You're simply not white enough. Get out.

Do not long for the night / to drag people away from their homes.
Beware of turning to evil / which you seem to prefer to your own discomfort - Job 36:20

Several years ago, I was on the phone with someone in the office of the United States Council on Energy Awareness, and I was lying my head off. I was trying to get on their mailing list.

The fellow on the other end of the phone was, by turns, suspicious, cagey, confrontational and interrogating. He wanted to know why I wanted to be on the list of this above-board, obviously grass-roots coalition of concerned citizens, rallying around a cause I think we can all get behind: the fact that there simply are not enough nuclear power plants in America.

So I was telling him that I was a high school physics teacher, and I wanted USCEA's excellent materials to share with my classes. None of this was true, of course. But then again, I wasn't the only one on the phone who was lying.

At the time, the USCEA was a well-funded and very sub rosa arm of the marketing departments of some key power companies, and they were enacting what can only be termed a sort of jiu-jitsu on the level of America's environmental memes. The USCEA was tasked with getting the message out, on the local and national levels, that the cleanest and brightest alternative to our energy "needs" was increased (and increasingly subsidised) nuclear power. Clean and green was the angle, natch.

I was successful in my ruse, and was the recipient for a few years of their materials, until the political climate changed in the Clinton years and the organization-formerly-known-as-USCEA changed its look and name and became something else with a different name but likely a similar agenda.

The main thing I was aware of (and this was the main reason I wanted on their list) was that the USCEA was slick. They sent media alerts. They put ads in magazines. They encouraged you to write your representatives, and they sent you the addresses of your senators and congress persons based upon your mailing zip code. They told you the words to say in your letter, and who to say it to. And by doing this, they made it look like writing your representative was your idea, and that their words were your words.

Like I said, slick.

My lie was a noble one. I got on their list and used their materials to contact my congress persons and senators about developments in the nuclear industry I was made aware of by USCEA's media alerts. Then, I detoured from the USCEA agenda, and instead of advocating for these inanities, I would urge my representatives to reject them, like any rational and sane member of the human species would. But during my time on that list, I also received a passive education in the big business of looking small - the power of grass root manipulation of public policies.

I was put in mind of all this just now, when I happened upon a full-page ad in the latest issue of Harper's. It's on page 11, if you have a copy handy and want to turn to it, or you can download a pdf of it here.

The top of the ad is a picture of a gridlocked highway, with the caption underneath reading, "One of America's Most Popular Pastimes." The ad copy underneath that begins the wind-up to the pitch by grousing about something everyone can agree to hate: traffic congestion. "For many people," the ad copy intones, "commutes to school and work and daycare can take up to three hours a day."

Now, I used to live in Atlanta, a city which, at the time, boasted the longest commutes in the nation - both in terms of average distance and average time per day. Getting across town could be Hell (forgive the pun) on wheels, and so I take this problem raised by the quotation above seriously. Commuting is no joke.

The answer in Atlanta, of course, was the same as it would be anywhere: more public transportation, live closer to where you work, buy a bike, telecommute, learn to live on less disposed income so you can downsize your car and your job, or, you know, walk once in a while. (My particular borough of Decatur enacted some of these sensible ideas as civic policy, making streets narrower and sidewalks wider, and focusing on the development of a planned town center with equal emphases on a central shopping district and the MARTA train station. Sensible. And it worked.)

This ad, however, sees the problem - and the solution- quite differently. The solution is not sensible downsizing of extravagance, but elimination from the streets of certain demographic groups. To paraphrase: white folks can't drive where they want to as fast as they want to because there are too many brown people in the way.

That's right. It turns out this ad is not about traffic congestion at all, really. It is about immigration, and the encouragement of a buggered and reactionary immigration policy that pumps hatred and fans hysteria (their tagline at the bottom of the ad is, "300 million people today. 600 million people tomorrow. Think about it.") while doggedly asserting that the real problem isn't our binge-and-sprawl approach to civic planning or our own over-bloated addiction to car culture. It's Pablo and Enrique, the men who just bussed your table and made sure your toilet seat was clean (or - why stop at day labor? - who prepared your taxes, taught your chemistry course, or anchored your local news. Money may make the "darkies" and the "brownies" more tolerable for a while, but when push comes to shove in the fast lane, they all look the same to us, don't they?)

Where I come from, this is called race-baiting, and it's of a species with the old arguments that say, "we can't let schools be integrated because those [fill in the insulting name for African-American men] can't be trusted around our women." It is an argument from fictional consequences, perpetuating comfortable bigotries and trafficking in stereotypes.

But the ad tell us, "Together we can do something about it." We. Who? Concerned White Folks, that's who. Jane Q. Citizen, soccer mom and den mother, blameless in her SUV, uniting with other lilly-white Janes across the nation to do something about it.

Sound familiar? Spend a few minutes on the websites listed (Californians for Population Stabilization, Americans Immigration Control Foundation, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform among them) and you will discover the same modus operandi that I encountered years back with the USCEA alive and well in the immigration wars. From the websites, you can download podcasts to share with your friends, print posters to put up, and - naturally - obtain media alerts and addresses for representatives to write. After all you, Jane Q. Citizen, carry a lot more weight and persuasive power than some evil lobbyist.

It is, in sum, fodder to help the bigots get organized, without drawing attention to the bigotry.

I don't know when Americans became such a cowardly people. Afraid of terrorists after 9/11? I can understand that, of course - even if ultimately we figure out that we trained and financed a lot of those terrorists back in the day with our wonderful covert military-industrial foresight. Afraid of our daughters and sons dying in an interminable war? Again, I find that a reasonable danger to be afraid of.

But afraid of traffic jams?

And worse - we seem not afraid enough to actually change our way-too-comfortable lives of excess and sprawl as we grasp madly for a solution, but rather afraid just enough to pass the blame off on those "others" (pick your ethnicity) who are somehow ruining "our" dolce vita.

This is pernicious rot, and it speaks ill of us (I'm talking to you, white folks). This ad campaign is a shill, and the "concerned citizens' organizations" behind them are a hissing and an abomination; well-oiled propaganda machines designed to get the Ruling and the Comfortable terrified of potential (not even actual) discomfort, and then equip them with choice pieces of the wrong data to parrot.

Like the old Who song says, It's a put on. Don't forget you're hiding.

My recommendation? If you're really worried about gridlock, sell your car. Change your life and your lifestyle. Stop blaming some fnorded "other" for problems we bring on ourselves and perpetuate.

Or... if you really want to get some karmic traction, join the mailing lists of these bozos and use their lobbying infrastructure against them - by advocating something sensible, decent and moral to our representatives - for a change.