Category Archives: History and Politics

What good is history?

“You remember I told you about my brother and I taking Uncle Peter to the zoo?” said the skeleton of my father from his grave on the side of Cortlandt Road.

You showed him the giraffes.  

“Yeah, we said ‘look, Uncle Peter!  Those are giraffes, from Africa –aren’t they amazing?’  Uncle Peter said ‘what good are they?’.   My brother and I looked at each other, took him to see the crocodile, one of the world’s most impressive reptiles.   Do you remember what Uncle Peter said?”  

“Who needs it?”

“Well, the same goes for history.   To some people it is an empty abstraction full of ambiguity and threatening, unresolvable nightmares better forgotten.   Why think about what our forefathers did to Africans, to Native Americans including the Mexicans?    We committed some horrible genocides, wrote laws to protect the most vile occupations man has ever engaged in, protected those practices for almost a hundred years under the world’s most revolutionary blueprint for democracy, our U.S. Constitution.  

“Of course, you’d have to be a lawyer to find the discreet little phrases where the Constitution protects those hideous practices, but to a lawyer and a judge, no matter could be more cut and dried.  ‘ ‘Other such persons,’ Yaw Honuh, what could be more clear cut and precisely, perfectly dried, suh?’   

“The learned Chief Justice, a man a hundred years ahead of his time, is compelled to write: ‘Whatever the constraints of our individual conscience, the law requires a faithful interpretation of the intent of the Framers. It was clearly intended by our founding fathers that this genocidal practice be authorized under our law, at least until the year 1807.’     

“What American wants to hear that shit?  What, we are no better than the Nazis?  Who wants to hear that Americans, many times in our history, have celebrated mass murder as enthusiastically as the fervent mobs at Nazi rallies?   There was never an anti-lynching law, and those lynch mobs used to be quite enthusiastic, bring a picnic, the whole family, buy souvenirs afterwards to recall the amazing day.   There were no protests when Truman insisted we had to drop those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  There was dancing in the street when Japan surrendered.    

“With Hitler, you had, for the first time in the history of warfare, a ruthless maniac with the modern means of killing civilians on a mass scale and no hesitation to use the new technologies.  The blitzkreig in the skies over London, for example, a continuous, nightly bombardment of civilians, was designed to terrorize the populace and demoralize support for the war effort.  So the Allies responded in kind, we killed untold hundreds of thousands of civilians during World War Two.  The historic city of Dresden was wiped out with incendiary bombs, the massive firebombings of Tokoyo killed many more Japanese women and children than both atomic bomb blasts combined.  So, of course, in a time when everyone is filled with dread and fear, it’s no surprise that many people turn away from history.”  

“Add to that the notion many people have that history is generally written by rascals, in the pay of other, sometimes pernicious, rascals.   Which is often true, you have to look at who the person was who wrote the history, who paid for the book, what the hidden agenda is, why the story is told this way, certain facts highlighted, others left out completely.  You know first-hand that it’s possible, by the way you tell a story, to convincingly describe something completely alien to those who actually lived through and survived it.”

It’s fascinating to me that you had such a keen, lifelong interest in history, and bending the moral arc of history and all that, and at the same time you always insisted that people can’t change themselves in any fundamental way.   That optimistic impulse, to read history and learn lessons in hopes of avoiding the worst stupidities of the past,  set against the pessimistic belief that people’s lives are laid out for them immutably by the age of three.

“Well, look, Elie, you can hold up history to support either proposition, or both of them.  Did America change for its black citizens?  You now have a black middle class, much larger than it was sixty years ago.  You have black millionaires, even a black billionaire or two.  Certain changes toward equal rights have been made, as a result of a titanic, organized struggle and sometimes unbearable sacrifices.  You can say a lot has changed.  The power company in Georgia has a policy of firing employees if they say the word ‘nigger’, you know, what is now universally, in mixed company, pronounced as the ‘n-word’.  

“On the other hand, you have, for the vast majority of blacks in America, the same eternal charnel house.  Brown v. Board of Ed was decided in 1954, segregation in education was unconstitutional, it imposed inferior education on black students.  States were ordered to de-segregate schools ‘with all deliberate speed.’ Now, going on 63 years later, longer than your lifetime so far, schools are as segregated as they were the day before Brown was decided.  So you tell me how much has changed for the average Negro in America.”    

I’ll tell you one thing that has changed, with a president who cunningly positioned himself with the White Supremacists, hate crimes are up.   Every other day we see a scene in a Jewish cemetery, grave stones knocked over; a mosque set on fire.  The anger of the master race is quite palpable, and we have a guy who is stoking it in a cynical attempt… well, you just have to listen to the political pronouncements of each side to get a pretty good idea what is going on.  

“History, what good is it?  I can hear my Uncle Peter, an uncurious man with only practical concerns related to life on his farm.   I guess I’m with Howard Zinn on the constructive use of history– taking courage from those rare moments when people have organized and triumphed over evil things like slavery, child labor, denial of basic rights to women.    We have to take courage from these things or we could not act.  We’d be in despair with a destructive narcissist like this one in power, appointing people who are dedicated to destroying the agencies he’s putting them in charge of.  

“We have seen this before, seen the mistakes a divided opposition makes in opposing each other as the far worse evil takes root.  I grant you it makes little sense, looking toward society wide change for the better while denying a person can do it in his own life– but there we are, Elie.  People are not consistent, or logical, or, in most cases, very brave.”    

The skeleton looked over his shoulder to Cortlandt Road and we both pictured the line of cars, traveling slowly past after being energized by Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, and their message of brotherhood and positive social change, at the moment the fist sized rocks began pelting down on their windshields.    

“The power of hatred, Elie, one of the big ones in human affairs,” said the skeleton.  

No shit, Shylock.

Why Do We Pay Tribute to the Baron?

A serf boy asks his father why they pay rent to the Baron.  Not only rent, says the boy, the Baron gets ninety per cent of our crops.  And I notice, says the boy, that mom sometimes goes to the Baron’s, in his carriage, and while she’s gone you’re always in a violent mood. “Why do we have to pay tribute to the Baron, who doesn’t even seem like a nice man?”

“We pay tribute to the Baron so that he will protect us from other barons,” says the father, the boy staring at the man’s clenched fists.

Standing on a Phantom Leg — and Ag Gag Laws

The law gives and the law takes away.  Thank God for the laws we have that protect the vulnerable.  These laws are not the rule, but they are something to be very thankful for, to fight to protect.  Between the rule of law and the rule of violence, there is nothing to choose.

One of the most difficult things, as an idealistic young lawyer trying to make a living, was hearing a prospective client’s long, painful recitation of a brutal screwing that raised no legal issue a court could address.   One of the most useful, and terrible, parts of law school is the “issue spotting”  exercise.  You listen to a long detailed complaint looking for issues that may be legally remediable among the many equally, sometimes more horrific, parts of the story that is regarded, in its entirety, as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  

“You got royally screwed, no question, and I sympathize 100% with your anger at the sickening ordeal you were put through, I would feel exactly as you do,” I would begin, seeking the words to let the poor sodomized fucker down gently on his tender sphincter.  

“What they did to you was unconscionable, sickening and offensively typical.”  The words do not come easily, you have to give your professional opinion of the person’s odds of getting a case into court, having a meaningful hearing, achieving some victory with the law.   Those odds are zero. 

“This is the worst part of my job, explaining to someone who’s been brutally, deliberately screwed, against his will, that the law regards his screwing as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  De minimis non curat lex, as the judges say.   It’s Latin for ‘your client is shit out of luck, asshole.  Next!'” 

The issue spotting exercise is the law student’s training for hearing a layman’s complaint and finding a viable legal theory for bringing the complaint to court.  Often there is no remedy at law.   People who are severely screwed often have a hard time understanding this.

 “You agree that they fucked me up the ass sideways,” the prospective client will protest.  

“I do,” the empathetic young lawyer will say.  

“You agree that it was unconscionable, your own word,” says the prospective client.  

“I do, absolutely,” the lawyer will say.  And so on.  The lawyer knows what the prospective client cannot understand in his particular case yet–  the laws are made by powerful forces that like the idea of non-consensual sex, they like it very, very much.   Unless there is a provision in the law to enforce the rights of those who do not give consent to those powerful people, and other non-human entities, who love a little spontaneous dalliance, consensual or not, well, you have a trifle that the law does not need to concern itself with.

It is very troubling to see a rightfully aggrieved person standing on a phantom leg. There ought to be a law…  well, I agree very much.  Unfortunately the billionaire class, in conjunction with those psychopathic legal fictions called ‘persons’, with their army of well-paid  lobbyists representing the tiny, powerful group whose interests they tirelessly protect, have the most persuasive voice for lawmakers.  

Still, there is the human reflex, felt by many, to stand on a right they strongly believe they SHOULD have.  Brings us, in an odd way, to the narrow electoral college election of this unreasonable fellow we have in office now.  Millions voted for his unconvincing promise to help the little man and cut through law and everything else to get him what he SHOULD have.   A promise ridiculous on its face, as we used to say at law,  but there you have it.  His type essentially says, pretty much irrefutably:

You have no legal right unless you can enforce it in court, asshole.   Even if you have a legal right that a court will enforce, find a lawyer who will work for free or we will bankrupt you.  We will bury you in legal bills!  You really want to fight the power, motherfucker?  We will destroy you!

In this context there is a controversy, sadly non-controversial to most Americans, that is like a fiber of celery caught uncomfortably between my molars.  No floss can remove it, my tongue is constantly playing with the irritating strand every time I’m reminded of it.   I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki went all the way over to becoming an active al Q’aeda recruiter, as his accusers claimed when they put him on the secret presidential kill list, and after they turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched by a Predator drone.  I doubt it, but I don’t absolutely know for sure.  Neither did Jeremy Scahill, who researched the issue in depth, but he also strongly doubted that Awlaki was affiliated with terrorists and presented a good case that no evidence whatsoever of terrorist ties was produced before his extrajudicial execution.

I know, at least in the first part of his railing against the American worldwide war against Islam, that Awlaki probably felt he had a right to free speech under the First Amendment.   It’s an argument his lawyer could have made in court, Awlaki’s right to dissent, if he’d been tried, even in absentia.   As an American, Awlaki believed he had an absolute right to express his opinions, to argue against the murderous policies of his government, to appeal in the strongest possible terms to the sense of justice in those he addressed.  

The American president had a different idea and, being a brilliant Constitutional law professor brushed aside all the legal issues raised by the targeted murder of an American citizen for giving speeches the president deemed the dangerous incitement of a deadly enemy combatant.  Brushed aside all legal arguments and zapped the American citizen with a drone-launched missile.  The story forever after would be that Obama wisely and decisively took out a dangerous terrorist leader, the number two man in al Q’aeda and heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden himself, if you believe Obama’s representations about  Awlaki.

I don’t begrudge Obama his accomplishments.  The elimination of the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ loophole in health insurance was long overdue and something every American should applaud.  At the same time, Obama handed expanded executive prerogatives to the volatile, angry man who succeeded him as president.  

Included in these prerogatives was the absolute right to say who is an enemy combatant and, based on that unappealable status determination, to take any steps necessary to make sure the dangerous terrorist is neutralized.

“Your classic slippery slope, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You heard about those ALEC introduced Ag Gag laws which call for complete opacity when it it comes to the systematic industry-wide torture of animals raised for slaughter.  In the states where these laws have been passed it is illegal to take unauthorized videotape of violence against farm animals.  

“Violence seems like a ridiculous thing to talk about in connection with animals raised to be meat.  And it is.  The standard for what is acceptable in the animals-for-food-industry, of course, is determined by industry standards.  If ten chickens per square yard of cage means you have to cut the beaks off them to keep them from pecking each other to death, so be it and there’s nothing cruel or unusual about it.  Cruel it might arguably be, but unusual?  I’m afraid not, we all do it, sir.  Industry standard.  Nothing to see here.

“Animals being raised for slaughter and sale as meat certainly have no rights a white man is bound to respect.  But here’s the kicker, Elie.  As you know, these laws allow the State to prosecute vegan activists as ‘terrorists’.  Try that ass hat on for size.   If you’re a PETA activist and you take a video of factory workers beating a cow or pig to death, you are a terrorist under these Ag Gag laws.  What can you do to a terrorist?  Some believe torture is too good for those motherfuckers, you dig?”

“But see, Elie, torture is nothing to worry about either.  That’s because our Constitution protects us against a psychopathic element of the government deciding that, in spite of treaties we’ve signed and prosecutions we’ve successfully waged against torturers from other nations, Americans can legally torture people — if we secretly redefine it and call it something else.  

“We all know Americans don’t torture unless the country’s most powerful skillfully play to the terror of the populace, which will allow such formerly hideous practices to become ‘normalized’.  You know, like if we’re facing an enemy so terrible that all measures must be employed to destroy that enemy.  You know, an enemy that has no hesitation to slaughter as many children as it takes to rid the world of what they perceive as evil.”

OK, dad.  Calm down now.  Life goes on.  

“Not for me it doesn’t,” said the skeleton.  

Not for me either, really, not all the time.

Follow up on Raid in Yemen Story

NBC reports, January 31, 2017 4:15 ET:

Contrary to earlier reporting, the senior military official said, the raid was Trump’s first clandestine strike — not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved “boots on the ground” at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, the official said.

source

Expect to hear no more about this story, but make a note of it.

Kudos to the New York Times

The Grey Lady, America’s newspaper of record, reports on the recent accidental killing, by Navy SEALs, of eight year-old Nora al-Awlaki, daughter of the previously executed Anwar al-Awlaki.   Awlaki’s father, Nora’s grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, is quoted in the piece:

Nasser al-Awlaki, the girl’s grandfather, gave NBC News a different version of events of what took place. “My granddaughter was staying for a while with her mother, so when the attack came, they were sitting in the house, and a bullet struck her in her neck at 2:30 past midnight. Other children in the same house were killed,” he said. Nora died from her injuries two hours after suffering the gunshot wound, he said. The grandfather went on to say that the SEALs burned the home after raiding it, and that Nora’s mother escaped the raid with only a minor injury. The U.S. has also killed Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and son in previous drone strikes.    source

I know I’m a nitpicky, mean-spirited motherfucker, but the Times concludes the paragraph above by reporting that the man who spoke to NBC news about the recent killing of his granddaughter had been himself killed in the drone strikes of 2011.  

We presume the Times will print a correction, if a reader writes in to point it out.  Who has the time?  Who really cares about such a seemingly insignificant detail?  There are larger issues of accuracy and credibility to concern their editors.

In a larger sense, the Grey Lady may have had it right.  It might very well feel true for Nasser al-Awlaki, that he was already killed by American drones several times over.  His petition to save his son Anwar from Obama’s kill list was thrown out of court.  His son was soon thereafter killed by a drone strike. Two weeks later his 16 year-old grandson Abdulrahim was killed by another American missile strike, also remotely launched from a Predator drone.  

Those two killings may have, metaphorically, killed Nasser al-Awlaki.  One can only imagine how troubling to his dead body the gunshot mutilated little corpse of his eight-year old grand-daughter must be.

But in fairness, and truly, America, who really gives a fuck about some family’s tragedy in far away Yemen?  Anwar al-Awlaki (you will read everywhere but in Scahill’s Dirty Wars) wasn’t a dissenting American citizen forcefully exercising his First Amendment right to oppose government actions he found hateful.   He was a dangerous terrorist, pure and simple, a powerful recruiter for hateful, murdering fanatics, the President said so.   He was very highly placed in al Q’eada when he was put on the Presidential Kill List, you can confirm that with the New York Times and NPR as well as on Fox, CNN, MSNBC.  

Chances are they all hate our freedom over there anyway, isn’t that right?   As for the beautiful little girl bystander left to die slowly in that raid, an American bullet in her spine, without medical treatment, remember that every terrorist was once an adorable eight year-old.  

Move along now, America, nothing to see here.  USA!  USA!!!!

 

 

Finding Inspiration in the Sickening Tragedy of History

I must take a moment off from trying to put all of my hard-earned insights about life into the mouth of the skeleton of my difficult, at times impossible, father.

To be more accurate:  I need to take a break from trying to put these insights into our ‘conversations’ by way of giving you, gentle reader, these hopefully tantalizing crusts to chew on.   I generously give the fucking skeleton most of the good lines because I am that kind of son.  But I’m afraid my dear old father can add nothing at the moment to what I need to say.  

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you completely underestimated me, would it, Elie?” said the familiar pain in the ass from his bed inside the earth.  

Most people I know are very upset at the recent political turns of fortune here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.    They have little faith that a vain, thin-skinned, attention and adulation-seeking man, born filthy rich, to a self-made millionaire father, Frederick Christ “Fred” Trump (I shit thee not), who sent the troubled boy to a military academy to make him less of a vain, thin-skinned, attention-seeker, and later battled government charges of systematic racism with this same son, aided by the evil Roy Cohn, the son by then the young president of his imperious, embattled father’s real estate empire, can lead our troubled and divided nation to better times.  They look at his Harvard-trained, Goldman Sachs exec turned successful profiteer of hate and innuendo, his Chief Strategist, and see Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment, the man with the intellectual fire power to sell his passionate master’s vision of National Greatness to the persuadable, and they shudder with horror.    

Sekhnet is more upset than most.   She suffers from PTSD, is more susceptible than many to loud rumblings of the worst case scenario.   She can’t hear much on any subject related to any of this without becoming tearful.   She told me tonight that I’m incapable of talking about anything else (though, in fairness to me, I spend plenty of time doling out Obama’s share of blame for the current state of affairs).  I must therefore take a few moments from trying to craft a salable manuscript about my father and history, written with a slavish devotion to the tastes of the razor-toothed corporate cocksuckers I hope will embrace it, promote it, and pay me for it, to speak bluntly and honestly about something that quickly reduces Sekhnet to tears.   History.  

She had terrible history teachers in school who made studying the subject a boring, meaningless chore.  As a consequence she never read history once she graduated.   She much preferred the intellectual rigors of philosophy and science, though she no longer reads much of the former and doesn’t have as much time as she’d like to keep up with most aspects of the latter.   History, she says, is like the politics and ‘alternative facts’ that divide us now, a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, or propaganda, dull and/or dangerous, the stuff of which the horror we live in today is actually crafted.    

“She’s not entirely wrong about that,” said the skeleton wryly.  

I tried to explain to her that uncovering the pertinent facts and learning useful lessons from history is, indeed, an ongoing battle.  It’s like the battle I must constantly wage against anger.  There are plenty of reasons to rage, always, no shit.   The struggle not to become angry must be ongoing if it is to have any hope of success.  You might learn to eliminate the reflexive tensing of your arms, the clenching of your fists, even the snarl that might feel irresistible — but the look on your face will still betray your feelings most of the time.  

The best history is a nuanced telling of what happened in the past in the context of how this past affects things going forward.  No professional historian can actually present this story in all its nuance, though some come much closer than others.  History, at its best, is an earnest search for deeper truth about our world that inspires us to make the best choices for the future.  

It’s true that most historians write for their masters, serve a powerful force of one kind or another.  It is said that history is written by the victors, often in the blood of those they defeat and vilify.  Much of what we call history is written to justify one set of beliefs or another.   The historian, we’re told, must start with a thesis, in the manner of a scientist, and demonstrate the truth of the theory by presenting and interpreting the known and uncovered facts.  

“Sounds a lot like a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, when you put it like that,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, maybe so.   History is slippery, I’ll give it that.  Certain things, however, happened, they objectively happened and they cannot unhappen.  There were a few hundred years of chattel slavery here, for example, from the earliest colonial days through almost the entire first century of our great democracy.   That part is beyond dispute, even if you refer to it as The Peculiar Institution and the rich people who owned slaves, raped the ones they liked, had the ones whipped that they didn’t like, as Planters.  Then the Civil War.  Then things get slippery.  

Woodrow Wilson was a great fan of D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece of early cinema, the innovative ‘The Birth of A Nation.’  He had the movie screened at the White House, the first movie ever screened there.  

“The aptly named White House, in that instance,” said the skeleton.  

Some feminist professor at CCNY made us watch most of the infernal movie with her, in a darkened room on the City College campus in Harlem.  I watched the thing and said to myself “I’ll be damned.”   I had no idea the freed slaves had created such a massive and intolerable wave of terror, preying on white women, raping them, and that the Ku Klux Klan, far from being the brutal, hate-filled lynching, terrorist murderers I’d always supposed, were actually modern day knights, living out a code of chivalry as impressively heroic as any from storied antiquity.  

“Sekhnet will tell you to tone down the irony,” said the skeleton.  

Fine, but I give it as an example.  The version of history that was in ascendance in 1915, when the hateful “Birth of A Nation” was made, and Klan membership was soaring, was that American blacks were out of control and needed the harsh penal laws of the southern states and brutal methods, including occasionally teaching them a collective lesson by torturing and killing the most uppity of them, to keep them in line.  It was better for everybody, these historians argued, to leave the treatment of blacks to the localities that knew them best.   Any black people who could get out of those localities migrated, en masse, to urban centers far from the former Confederacy.  Life wasn’t no crystal stair for them where they went, but it was arguably better than casting your eyes down wherever you went to avoid being strung up. [1]

The history of these things is fascinating to me, even if also maddening and grotesque.  I read historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn and nod my head.  These historians are speaking my language, presenting the past in a way that makes perfect sense to me, in light of the present.  Other people may not be moved by these histories at all, some might hate them, still others might never open any of these books in the first place.   I don’t say one way is necessarily better than another, but for me, as it was for my father, this shit is endlessly fascinating.  

“Well, not everybody is cut out for it, Elie.  You can see the long recitation of the horrors of history as an unbearable ordeal to put yourself through.  History is also alive.  You remember when you and your sister were little and I told you not to buy Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies?  They were Welch candies, made by a company owned by Robert Welch, the man who started the John Birch Society– in the year your sister was born, as a matter of fact.  

“The John Birch Society were rabid right wing fanatics who believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.  The infamous billionaire Koch brothers, who have done so much to bring about a more just world — for themselves– , sprung from the syphlitic gonads of one of the founders of the John Birch Society.   Here’s what Welch published about Eisenhower, courtesy of your friend Jeeves:

  • On page 278 of The Politician, Welch summarized, from his perspective, the only two possible interpretations of President Eisenhower’s motives: “The role he has played, as described in all the pages above, would fit just as well into one theory as the other; that he is a mere stooge or that he is a Communist assigned the specific job of being a political front man.”

“Anyway, true enough, any jackass can write history.  You recall Henry Ford’s masterwork about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, meticulously researched and based largely on the infamous Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  

Yeah, look, you and I don’t have much squeamishness about history, but I recognize that many people do.   I will end with Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

 

[1] I have a vivid memory of my mother reading me this wonderful poem by Langston Hughes  (read the poem, but whatever you do, don’t click on the play video button above it)

Enraged Asshole

“Well, look, Elie, rage is the most terrifying and destructive human emotion.  We can all relate to that, I suppose, from both sides.  Horrible as it is to be the recipient of rage, rage unleashes a phantom surge of powerfulness, but really, as we’ve discussed, rage is a response to intolerable powerlessness.  Real rage comes from the deepest shame.  

“We can’t bear shame, which is intensely painful, so we lash out.  We can’t strike at the thing that causes us shame, most of the time, so we find someone weak to attack, someone we can beat to a fucking pulp.  Something that can’t kill us after we smash it in the face.  That’s why most people reserve rage for their loved ones.

“You have it in national politics now, the politics of rage and shame, a response to enforced powerlessness.  People are angry, for many reasons, many of them valid.  You live in a country where you’re now forced to buy private health insurance.  You buy it.  You’re having chest pains, left arm hurts, your doctor advises you to get to an Emergency Room.  You present your insurance card at the ER.  A month later a bill comes for many thousands of dollars– your sole responsibility to pay.  

“The contract you signed with your insurance company informs you quite clearly, on page 75, that where your insurance is accepted is a matter you are solely responsible to determine before accepting any medical services, even if you are on a stretcher, or unconscious, even if you’re admitted to the hospital as a cardiac patient.  There are a million aggravating things like that for most people in a hundred areas of American life.  

“So you rage.  You are powerless.  You don’t have an army of millionaire lobbyists making laws for your benefit and protection.  That power belongs to the super wealthy ‘persons’ called corporations.  Period.  Work for a corporation and you may be OK in certain ways, although you will also be subject, many times, to the arbitrary will of a powerful psychopath.  Work for yourself?  Better have a lot of money before you start out on that path.  

“Anyway, there is a tremendous amount of free-floating rage out there in America.  You see it immediately as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car.  Some of your fellow drivers clearly don’t give a fuck if you, or they, die.  You can read about it in the paper every day, more Americans shot to death.  Road rage.  Disputes that get out of hand.  It’s not the guns that kill people, of course, Elie, it’s the rage.  A law against rage?  Hah!  Fuck you!

“Anyway, you have to get outside now, so I’ll leave you with this.  The president you have now is a brand, like all of them are, like President Hope and Change was.  This guy’s brand is anger, anger and winning.  He is angry about everything, always, even when he wins.  He’s angry that millions of dead Mexican rapists fraudulently voted against him, depriving him of a victory in the popular vote that the media fraudulently claims he lost.  What is his solution?  He momentarily fixates and rages.  An angry denier, perfect man to lead the greatest nation the world has ever known, wouldn’t you say, Elie?”

The cancerous, zombie chickens of American Exceptionalism coming home to roost, dad.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017

The myths we live by can sometimes break your heart.  Myths have sustained humans forever, brought people together, torn us apart.  Myths can teach us the most important truths or entrench us in ignorance.  I have no insight into Christian mythology, though I have been swayed in my life by the righteous voice of a Baptist minister, a voice that could not be silenced by the bullets that killed him.    It is that Baptist minister whose life and message we celebrate today.   

Jesus, born more than two thousand years ago– if he was born at all (a book I read makes a convincing case about the total absence of contemporary evidence that Jesus ever existed) — is believed by more than two billion people to be the son of God.   God, it is written, sent His only son to preach love in a world of human hatred and cruelty.  God, the all-knowing, understood that a powerful apostle of peace and kindness in a corrupt and vicious world must inevitably wind up tortured and crucified.  And so it was.

The myth continues that because Jesus allowed himself to be nailed to a cross for a long, painful death, while being mocked, believing in Him will cleanse a person of their sins, including their original sin– a concept I am a bit hazy about, I must admit.  I am no Christian, even as I greatly admire Jesus’s message of love and generosity.

It’s been impossible for me to disentangle the Christian message of peace and mildness from the Christian history of killing and enslaving in the name of God and His son;  good Christian killing good Christian in Thirty Year and Hundred Year Wars, good Christian killing Muslim, good Christian killing Jew, good Christian enslaving Africans who are then converted to Christianity, like millions in South and Central America converted under the sword.  There are many good Christians today who are intolerant, righteous in their hatred of homosexuals, in their support of preemptive wars.

The hypocrisy done in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the Son of God, ruins Christianity as a myth I can take much comfort from.   The Catholic Church’s long corporate cover-up of horrible crimes, actual sins, committed worldwide by priests and the church hierarchy adds a very bitter note to the mix.

The heart of a religion cannot be judged on the actions of those who distort its teachings.   It is good to remember that today as we celebrate a belated national holiday dedicated to Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a true Christian in the best sense of the word, a man whose life became a legend.  

Many of us were alive when King preached, when he was sent to prison for his outrageous insistence that American blacks deserved the same rights as all other Americans.  He was a hero to many decent, God-fearing Americans, even as he was hated by millions of other decent, God-fearing Americans who believed that King was a privileged Negro troublemaker who simply didn’t know his place.  

King inspired.  He spoke truth that rings across time.  See if you can listen to his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam speech without being moved, consider the tragedy of its unheeded, irrefutable wisdom,  without tears beginning to flow.

“An unjust, evil and futile war,” he explains in his distinct and sonorous cadence.   His conscience, he said, leaves him with no other choice but to speak of it.  The time, he said, has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.  You can read the transcript, if you prefer reading to hearing the tones of one of history’s great orators.  

The speech connecting racism, poverty and war cost him many things, his place among America’s most admired, a canceled invitation to the White House and, a year later, to the day, his life.  More on that here.  There is a strong parallel between the story of King and the story of Jesus, especially in the endings– both were ready to die to speak truth they knew would mark them for death.  

That is at the heart of our most inspiring myths; a genius who can unharden hearts and is willing to die for the truth is the rarest of humans.   I keep thinking about the millions of American blacks who still live in hopeless, inherited poverty in a nation still deeply divided about “race”.  I often think of how little has changed for millions of Americans originally from Africa, most now several generations deeper in poverty, since the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, since the outright assassination of Malcolm X.  We will never know for certain how James Earl Ray, another lone gunman, a lifelong jailbird with at best average intelligence, and no particular resources, eluded arrest during a long international manhunt after killing King.  Speculating on who would have ordered King killed one year to the day after his Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam sermon, when he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, already deep into his work to unite those in poverty, is best left to the “conspiracy nuts”.  

I have no light to shed on Martin Luther King’s murder or the horrible coincidence of his killing one year to the day after he articulated why America must address racism, poverty and a war culture, and how all three are inextricably interconnected.   The night before his murder King gave the fiery and prophetic “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.  Listen to it now unmoved, if you can.  

John Lewis was with Martin Luther King in the deep south.  Lewis had his skull broken by police nightsticks in Selma, Alabama, if I’m not mistaken.   Lewis has been in Congress for decades.  The other day he announced that he would boycott the inauguration of the new president.  I didn’t hear the announcement, but heard he questioned the legitimacy of this highly questionable candidate, who lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 but managed to win the electoral college fair and square, arguably, by a margin of less than 80,000 total votes in key districts of several swing states.  

The president-elect fired back, via tweet, that Lewis ought to pipe down, that he’d be better off looking after his business in his “crime-infested” district. PEOTUS also canceled his Martin Luther King Day trip to the Smithsonian’s new  Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This was a neat bit of tweeting, for a man who reacts swiftly and strongly to any provocation.   A lesser man might have burst forth with a racially charged epithet.  The genius of this reality TV superstar is to make such things perfectly clear with printable phrases like “crime-infested.”  It conjures the hateful thing beautifully.  The crime one immediately imagines is far from the Goldman-Sachs boardroom where the most lucrative crime schemes are hatched.  One instead immediately pictures dark, angry faces, disgusted by the narrow electoral college victory of history’s most divisive and historically unpopular president-elect.

I saw a clip of John Lewis on TV the other day.  He was refuting the idea that there has been no progress for American blacks since Martin Luther King’s day.   I was glad to hear him making the point, I am glad to agree.   There has been progress.  On the other hand, for millions in generations of eternal poverty, I think of an image of Malcolm’s from Alex Haley’s autobiography. There is a knife plunged deep into your back.  The knife is pulled out a couple of inches, but is still deep in your back.  That is undeniably progress, even if not precisely the full measure of progress one might wish for.

I imagine heaven, a place where good people go after they die.  I picture Martin Luther King sitting with Gandhi and Malcolm X.   They talk about history and the long, slow bending of its moral arc toward justice.   They all agree that had they lived at another time in history they would have likely accomplished little, died unknown, instead of as international icons of hope and inspiration.  

They were each blessed to have lived at a moment in history when their voices could be heard, when they could move masses to work toward a better world.  Gandhi could not have used Ahimsa to launch a successful movement for independence except at that moment when the British Empire was collapsing.   Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were preaching and organizing at that particular moment in American history, when the country was ripe for overdue change after decades of hard sacrifice by the despised. They were good-looking, charismatic men alive during the earliest days when electrifying men could mesmerize masses of people in their homes, from a TV screen.  Had they lived at any other time they could not have been known so widely or been so influential before their early deaths.  

I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. is the angriest of the three of them up there in heaven.  He may be less angry than I am, true, less angry, perhaps, than those who must continue to protest a nationwide pattern of police killings of unarmed black youths, but I picture him angry up there.   He was pissed off in that I Have Been To The Mountaintop speech, as he had every right to be, having endured what he had.

This would have been the great man’s 88th birthday.  His father lived to be 84, so his son had a chance to live a long life.  He would have preferred a longer life, longevity has its place, as he said, but he was fearing no man the last night of his life.   Ponder that for a moment, along with the ongoing heartbreak of his sacrifice, before you head out to the mall for the Martin Luther King Day sales.

Living in A Culture of Powerlessness

“Well, you know, Elie, you’ve become aware that certain readers are struck with a kind a dread reading our political and historical discussions.   People can only take so much bad news, amid the constant barrage of reminders of their abject powerlessness.  Many progressive types want to believe in a people’s champion during hard times, not be confronted by the details of that champion’s betrayal in virtually every area.  

“If Obama didn’t deliver hope to most people, or change where it was most needed, it’s not his fault, they will insist.  He’s NICE!  He’s a thoughtful, compassionate, very decent guy!   He would have loved to have been a great and courageous president, but look at what he was up against.  He was a hostage to haters, underminers and obstructionists.  His only fault was being too decent, they will say.

“You’ve seen the man’s mean streak, the sharp bullwhip sense of humor, but for the most part, he yielded pliantly to the powers that put him into office, negotiated generous deals favorable to the people who hated him.  Whatever he lacked as people’s president, he’s a born campaigner who presented and sold himself brilliantly twice.   He is the canvas on to which millions could project their hopes for sorely overdue change.  The first gay president, somebody called him today, you know, because he, as they say, led passionately from behind– as one should in gay matters, one supposes– when it was clear there were votes and public sentiment to pass marriage equality.

“This thin-skinned, angry, sleeepless, vindictive, constantly wheedling, whining, hollow victory-obsessed fuck you got now?  You will soon look back with great affection on the president who handed him the drone kill list, and the precedent of killing Americans by drone, even Americans not charged with any crime.  This new winner’s top-secret cabal of deep swamp creatures will make Obama’s opaque administration seem transparent.   Obama’s services to the fossil fuel industry will seem modest by comparison and you will forget the fact that he released huge tracts of virgin Alaskan wilderness for oil exploitation and vastly increased off-shore drilling.  Rex Tillerson was not unhappy with Obama’s oil policy, Exxon had record profits under President Hope and Change.  Plus, Obama gave several truly inspirational speeches about the need for green, renewable energy.

“But I guess one point I wanted to make last time about a culture of powerlessness is that you don’t have to be upset about any of this, Elie.  You always have the option of just shutting the fuck up.  Look, if there’s nothing you can do about it– why torture yourself?  You didn’t make the world.”

No, clearly, I didn’t make the world.  And, of course, I do have the option to just shut the fuck up, and also, in my silence, tenderly bugger myself.  It’s a funny thing, I’ve been listening to old podcasts on the iPod I got Sekhnet. Mine died and she found the iPod she hadn’t used in years, but won’t let me update it until she downloads all the movies on it, which will be wiped out forever if I update it first.  

“Uh, OK,” said the skeleton.

All this to say, the podcasts on the iPod were all originally broadcast from 2010 to 2012.  A surprising number of people, on various shows, offer a very strong critique of Obama, even back then, and highlight the gulf between his rhetoric and his actual policies.  The miracle is how easily he won re-election and it highlights his gifts as a smooth self-promoter.

“Well, he’s always clearly been one of those guys with a keen eye for the main chance.  He was elected on the power of his oratory, his looks and his electric charisma.   A progressive doesn’t immediately put the foxes in charge of guarding the recently raided hen house.    His financial team were the same geniuses who oversaw the engineering and sale of toxic, economy crashing tranches of collateralized debt obligations.  

“The president spoke sternly of their terrible behavior, but insisted they were the only people who could fix the system they themselves had broken.   The record bonuses they paid themselves after the crash of 2008?  Just another sad detail to shake your head about, their bonus clauses were ironclad and it was pay them or pay them trebly if they had to take you to court, best to just get over it.  

“Unless you get ten million people on the street, day after day, your message ain’t getting out there.   Even if you have ten million on the street every day, the consolidated corporate media has to show it on TV.  On one Bill Moyers show they discussed the TransPacific Partnership, which is supposed to be a trade deal.  The T.P.P. excludes China, fair enough, but purports to deliver a host of benefits, including, but not limited to:  promoting economic growth; supporting the creation and retention of jobs; enhancing innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raising living standards; reducing poverty in the signatories’ countries; and promoting transparency, good governance, and enhanced labor and environmental protections.

“So let’s take one laudable goal, promoting transparency and good governance.   That must be why President Obama has taken such pains to make sure details of the pact are kept top secret.  Legislators are not allowed to see a copy of it except under controlled, supervised conditions.  They are sworn to secrecy about its provisions.  There will be no public debate, just an up and down vote, which is neatly named ‘fast track’.  

“Which makes sense, Elie, since the public might be annoyed at some provisions of the T.P.P., which have been worked out by the industries affected.  The world’s largest corporations will be able to rely on an international agreement that overrides domestic laws on the environment, workplace safety and investments, among other things.  The pharmaceutical companies worked out extended patent protections to minimize the predations of generic drugs on their profits.  Oil companies wrote the chapter on hydrofracking and other environmental regulations.   If it hadn’t been top secret, you might have tens of millions in the street with signs saying NO NEW NAFTA and GET YOUR MOTHERFUCKING HANDS OFF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION.

“C’est la guerre, Elie, and you know, you can’t spend time getting upset about every poor little Yemeni girl or Somali boy orphaned by a drone strike, or the death of first responders when a second missile kills those who rush in to rescue survivors of the first explosion, the ‘signature strike’. These policies are decided way above your pay grade. When Putin or someone evil does the same thing to innocent civilians, we can easily see these acts as war crimes. When a man as fundamentally decent as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama orders deadly missile strikes in eight countries, he is a man defending us from terrorists. Why be upset about any of this, Elie? People are murdered by states every day, have been as long as there have been states.”

I don’t think I need to point out how much easier it is for you to be so philosophical, being long dead, than it is for those of us who have to slog through this toxic world.

“Oh, poor baby!   You should get a few jobs and start earning the money to pay for that PPACA gold plan you’ve been eyeing, the one with the low deductible. You might actually get to see a doctor! Now go fuck off in peace, my son, I have a long nap to get back to.” The skeleton waved wanly with two fingers and flopped back into his dirt bed.

Echoes of Dred Scott

“No, Elie, don’t start this now.  You have to get home today, and soon, to finish logging in and enrolling for health insurance on that constantly crashing bummer of a New York State of Health website.  You have less than five working days left to do it, during the arbitrary and stressful Christmas to New Year’s window, and the phone lines and website are going to be overwhelmed.  If you don’t sign up with a new company and complete the paperwork now you’ll have no health insurance until March at the earliest,” said the skeleton.

Got you covered, man, going to get on it as soon as this is tapped out.  I’m not going to write a full account of this infamous Supreme Court decision, just pluck out a few great lines.  

“Don’t start with this today, Elie, I’m telling you.  You have to attend to your own health issues and make sure you have insurance and see the several doctors you need to see.  You have problems with two of the four chambers of your heart, you need to speak to a cardiologist.  You have to follow up on the state of your kidneys, which are spilling protein into your urine.  You haven’t seen a dermatologist in a few years, with denials from various insurance plans, after multiple skin cancer operations.  Don’t fuck around with this, Elie.  For one thing, you have a long way to go to make these 800 pages into a book.  Don’t fuck me, man,” said the skeleton.

Jesus, dad, I wouldn’t fuck you with Eli’s dick.  

“OK, clip out those sections from Dred Scott and get on your way,” said the skeleton.   

The Court signed off on Chief Justice Roger Taney’s long, impeccably reasoned decision 7-2.    

“Impeccably reasoned?” said the skeleton.  

Arthur Kinoy, my by then doddering professor emeritus in law school, cited it as an excellent example of legal legerdemain.  He challenged us to find a weak link in Taney’s argument.  Once you accept the premise of the Negro’s inferiority to the white man, he pointed out, the rest flows like a river.  I found that to be true at the time, even as my glance at it today made me wonder about some of it.    

“You know, Elie, I feel like the fish in the Cat in the Hat.  I have to raise my front fin in caution again, do not do this, do not get into this swamp.  I know you have a point you want to make, or have me make, or whatever your damned plan turns out to be, but I urge you, please, get in the shower, get dressed, get on your way.   After you’ve taken care of the fucking Obamacare stuff, return to this and finish it.  For the love of Christ, Elie…”

I hear you, man.  Just two things.  

“Oh, no!  Two?!” said the skeleton.  

The first is a very weak bit of legerdemain from fucking Roger Tawny.  

“Yeah, that’s how you say the fucker’s name, though it’s spelled Taney,” said the skeleton.

He cites, as proof that the Negro, inferior and enslaved, was never intended to be considered a human or citizen under the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, the vaunted language from the Declaration of Independence that has stirred so many hearts over the centuries.   Here he goes, the motherfucker:

The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive:

It begins by declaring that, ‘when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’

It then proceeds to say: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.‘

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

“Utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, oh, my!” said the skeleton.  

Taney continues:

Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements—high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.

This state of public opinion had undergone no change when the Constitution was adopted, as is equally evident from its provisions and language.

The brief preamble sets forth by whom it was formed, for what purposes, and for whose benefit and protection. It declares that it is formed by the people of the United States; that is to say, by those who were members of the different political communities in the several States; and its great object is declared to be to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. It speaks in general terms of the people of the United States, and of citizens of the several States, when it is providing for the exercise of the powers granted or the privileges secured to the citizen. It does not define what description of persons are intended to be included under these terms, or who shall be regarded as a citizen and one of the people. It uses them as terms so well understood, that no further description or definition was necessary.

But there are two clauses in the Constitution which point directly and specifically to the negro race as a separate class of persons, and show clearly that they were not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government then formed.

“Oh, God, these are great clauses, direct and specific, I’m so glad the Honorable Mr. Taney brings them up,” said the skeleton, cheerfully.  “I remember you telling me about these clauses when you stumbled on them in law school.  You seemed so shocked, it was hilarious.”

Taney continues:

One of these clauses reserves to each of the thirteen States the right to import slaves until the year 1808, if it thinks proper. And the importation which it thus sanctions was unquestionably of persons of the race of which we are speaking, as the traffic in slaves in the United States had always been confined to them. And by the other provision the States pledge themselves to each other to maintain the right of property of the master, by delivering up to him any slave who may have escaped from his service, and be found within their respective territories. By the first above-mentioned clause, therefore, the right to purchase and hold this property is directly sanctioned and authorized for twenty years by the people who framed the Constitution. And by the second, they pledge themselves to maintain and uphold the right of the master in the manner specified, as long as the Government they then formed should endure. And these two provisions show, conclusively, that neither the description of persons therein referred to, nor their descendants, were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution; for certainly these two clauses were not intended to confer on them or their posterity the blessings of liberty, or any of the personal rights so carefully provided for the citizen.

No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily; all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise. The number that had been emancipated at that time were but few in comparison with those held in slavery; and they were identified in the public mind with the race to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free. It is obvious that they were not even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union.

Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them.

“Well, dassum shit,” said the skeleton.  “I love that bit: high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting.  After all, Elie, the high and inviolable sense of honor and principle of wealthy and influential men who raped their slaves is beyond question.  Although, of course, it is impossible in that world of solemn legalities to call the rape of property ‘rape’, you understand, as rape only applies to a creature capable of giving consent.  By that logic, Mr. Jefferson’s liaisons with Ms. Hemmings were a discreet and purely personal matter, roughly the same as Mr. Jefferson having a favorite and well-loved sheep, or goat, the intimate parts of which he sought for tenderness and release.”  

Weren’t you telling me I have to get out of here?  

“Yes, yes, make your second point and get going.  And make it snappily– nobody wants to read all that Tawny bullshit.”  

Short and sweet, then, and containing one of the great lines ever written by a Supreme Court justice, a bit of inadvertent, unvarnished truth telling.  

Speaking of the time leading up to the formation of these United States (in five of which, one dissenting judge pointed out, blacks were allowed citizenship, including the right to vote), Taney writes:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.

“No one thought of doubting or disputing any of this, of course, except for the millions who did dispute it.  Or legislators of the five states that allowed blacks to vote when the Constitution was ratified,” muttered the skeleton.   “They can read a condensed version of the dissents here, where you just saw that startling fact.”

The beauty of it, and a hideous beauty it is, to be sure, is that Taney uses the ‘originalist’ argument here, speaking of all this shit as the well-understood intent of the men who framed our republic, and by that quaint device ratifying it for the future, even as he quietly acknowledges how much times and beliefs have changed since.  ‘All men created equal,’ written now, would surely have a different ring than in 1776, he admits.  But since in bygone times white men regarded Africans as plainly inferior, we must respect this tradition in the face of those today who insist it is not so.  He speaks of the past while setting it out, pious, infallible prick that he was, as immutable law for the future.  

“With the beautiful irony, of course, from a legal perspective, that he denied Dred Scott, still held as a slave, standing to even bring the case in federal court, which should have been the end of the matter.   If Dred Scott had no standing he should have dismissed the case.   Yet, instead of dismissing the it, he rambled on at great, tedious and labored length, to explain why a piece of property and member of an inferior race had no rights a white man was bound to respect,” said the skeleton.

Beautiful irony, pops, that lives on, undisturbed, to this very day when our great nation imprisons more people than China, a ruthless state with four times our population.  The U.S. prison population, naturally enough, disproportionately non-white, many with no rights the white person is bound to respect.  Now, if you will excuse me…