As baseball's greatest philosopher Yogi Berra might
have put it, "If ya fuhget about history, it comes back to bite ya in the ass."
Yes, my reworking of the shopworn saw about those who forget history being
doomed to repeat it, into Yogi's irresistible vulgate, certainly offers a fresh new
perspective. And with the same-old, same-old political muck we're mired in, new
ways of seeing are certainly what we urgently need.
Sometimes our own biases are what bar us from finding
the required fresh perspective. Or, to continue my mucky metaphor, the needed
Ram pickup and winch. See, in my last OEN article I came down pretty damn hard
on America's political rednecks. Now, in a 180-degree twist of perspective that
may well give your poor neck a Linda Blair Exorcist
moment, I'm going to ask you to put yourself in their clay- (or worse-)
encrusted shoes. Prepare, gentle progressive reader, to "set a spell" and
identify with rednecks.
Say what? Progressives identifying for one coon
hound's heartbeat with rednecks--what's this world coming to? More on that in
due time. But for now, just remember that in the late 1960s Bob Dylan's backup
boys The Band went solo and suddenly made redneck music all the rage. The
Bobster himself went Johnny Cash on us and did the album Nashville Skyline, and even Bob's Madonna and Muse,
ultra-flower-child-cum-peacenik-activist Joan Baez, covered The Band's "The
Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Granted, The Band did a better job, but even
four out of five of them were friggin' CANADIANS, mind you. So, if these hippie
icons were willing to pretend to be sympathetic to--or what's more, even considerably identify with--rednecks, I
don't see why a few harmless minutes of such identification here should traumatize you.
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (just LOVE
that creepy harmonica on The Band's version) makes a perfect segue here, for
it's precisely the sort of historical poor "redneck" wailing his woes in that
song with whom I'm asking you to identify. Exactly the sort whose homelands
were ravaged by Sherman's March, whose home states were subjugated by predatory
Northern carpetbaggers, and who later, regrettably and tragically, vengefully found
his natural home in the KKK.
Yeah, history "sure 'nuff ain't purty"; and neither,
therefore, is its repetition. So Lincoln, whom even many Southerners revered as
a noble and generous foe, was assassinated; his message of binding wounds was
disregarded as so much yada-yada; and with Honest Abe conveniently out of the
way, opportunistic Northern vultures got down to their proper business.
Now, a
question lost to history is how pampered suck-up black house slaves, those
opportunistic Uncle Toms, reacted to all this. Without knowing any relevant formal
history, my best-guess answer is, "opportunistically"--though if we take a long
historical perspective (and make certain metaphysical assumptions), I'd say one
got reincarnated as Barack Obama. But I have to imagine the Toms of the time
sampled the prevailing winds, scented what side their biscuits would be
buttered on, and offered their services accordingly. Doubtless, that was often
on the side of the carpetbaggers. In other words, they served White Power, but
not exactly the sort of White Power soon to be tragically advocated by the KKK.
In one of those sublime historic ironies that always
come back and bite human beings in the ass, America's first African American
president is a servile lackey of White Power--and again not of the sort
advocated by the KKK. No, Obama has pledged his soul to a new species of white
carpetbaggers as hell-bent on grinding poor blacks under their heel as they are
to subjugating the poor and lower-middle-class whites who form the supporter
base of the modern KKK. And if the KKK ever appears at all on the radar of that
arch neo-carpetbagger and Obama patroness Penny Pritzker, she must have a good
screaming laugh at their chants of "White Power." For Princess Penny knows
pretty damn well where White Power lies--and it sure as hell ain't with those
white racist "boys in the hood." From a different standpoint, those rival
carpetbaggers known as the Koch brothers must share the same loud, sick guffaw.
Of course, my astute readers may ask on what basis I
speak of "carpetbaggers." And of course I'll astutely answer. See, the common
thread is a civil war that left massive devastation in its wake and rendered
government an excellent tool of self-serving predation. In fact, liking to
cover my exposed editorial butt with the authority of people better known than
your humble scribe, I have an excellent book to recommend: The
Predator State, by second-generation famous economist James K. Galbraith.
See, Galbraith fils is one of those
economists (the only kind I respect, actually) who feel capitalist economies
depend crucially on effective government, and that due to a certain civil
war--let's call it for convenience the "class war''--the crucial role of
government has been more and more effectively eroded. Eroded, in fact, to the extent
that under the Bush, Jr. administration, government had become little more than
a tool for predation on its subject citizens. Strikingly like the deeply
resented carpetbagger governments of the postbellum South.
Sadly, despite the deliberately misleading,
extremely well-funded campaign invocations of that friend to all races (if only
they knew it!) MLK, carpetbagging under "Uncle Tom's White House" has remained
just as predatory. Though it is perhaps more dangerous, as it now has--to use Mumia
Abu-Jamal's term--"the black face of empire" to cover it.
So what lesson do we draw from all this? That under
today's carpetbagging, predatory U.S. federal and state governments, we not of
"the 1%" are all rednecks. Ich bin
ein Rednecker--and that applies to us poor, struggling slobs, whether we're
black, white, red, yellow, brown, or what have you. Probably the great
religious souls of this world are right in counseling us not to hate, but if
there is room for hate, we'd be far better doing it across CLASS and not racial
or ethnic lines. But if we do bar hate, there's still plenty of room for
outrage and peaceful revolt. Consider joining the one young political movement
hell-bent on pulling the carpet from under today's carpetbaggers of both major
parties: www.facebook.com/TrueBlueDemocratsAProgressiveRevolt .
