The Pink Negro: As an Ivy League Lawyer, is President Barack Obama Hard Enough to Confront the Evil Personified by Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

President Barack Obama gracefully accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.

Norman Mailer's controversial 1957 essay

Details

Hear a tape of a sheriff's emissary remarkably telling an Arpaio political opponent he can't run for office again for five years.

Read another example of racial profiling by Sheriff Joe's forces in New Times' series "Are Your Papers in Order?" This week: "Tuned In."

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More About

• Barack Obama
• Joe Arpaio
• Tom Bearup
• Constitutional Law
• Civil Rights

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Here, in Phoenix, Arizona, we enjoy little peace; indeed, we live in the chaos generated by a reign of terror that Obama has done little to address.

Yes, his federal investigators are here examining the assaults against human rights perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.

But, after 20 months, we must ask: Are they unearthing evidence or burying it?

There is, as yet, no remedy, no redress, no recourse.

President Obama, unwittingly, put the glacial timeline of his Arpaio/Thomas investigation into perspective during his speech to America last week. He said his troop surge will see our soldiers depart Afghanistan after 19 more months of combat. In other words, the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban will end triumphantly in less time than the feds have spent — without result — probing Arpaio and Thomas.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally summoned a Justice Department task force in April 2008. As we usher in 2010, federal officials have yet to contact the very first political victim of the sheriff and the county attorney. Critical documents remain unexamined.

You are about to read a recorded conversation between Maricopa County deputies and Arpaio himself that illuminates the depravity of the Sheriff's Office.

Aggressive federal questions could have, and should have, uncovered this information. But that has not happened.

Instead, the integrity of the probe founders upon a fundamental legal axiom: Justice delayed is justice denied.

Sheriff Arpaio's 13 brutal immigration sweeps targeted Mexicans here in the Valley. Constitutional safeguards went up in smoke to stoke nativist bigotry.

Arpaio has openly consorted with, accepted awards from, and initiated round-ups of Latinos at the behest of clearly identified hate groups.

Neo-Nazis and their shouts of "sieg heil" poison Phoenix streets.

Those who criticize Sheriff Arpaio must dodge the baton, accept a cell, and, increasingly, litigate the spurious legal brief.

Sheriff Arpaio now publicly identifies Mexican immigrants as dirty and disease-ridden.

At the dawn of the civil rights era, television crews filmed rednecks confronting black schoolchildren.

In today's Southwest cauldron, citizen watchdogs videotape sheriff's deputies zip-tying the hapless and the brown-skinned.

In 1957, President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division into Arkansas to protect the constitutional rights of the black citizens of Little Rock.

His decision took 18 days, not 20 months.

In that same year, 1957, Norman Mailer wrote his infamous essay The White Negro, a meditation on courage and violence and survival.

With the bomb and concentration camps as bookends, the leader of the free world and the enfant terrible of American letters, wrestled with race.

Mailer envisioned a different response than Eisenhower's troops.

Out of black oppression and jazz, Mailer championed the anti-hero, the hipster.

The White Negro was all about the street.

"One is a rebel or one conforms; one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife," said Mailer.

Hip diffused the threat. The hip could not be threatened. And the alternative was too dull to take seriously.

"Or else [one is] a square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed," observed Mailer.

Eisenhower and Mailer staked out the extremes of American response. Mailer romanticized the passiveness of the Beat, Eisenhower reluctantly reached for the bayonet.

Neither the general nor the writer envisioned Barack Obama! (Did anyone?)

In Reflections on Little Rock, philosopher Hannah Arendt focused specifically on how otherworldly the very idea of miscegenation was at the time: The "Civil Rights bill did not go far enough, for it left untouched the most outrageous law of Southern states — the law which makes mixed marriage a criminal offense."

Not Eisenhower, not Mailer, not the very law itself contemplated Barack Obama — let alone a nation — tethered by his judgment.

And yet Obama, the Harvard Law School prince, the button-downed ditherer, the methodical seeker of the middle ground, is, ironically, the square against whom Mailer set his essay.

Never a hipster but rather the entitled private-school graduate, Obama's worldview had less to do with jive than Izod. His college peers were not draped in the poet's black threads but rather the preppy yellows, lime greens, and plaids — even pinks — of the preppy striver.

Fifty years after Little Rock, enter now the Pink Negro.

As an Ivy League lawyer, is Obama hard enough to confront the evil in Arizona?

Or has the president made a more diabolical calculation based upon immigration politics?

Plaudits in Scandinavia are little help trying to diagram the sirocco of outrages perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio since his first election in 1992.

It is simpler to begin at the beginning.

The following information is from a law enforcement tape recording produced in a federal lawsuit.

The sheriff and his command staff tape-recorded themselves in conversations as they served legal papers on the first man to challenge Arpaio for office, Tom Bearup, in 2000.

Following an investigation that targeted his opponent's campaign paperwork, Sheriff's Office Captain Brian Sands served an order from County Elections on three individuals.

Bearup was fined $1,000 and, remarkably, told he could not run again for public office for five years. (Hear the tape for yourself here)