BY MILT THOMAS

Although that term has not been used lately by the NRA describing President Obama, it kept dancing around in my head as words often do. I know I’m not senile or paranoid because the word combinations actually make sense, at least for now. Anyway, if you Google “elitist hypocrite” you will see 82 million references to that term ever since the National Rifle Association ran an ad and PR when Obama wanted to do something about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut.

First of all, name calling is a tradition that dates back to my elementary school days when kids called each other names to try and hurt them: “You’re a dirty rotten liar!” or “Your mother wears army boots!”  It acquired a more serious connotation when Senator McCarthy called everyone a communist back in the mid-50s. That created paranoia among Americans because communism was a real threat, and when a respected senator calls someone a communist, that person could be ruined for life, even if the allegation is false. McCarthy went down in flames along with communism so no one was accused of being a communist until Barack Obama took office.

Calling him an elitist hypocrite has raised name calling to a more literary plateau, even though it has more in common with the elementary school euphemisms. How many people will know what elitist hypocrite even means? I still don’t know what Spiro Agnew’s “Nabobs of negativism” means.

So, if you are branded an elitist hypocrite, will you be ruined for life? Will your feelings be hurt? Will it become the latest phrase to make next year’s Webster’s Dictionary? Probably none of the above.

The irony here is that calling an African-American man “elitist” is probably a compliment. It is far more complimentary than the name traditionally used by whites toward blacks. The fact that a black man has risen to a level of success in the same category of denigration usually reserved for wealthy white folks, shows how far our society has risen from the day Lincoln freed the slaves.

The term “hypocrite” is more or less in that same category, reserved for people whose actions are the opposite of their self-proclaimed standards. The people Senator McCarthy directed his tirades against were hypocrites in his eyes, pretending to be American when they were really communists. Of course, few of the accused were actually communists, which merely demonstrates how people who use this term of derision against others are often hypocrites themselves.

The NRA makes good use of its first amendment right of free speech to defend what it believes is a serious violation of Americans’ second amendment right to bear arms. That does not make them right, it only gives them the right. When the White House received 100,000 names behind a petition to deport Piers Morgan for attacking our second amendment right to bear arms, they seemed to ignore his first amendment right to speak against gun violence. Even citizens of the country that prompted our forefathers to add that amendment have the right to speak against it.

Of course, this controversy is really about Americans’ fascination with firearms. Personally, I think this preoccupation with guns has less to do with the Constitution and more to do with Sigmund Freud.  A logical explanation for all the false indignation over any effort to control our right to possess bigger and better guns is not unlike the fascination with so-called muscle cars. Get my drift? In that is the case, then who advocate gun control must be more secure about themselves and feel firearms are not necessary to make up for other shortcomings. Certainly our black president is more secure than the white critics who make up names for him.