Stop Looking, Geraldo

On Friday, the Fox News morning show "Fox and Friends" had its customary visit from its reporter Geraldo Rivera, late of "Dancing with the Stars."  The segment replayed an exchange between Rivera and Fox's Bill O'Reilly from O'Reilly's show the previous evening.

We're all aware of the ongoing dust-up between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in regard to Cruz's reference to "New York values" during an early presidential candidates' debate.  I wrote about it at the time, and I think it was rather evident what Cruz was referring to.

Apparently Geraldo Rivera also thought it was evident what Cruz was referring to, and it wasn't the same thing.  In his view, Cruz was making a specific, coded anti-Semitic reference, particularly when he mentioned values in New York being about "money and media."

Rivera on Friday morning did not explicitly state that money and media in New York are seen as the province of Jews, but in effect he did.  By doing so, he effectively said that Cruz was "coding" an anti-Semitic message.  I may not get the words exactly right, but what Rivera, who is Jewish, said was "I've been a reporter for 40 years and by now I know a coded message when I hear one."

Now, I admit to being someone who is not any more or less sensitive to "coded messages" than the next guy.  And I may not react to such messages toward, say, blacks, Jews, Muslims or Hispanics as much as someone who was black, Jewish, Muslim or Hispanic.  But I have heard Ted Cruz say variations on that "New York values" line several times since the debate, and until Rivera said something, it had not even crossed my mind that Cruz had somehow been making an anti-Semitic allusion.

I still don't think so.

Geraldo Rivera is a New Yorker.  He hears things through New York ears.  Although he has traveled the nation and the world as a correspondent, the ears are still all New York.  And I believe that he is simply not in touch, nor can he be, with the way New York is actually perceived by the rest of the nation.  And it has nothing to do with the religion of its powerful.

I'm not sure how you undo an accusation of bigotry, and Rivera has put the senator in a strange position.  Ted Cruz is an outspoken supporter of Israel, if one were to look to his record on the single issue most identified with the opinion of Americans who are Jewish.  His record there certainly compares extremely favorably against that of, say, the current president.  Rivera could easily lob accusations of "coded messages" at the White House.

The point, though, is that we who are not New Yorkers, including those like me who can't stand the place and who react negatively when someone says they are from New York, do so out of the reputation of the city and its people.  Ted Cruz has restated his comment from the debate, by referring to those values he referred to as being those of "liberal, progressive, high-spending, high-taxing politicians and of the people who keep voting them in, of money and the media."

Outside New York, that is exactly how we see it, along with arrogance, pugnacity and an attitude of being right all the time.  Donald Trump brings up the response to 9-11 but, as I wrote, two things get in the way there.  First, he's wrong -- almost any city would have responded with courage and care; the fact that it happened in New York gives him evidence but not exclusivity.

Second, it happened in a rare era in the city when, disgusted with incompetence from its liberal leaders, it voted in Rudy Giuliani, who had subsequently and promptly cleaned the place up and gave it pride.  Giuliani made the 9-11 recovery a part of the city's fabric -- picture 9-11 happening on current mayor Bill DiBlasio's watch if you want to understand it better.

We in the non-New York world heard Ted Cruz just fine.  We didn't hear anti-Semitism because we weren't hearing what wasn't there.  We heard the non-New Yorker's view of that arrogance, pugnacity and attitude of being right even when wrong, along with the liberal high-tax, high-spend part.  We associated the arrogance with money and media because it is centered there ("Yeah, we got Broadway and Wall Street here, clown, whadda you got?").  That so many in money, media and entertainment there happen to be Jewish doesn't even rise to consciousness.

If Geraldo Rivera hears bigotry where none exists, he would do well to listen to the words of Mo Vaughn I mention here, and be really careful about sometime seeing his world the way others do, not as he assumes they do.

There's a wonderful nation west of the Hudson.  Geraldo has gotten out to see most all of it in his long career.

He would do well to try to get more inside of it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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