July 12, 2007 - Issue 237

Our nation’s experiment in democracy is in danger of being lost.  Bush is busier than ever.  Just recently, he commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He saved this perjurer from a 30-month sentence. Of course, he knew he would all along, and so Scooter’s presence before the Grand Jury was a merely a performance. How many blacks and Latino/as linger in prison for lesser crimes with longer sentences in the war on drugs? How many have been executed while innocent of any crime? How many innocent Muslims and Arabs have been detained and tortured in the war against terrorism?  Oh, those “enemy combatants” in the prisons here and in far places don’t have friends in high positions; they don’t have the “goods” to spill to the press or to publish in a book if their sentences are not commuted.

We have a government run for and by white, wealthy men with corporate interests in mind at all times, particularly at 2:30 a.m. or when Congress is in recess.  Someone, likely the Darth Vader himself, Dick Cheney, dressed in black, and carrying a glowing document, comes down the darken hall toward the Oval Office.  The door opens on its own as he approaches. The room is dark.  Deep in the darkness, sits a figure, elevated on what appears to be his throne.  In front of the figure, DV points to the bottom of the document, and the hand with the pen mechanical rises and signs yet another signing contract. 

He’s been king for sometime, but DV just announced he, too, is no longer a member of the executive branch of government. 

Well, yes it seems they have abdicated government for and by the people.  They have long since rejected the idea of democracy. 

We are people who have endured and survived the pageantry of chivalry and the absurd tragic/comedy of white sheets, confederate flags, and burning white crosses. This spoof of King George and Darth Vader is something worse because it presumes we, black Americans, are already dead, buried, finished as a people, floating, “if you will,” in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. That was no accident! And “recovery,” such as it is, slowly and forever coming for the 9th Ward, is no accident either. 

Should we wait another 564 days and 2:30 a.m. signing contract nights, 18 months, for King George and Darth Vader to leave the offices that they do not hold? Should we wait some more and see how it all plays out?

We have always known that business conducted at the White House has never been in our favor.  We have never been surprised by the way in which brute force and power corrupts; we have known plantations and slaveholders first hand.  We have only to recall the narratives of our ancestors who wrote of the veneer of victims’ innocence on the faces of presidents who were their masters.  Our presence afforded Washington and Jefferson insight to envision a worst case scenario of a president and a vice-president, one or both, running amok with executive privileges.  Jefferson observed and wrote about the negative influence of such power on the children of slaveholders and in the behavior of poor white tenant farmers to the black enslaved population.

We have known of a Lincoln reluctant to show compassion for enslaved blacks as he did for the white soldiers in the Union Army.  He instructed Grant to establish detention camps between the North and the South where thousands of us died from starvation and disease. We have known indifference to the rise of lynching from the presidency of Garfield to McKinley. We have known unfairness and exploitation.  Our own efforts to appeal to the humanity a Roosevelt and a Kennedy moved us forward until a Nixon and a Reagan came along.  Some of us might have thought Clinton was black until he signed the Welfare Reform Act.  The “incarceration President,” as he is known to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, has opened the federal and state prisons to more black Americans than ever. With Bush—we knew there would be no mystery in his presidency for us! Few other citizens could understand the depth of our despair on those election nights in 2000 and 2004. They waved Colin Powell and Condi Rice placards before our eyes, and our ancestors withered. 

The Democrats have been dependent on our vote since the 1960’s, but the candidates, particularly Obama, have been quiet about caging and rigged voter election machines.  Busy in his race alongside Clinton who lugs behind her monies from the DLC, they appear two peas in a pod running down the big money.  And big money to win a presidency is not in the 9th Ward unless it’s the money contracted from the government to Halliburton or Blackwater.  Edwards may think about the poor and the increasingly disenfranchised low-wage and migrant workers, and Kucinich may favor a single health care plan. But is it conceivable that either of these candidates can overcome the financial stash of Clinton and Obama.  It is all about the money—and oil—and empire—with as little refuse, read: poor and uninsured and ethnic and religious difference to drag along.  The secrecy Darth Vader wishes to evoke surrounding his Office and Constitutional privileges extends the repressive state of fear to all other citizens who, until these last few years, have not experienced tyranny in this country.  

There’s no sharing of the American pie with the peasantry—without a great cost to be paid! This is the secret some citizens are waking up to, but some of us knew all along.  We have not forgotten.

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner suggests that it wasn’t Thomas Sutpen’s mansion (plantation) with its French chandeliers and Haitian blacks enslaved that upset the citizens of Jefferson, Mississippi.  It was that Sutpen had amassed a fortune during his time in Haiti working on a sugar plantation.  He returns to the U.S. but not to the Tidewater swamps of his origins in Virginia but to Mississippi where he establishes a mansion that makes the others in Jefferson pale in comparison.  His “possessions” taunted the other slaveholders. His swaggering presence sends them reeling in rage.  He had too much! All of a sudden, someone in the land of greed and capitalist might, someone had too much! And he was not one of them!

We seem to be living in a country designed by the likes of these old planters by run by descendants of Thomas Sutpen.  Swaggering about the White House for about the last thirty years, they now represent both camps, Republicans and Democrats, with their lobbyists and special interests groups, and high-powered legal guardians. They are not after French chandeliers or enslaved labor but have anointed swaggerers like themselves to the Supreme Court, to the IMF, and to the UN.  Swaggerers all and all confident in their plans to domesticate Federalism while exporting the idea of the Kingdom of the United States around the world. 

These are greedy white men with eyes that view the world as workshop to be designed to their liking, to accommodate their interests.  Devoid of compassion or morals, only those who swear an oath of loyalty may receive the benefits of an affiliate: Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Roberto Gonzales, John Yoo and others. To what end are they leading this country? What example of leadership do they offer our children now and generations to come? 

We have always proceeded despite the so-called leadership of this country.  But we, as black Americans need to be citizens again.  I don’t mean by flying flags or singing the Star Spangle Banner.  We must come to recognize in the descendents of Thomas Sutpen the ancestors and values we are negating.  We must further recall that the blueprint for existing in this country—to conquer or be conquered—is not sustainable for us or other peoples in the world. It is not sustainable for the Earth itself!  We have been lost in this narrow way of thinking. What good can ultimately come of following the ghosts of masters into oblivion?

“How is this to end?” Lord Wessex asks Queen Elizabeth at the end of Shakespeare in Love.  This is not the play he is referring to, but the real live reality surrounding Shakespeare’s play.  How will a series of disconcerting events end?

I think it is time black America remember our roots, for the moment has come again to say we are citizens not because we shop or can shop for shoes with Rice at the Ferragamo.  But we must call for and participate in the impeachment of King George and Darth Vader.  Our various grassroots efforts across this nation necessitates that we engage in a massive effort to remove this president and his vice president before more damage is done. There has been plenty.  There are unnecessary deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan everyday—deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi and Afghani citizens.  The response to 911 and the response to Katrina should have been enough! The removal of Habeas Corpus is enough! The building of detention camps, secret and revealed, is enough! The building of the world’s largest embassy in Iraq and the escalating incarceration of blacks and Latino/as in this country is enough! Billions of dollars to multinational contracting corporations and no money for health care and education is enough!  Unwarranted wiretapping is enough! The Downing Street Memo is enough! The Supreme Court’s rulings to initiate what they hope will be the end of Brown vs. Board of Education is enough! Bush’s forewarning of his desire to be a dictator is enough! DV’s declaration that he is a branch of government all to himself is enough! Freeing Scooter Libby is enough!

We have seen and heard enough!

Now, we must act to impeach.  We can’t wait for Obama or Clinton or Edwards.  Let’s not just demand an impeachment process, but we should stand with House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. and lead the way.  (Speaker Pelosi has her corporate interests, too!)

With tears, we begin this journey, as the core progressives of this country, whose history is that of opposition to any social order that would deny us the right to pursue freedom, democracy, justice, and peace, or it may be our last chance for a hopeful ending.  What if we gain the world, but lose our souls?  It is no mystery how we came to being lost.  Let’s shed our tears and then journey toward a new beginning for the social good of all!    

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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