The third rail?

Reader question:

Please explain “third rail”, as in “atheism is the third rail of American politics”.

My comments:

Atheism, by the way, is the belief system of atheists who, as the word implies, are non-theist. These people don’t believe in the existence of God, as in the Christian God or gods, as seen in Greek mythologies.

In other words, no supreme or divine being. No deity.

American politicians, though, are believers. Most of them are at any rate. Most believe in Christianity in one form or another. Others believe in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and what have you.

Atheist politicians are few and far between.

We may infer, therefore, if you are to run for public office while declaring yourself as an atheist, your chance of winning is very little, if your chance of winning exists at all. I, an atheist, believe it exists.

Hence, in our example, we hear people say that “atheism is the third rail of American politics”.

In other words, it is a doomed cause. Don’t even go there.

The third rail, you see, refers originally to the additional rail that provides electricity to power trains on an electric railway. There are two running rails on which the train travels. The additional rail, which runs alongside the running rails, is known as the third rail.

As the third rail is electrically charged, it is dangerous. Anyone who touch it is, literally, electrified.

It is from this that the idiomatic third rail is created. Often seen in politics, when something is described as the third rail, it is something off limits. It is a topic no-one wants to touch because touching it means doom and gloom. Nothing good will come of it.

That’s about it. Let’s read media examples to hammer the point home:

1. If Donald Trump’s presidential bid is dead, no one bothered to tell Mr Trump - or his supporters.

Just a week ago, following the New York billionaire’s mocking comments about 2008 Republican nominee John McCain's Vietnam POW experience, pundits and prognosticators were busy etching his political epitaph.

“The circus is almost over,” Republican strategist Rick Wilson said in Politico. “My advice to Trump fans? Don’t be the last clown out of the tent.”

The previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney blasted Mr Trump, as did current candidates Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham.

All that was left was to wait for the latest poll results to come in and see exactly how precipitous Mr Trump’s fall would be.

Naysayers are going to have to wait a bit longer, it seems. A CNN/ORD national survey conducted entirely after the McCain dust-up, for instance, puts Mr Trump ahead with the support of 18% of Republicans, Mr Bush at 15% and Mr Walker at 10%.

So, how to explain Mr Trump’s enduring appeal? Here are five possible factors at play.

First, the voice of the anti-immigration cause.

Immigration has become a centrepiece of Mr Trump’s campaign thanks to the over-the-top rhetoric in his kick-off speech in New York, where he accused Mexico of “bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists” to the US.

While his views were condemned as extreme and racially tinged, his immigration stance appears to be resonating with a significant portion of the Republican primary electorate.

According to that CNN/ORC survey, 63% of Republicans support deporting the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Of that number, 23% back Mr Trump, while only 10% support second-place Bush.

“It is immigration - its universally celebrated benefits and its barely acknowledged costs - that is the third rail of US politics,” writes Matthew Continetti for the Washington Free Beacon. “Trump didn’t step on the third rail; he embraced it, he won’t let go of it, and in so doing he’s become electric.”

- Five reasons Trump still tops the polls, BBC.com, July 27, 2017.

2. This was more than sidewalk video now, or the sound of shouts and police gunfire in Baton Rouge in the last moments of Alton Sterling’s life. This was something more in Falcon Heights, Minn., on Wednesday before Philando Castile was shot dead by a police officer for the crimes of being black and having a busted taillight and telling the cop who shot him that there was a gun in his car — along with his fiancée and a 4-year-old girl — right before reaching for identification became a threat to men with guns already out.

No, this was something different from the front seat of Castile’s car, with him already shot, life already spilling out of him. This was finally a play-by-play on what it’s like to be black and defenseless against trigger-happy cops, streamed live, soon to be posted on Facebook for the world to see.

This was the official play-by-play on another black life that apparently didn’t matter in America.

We got chilling commentary this time from Castile’s fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, in the aftermath of the shooting, Reynolds looking into her phone and calmly and eloquently describing a nightmare, the kind that now happens twice in two days in this country. You can easily find this video, could find it on Wednesday night; see it begin with blood all over Castile’s white T-shirt. He is still alive. It is here that the camera, in a snuff film all too tragic and all too real, finds Ms. Reynolds’ face as she says, “They killed my boyfriend.”

She says that Castile told police that there was a gun in the car, one that she says he was licensed to carry. She says that he was simply reaching for his wallet when a cop started shooting. With her in the car. With her daughter in the backseat. None of these shootings are the same, of course. Except for this: Another black man ends up dead, this time in the front seat of his car.

You see a cop’s gun pointing through the window. You hear Diamond Reynolds:

“You shot four bullets into him, sir.”

This all happens, for the second time in a week, as the presumptive presidential nominees bicker about a Star of David and emails and judgment most of all; at a time when we keep getting the kind of judgment rendered in Falcon Heights, Minn., on a Wednesday night.

You eventually hear one of the officers telling Diamond Reynolds to keep her hands on the wheel of the car. Somehow she remains calm in this terrible place and in these terrible moments, because she doesn’t want to become part of the shooting gallery in the front seat of Philando Castile’s car.

She says, “I will, sir. No worries. I will.”

There is the moment when the young woman’s voice begins to break. But does not shatter.

We hear one of the cops from the St. Anthony Police Department, assigned to police Falcon Heights, a small town north of St. Paul, say, “Get the female passenger out.” The young woman exits the vehicle, as told, as she is also told to “keep them up.” By now she knows that any sudden movement, even with a phone in your hand, can get you killed. The woman asks for her daughter, who has seen it all from the backseat, where she actually had a ringside seat to race in America, which is the third rail in America and always has been and always will be.

- America gets chilling look at what it’s like to be black and defenseless against trigger-happy cops, New York Daily News, July 7, 2016.

3. The 2016 Olympics have exposed to the world sides of Rio de Janeiro that most Brazilians would have preferred to keep out of sight. Raw sewage running into waterways. Chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling of a newly built tunnel. Stray bullets flying through the air. Not to mention that pesky foreign reporters keep venturing into the city’s favelas, where conflicts between drug gangs and security forces continue to simmer.

Of all the bad press, though, nothing has captured the world’s attention like the supposed late-night robbery, this weekend, of Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers from the U.S. Olympic team. At first, the story seemed to confirm Rio’s inability to keep its most celebrated visitors safe, even with eighty-five thousand soldiers and police officers deployed throughout the city. Now it appears that the swimmers may have fabricated their account, to avoid revealing that they had, instead, drunkenly smashed up a gas-station bathroom and got into an altercation with a security guard. On Wednesday, when doubts about their story began to emerge, Lochte was already back in the United States, but Brazilian police, seeking answers, pulled two of the other swimmers involved, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger, off a plane at the airport.

The news has captivated Brazilians, too. And, while many have brushed it off as a humorous episode, many others have not. On Twitter, one well-known Brazilian TV journalist called Lochte a liar, an idiot, and a coward. Some Brazilians, not unreasonably, accused the swimmers of undermining Brazil’s international reputation. But the intensity of the reactions—both official and unofficial—also points to a larger cultural peculiarity. It has long been common for Brazilians to obsess over what the developed world thinks of them. Even when the Olympics aren’t on, the local media constantly run stories about what U.S. and European outlets are saying about Brazil. Lochte unwittingly touched the third rail of Brazilian national identity.

This obsession with the national image was part of why Brazil’s leaders wanted to host the Olympics in the first place. In 2009, when Rio won the bidding to hold the Games, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then the country’s President, hailed it as proof that “Brazil has left the ranks of second-class countries and turned into a first-class country.” The economy was booming then, and the Olympics seemed to present a chance to challenge the old refrain that “Brazil is not a serious country”—a jab that Brazilians commonly (but wrongly) attribute to Charles de Gaulle. As proud as they are of samba, Carnival, and futebol, Brazilians hoped to show the world that their country has a lot more to it.

This feeling has a name in Brazil: complexo de vira-lata. Literally “mutt complex,” the term conjures a stray dog begging for scraps. It was coined during another international sporting event in Rio, the 1950 World Cup, when Brazil’s national soccer team lost to Uruguay and it seemed as though the country had thrown away its best chance to demonstrate its greatness to the world. But the phrase also hints at a deeper, more noxious insecurity, over the racial makeup of the country, and the unresolved legacy of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Brazil’s leading minds believed that the way to achieve progress was by “whitening” the population with European immigrants. Then, as now, the élites saw their country in the same league as the United States and Europe, and only rarely compared it to others in Latin America.

Brazil has a kind of inverted exceptionalism. Even with all of its natural resources, and its nearly continental size, it always seems to fall short of its potential, never managing to find its place in the club of developed nations. One quirk of the complexo de vira-lata is that Brazilians are often the first to assume that their country is hopeless. At a doctor’s appointment in São Paulo recently, my doctor told me with a shrug and a smile, “I knew the euphoria wouldn’t last.” He spoke about Brazil as though it had never progressed at all. But this isn’t true, either. Despite its recent troubles, the country has come a long way since 1950, especially on poverty. It just isn’t the superpower that Lula and others tried to sell to the outside world.

- Why Brazilians are so obsessed with the Ryan Lochte story, NewYorker.com, August 18, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.