Hillary' s Meta-Racism, Obama and Schrödinger's Cat

Now hold on a minute, I might have something here.

Hillary Clinton's latest gambit might be called "meta-racism." The virtual world of electronic media eventually gets around to creating a meta-everything, and this may be its latest artifact. It works this way. Hillary claims that she does not encourage her supporters to vote for her because, ipso facto, she's white, even though she cites (and even lauds) her popularity among "ordinary working Americans, white Americans." Rather, she urges these ordinary white working Americans, and "progressive"-minded Americans everywhere, to simply face the facts. Racist Americans (real racists) are not going to elect Barack Obama in November; sad but true, she laments. So when choosing between candidates in the Democratic primaries, everyone who wants a Democrat to win should vote for her in a very race-conscious way which is not, paradoxically, racism, but simply a form of meta-racism necessary in order to achieve ultimate victory.

Now I harbor a sneaking suspicion that among Hillary's throngs of supporters in such states as West Virginia and Kentucky, and in "rural" Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, and in many other places, are quite a few people who aren't so much meta-racists as they are the gen-yoo-wine article. And while I'm being cynical, I might as well admit my other suspicion, which is that Hillary sure as hell knows this. So I'm saying that Hillary is deliberately courting a white racist vote, by being "their" candidate, under the guise of simply doing what's right for the party, which is making sure she's the nominee come November, the one who can win.

The meta-racist argument proceeds on the assumption that America in 2008, almost four hundred years after the first importation of African slaves to North America, is just not quite ready, not just yet, to elect a black person President, and that's what Hillary means when she whispers to party bigwigs that "Obama can't win!"

Yet we don't really know that, do we? Presidential campaigns are often full of surprises. The most unlikely people sometimes succeed. George W. Bush in 2004, with Iraq erupting into nonstop violence, no WMDs found, every rationale for the invasion exposed as a blatant lie - and he does better in 2004 than in 2000? Many people now talk of a younger, post-racial electorate coming of age, of a galvanized African-American voting bloc, of Southern states now in play for the Democrats, all of these changes in the electoral scene taking place against a background of great economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and against huge disenchantment with Bush in particular and Republicans in general.

It seems to me that the state of electoral politics in this country calls to mind the conjecture of Schrödinger's Cat, that clever thought problem dreamt up by
the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. It was his subtle criticism of the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics with all its wave/particle dualities, its indeterminacies, its dependence upon observation to fix the state of things. If you're a cat lover, as I am, it's a little unsettling that Erwin used a cat as the example, but I suppose "Schrödinger's rhino" lacks the same bemusing quality. So the experimental arrangement involves a cat sealed in a box with an element which may or may not emit an alpha particle as radiation, but if it does, the particle will be detected by a Geiger counter, which will trip a hammer breaking a vial of hydrocyanic acid, which will kill the cat. The paradox lies in the clever coupling of quantum and classical domains. Before the observer opens the box, the cat's fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schrödinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, observes the cat, and "collapses'' its "wave function."

Lots of people, including Einstein (who thought it was brilliant), have weighed in on this paradox. While the box is closed, the Copenhagen Interpretation forces us to conclude that the cat is both alive and dead, with its "superposition" undetermined. It is not until the "wave-collapse" moment of opening the box that the cat's status is determined. But surely, argued Schrödinger, the cat was alive or dead before the box was opened. Simply because subatomic particles exhibit the "superposition" quality of wave/particle duality until the moment that observation "fixes" their position doesn't mean that macroscopic entities like cats behave the same way. It was a head-scratcher for Niels Bohr and the rest of the Copenhagen gang, that's for sure. Schrödinger himself said later in life that he wished he had never thought of that cat.

It seems to me that Hillary Clinton is suggesting that we never open the box and find out. Is Barack's campaign alive or dead? Is the country so racist it cannot elect an African-American or not, is something new happening in this country or not? I'd like to know; I'd like us to perform the act of observation. And beyond that (and I don't know how Schrödinger would fit this into his analysis): if the Democratic Party really is completely incapable of winning in this country unless it runs candidates who appeal to Appalachian racists, and racists everywhere else; if that's still where we are almost four hundred years after slavery began, and after the 1868 ratification of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause, which was supposed to have "freed" the slaves once and for all; if those Constitutional guarantees are still meaningless because of the relentless and ineradicable bigotry of this country, then I'm not sure I even care anymore. Because it's pretty obvious that at such a point we will have looked inside and seen something dead, and an old, querulous white coot like John McCain, a guy who voted against Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday, and who casually hooks himself up to religious, ethnic, and social bigots, is good enough for this place.

So give up that line of argument, Hillary. Get out of the way. Let's open the box and take a peek.