. It was not elevated to a national movement, complete with legislation demanding future presidents show proof of citizenship. 

To me it’s more like the anti-semites who called FDR Rosenfeld; he wasn’t Jewish, of course, but you couldn’t prove that by them. Like Holocaust deniers and that guy who Buzz Aldrin punched for saying he didn’t walk on the moon, these birthers don’t need logic or truth on their side. All they need is a smidgen of suspicion and a ton of resentment and suddenly “alien” can mean all kinds of things. It could mean you’re a brother from another planet, which was my old nickname for Obama, or just another black man trying to break into a house you already own.