MONUMENTS, DIXIE AND MONUMENTS IN DIXIE

I wish I was in the Land of Cotton.

Old times there are not forgotten.

Or in Mississippian William Faulkner's apt phrase referring to his home region, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

For a couple of years now we have been distracted and agonizing over monuments, songs, buildings, books and other supposed desiderata that have compromised or downright unpleasant connotations. For the moment I'm going to limit myself to the discussions around race, racism and the fetishizing of the Confederacy. So let's get one thing out of the way immediately. 

The American Civil War was not a "War of Northern Aggression". The first shots fired in that war rained down on a Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of the secessionist city of Charleston, South Carolina. Major Anderson did not fire on Charleston first. He was fired upon. Nor was the Civil War a "War for States Rights". The states kept their Constitutionally guaranteed rights but they had to acknowledge that they were parts of one nation and subject to the laws thereof. The whole point of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the ratification of our Constitution was to knit together what had been thirteen fiefdoms at war with one another and often with themselves. Our Civil War settled the fact that we are one nation in which states have rights but not rights that supersede those of the Federal Government.

The American Civil War was fought over slavery and the preservation of the plantation system that could not exist without slave labor. Every one of the secession documents and secession constitutions of the Confederate States make it absolutely clear that slavery was the issue behind secession and all that followed so let's be clear about that from the start.

Here we are more than one hundred and fifty years later and the freedom that a northern victory conferred on former slaves has never been fully realized. Too often we see minorities, black, brown, Native American and others cheated, denigrated and abandoned not to mention the every lengthening list of murder victims: Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille and on and on stretching both to past and future. We have forced African-American and other racial and ethnic groups into ghettos. Because Irish, Italians, Polish, Germans and Jews among other Europeans are considered "white" they assimilated quickly and within a century became part of the American majority. Perhaps the greatest assimilation factor was World War II during which members of many ethnic groups found themselves in the same foxholes trying to stay alive while fighting a common enemy both in the actual battlefield and in the movies shown at home.

African-Americans, unlike their pale, European cousins have always had their skin color to identify and exclude them. Too often they have been seen as Africans while their white sisters and brothers excise the "American" part of their group identity.

The past truly isn't even past. Lynchings now seldom involve a rope, at least outside of a jail cell. Today they involve a choke hold or an all too eager policeman's bullet. Yet it is those very bullets and the videos that allow bystanders to document the abuses of police and other citizens that have made the racism and discrimination obvious to those previously inclined to dismiss such claims. Thus having brought the Jim Crow past manifestly forward into the present we are also sensitive to the symbols of that horrible past that persist into our slightly less horrible present.

Much has been made of David Wark Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the inspiration for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th Century. That's a facile and largely wrong identification. The U. S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. For that decision to reach the Supreme Court there had to be segregation long before Homer Plessy was refused a seat in a rail car. If we are looking for a beginning to the Ku Klux Klan we have to look into the hearts of men who can observe another human being and find a difference that makes the observer superior to the person observed. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept freedom and equality for all human beings. We have to look at white women who valiantly fought for their right to vote but would not consider that their African-American sisters should have that right too. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept that the world that they knew and profited from was, to coin a phrase, "gone with the wind" and never would come back. We definitely have to look at "The Corrupt Bargain of 1877" that traded Reconstruction and Federal troops occupying the former Confederate states for the presidency of minority Republican Rutherford B. Hayes rather than the majority vote's choice of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Griffith's film and Woodrow Wilson's personal racism sure had an effect but the Klan hordes who came out from under their several rocks through the 1920s weren't new. They were just revealed. The Klan and other racist groups and individuals (e.g. the German-American Bund, America First, Westbrook van Voorhis or the popular Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin) were always lurking in the penumbra at the edges of our vision. They just came out into the centre of focus for a time. I am not defending Birth of a Nation. The script is an appalling racist screed and needs to be acknowledged as such. It is also, however, a work of art. The narrative may be vile but the skill and perception that went into making it is worth seeing. That is the dichotomy that I wish to discuss very shortly.

Much like Birth of a Nation is only one expression of the racism infecting our society, the statues now coming down or, more often, staying up long after their meaning gone from bad to worse have a complicated and fraught meaning. Many who want statues honoring soldier and figures of the Confederacy removed cite the fact that most were erected between the 1890s and 1920s, long after the Civil War was over and the battlefield dead turned to dust. That late advent is indisputable fact but I would suggest that we also consider that time in a slightly different light. The 1890s into the 1920s saw the passing of the great majority of the survivors of that war. The old veteran who might be seen at some local popular spot ready to tell stories of his youth in battle was no more. That his friends and neighbors and, yes, often fellow Klan members, might subscribe to erect a statue to their local veteran and all such veterans is no more perverse than the monuments to those who served in World War II, Korea or Vietnam that now stand on the National Mall. What is perverse is the cause for which that veteran fought.

When I was a boy and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War I found much that was admirable in Robert W. Lee, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, Joseph Johnson, Philip Kearney, Ulysses Grant and, perhaps the noblest next to Lincoln, William T. Sherman. As a Union man and admirer of Lincoln I could still feel the pain of Confederate General John Bell Hood after losing the Battle of Nashville and seeing his army destroyed. Hood had lost both an arm and a leg in the war. He had to be helped about the camp and strapped onto his horse. I have no sympathy for his cause but I do not have so stony a heart as to remain unmoved by this man, wracked with sobs, alone in his tent after the battle knowing that he had lost all of the Confederacy west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. Hood is as tragic a figure as King Lear and deserves a tear no less than Shakespeare's supremely tragic king despite his fight for wrong to his fellow men. He is not less worthy of remembrance than martyrs for the rights of all human beings like Medgar Evers or Fred Hampton. I am not about to set up a statue to John Bell Hood who is already remembered in Fort Hood, Texas nor will I oppose the removal of a single statue to him. His story, like those of the much more admirable Evers and Hampton, is worth remembering still.

The great problem for the Confederate symbols and statues and even the song, Dixie, is that they have been adopted by the worst of us, the new Klan, the casual racists and the neo-Nazi alt-Right, the white supremacists who, with every word and act, prove to the world and especially to this old white man that there's precious little that's supreme about being white.

The statues in question are tainted at the root from racism and they are further tainted by the inhuman and sub-human scum who cleave to them in support of their odious beliefs. Yet I can foresee a day, a day that the greatest hero of my lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also foresaw. That day is one when the past is at long last past. When we have acknowledged that humanity, equality and decency are the birthright of every human being and we can go to museums and parks and public buildings and view statues and monuments to men and women who attempted what they believed were great things but in service of an odious wrong.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemmings. Those actions are a great wrong yet Jefferson could also write that "all me are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." There is considerable irony in his authorship of those words but those words form the bedrock of all fights to realize every American's inalienable civil rights. We cannot pull down that larger than life statue of Jefferson in his Washington, D. C. Memorial without pulling down those words as well.

For our time and for a very long time we need to put away the Confederate battle flag, the statues and Dixie. Put them by, let them gather dust and be forgotten. Let the past finally be past. One day, however, let them be seen and heard again. Let the dust be removed when the white, black, brown or other child viewing those old symbols can look up at his or her grandfather who's just explained their meaning and say, "But, Grandpa, that was all wrong. Awfully wrong!" Then Grandpa can answer, "What a good, smart child you are! You make me so proud." Perhaps on that future day, should there be a band standing by, someone can quote the always generous Abraham Lincoln after receiving the news of Lee's surrender at Appomattox the day before, "I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard....I now request the band to favor me with its performance."

For the sake of our times and for all future times, let the old times there be forgotten so that we can one day remember them as part of history and not as part of current injustice.

A DECENT MAN

I have just heard the news that many have been expecting for months let alone the last few days, that Senator John McCain has died at age 81.

I am not a Republiscum nor am I a conservative. I am not of the alt-right neo-Fascist bent that now overwhelms the "Party of Lincoln". I'm not even a nice person much of the time. I have long paraphrased General Phillip Sheridan's horrible dictum about Native Americans by asserting that the only good Republican is a dead Republican. There are, after all, a lot of good, dead Republicans: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, Elliott Richardson and now John McCain. Even as I was being horrid in saying and writing that, I knew that William Ruckelshaus and Pete McCloskey are still with us, good men both. I also could be pressed to say that there may well be good Republicans hidden amongst the neo-Fascists here and there in Red States, even in Texas. It is the shame of our nation that few if any of them have made it to public office. Tonight, however, I want to mourn a bit for a decent man who was also a Republican and a good Republican even in life, John McCain.

For most people John McCain's heroism centres around his captivity in a North Vietnamese prison fifty years ago. What makes McCain a hero to me is his deciding vote to save the Affordable Health Care Act. In that moment McCain rose above party, ideology and those who buy and sell politicians like they were pot roasts. With his thumbs down gesture he did his best to be a senator for all Americans, to save health care for millions of our people.

I don't believe in gods or devils. I don't believe in heaven or hell or a purgatory between. Having been brought up in a Methodist Church, I believe that the injunctions to care for one another, even the least of my brothers and sisters, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of Matthew represent the best way to live. But this night this old atheist, in reference to Senator McCain, finds himself recalling the story of the old woman and the onion in The Brothers Karamazov.

In that story a poor woman, starving, hollow-eyed comes upon the gate before the garden of a mean, pusillanimous old woman who's never been known to have a kind word for or show generosity to anyone. The poor beggar woman asks for food from the old householder who uncharacteristically relents and gives the beggar a small, shriveled, partly rotten onion. At length both the mean old woman and the blameless, poor beggar die. When the beggar woman arrives in heaven she stands before god and looks around for the old woman who gave her the onion that prolonged her life a little. God tells the beggar that the old woman is suffering in hell's lake of fire. The beggar pleads that the good act of giving her the onion should redeem the old woman. After considering this a moment god produces the very onion the beggar received long before. God then instructs the beggar woman to journey down to hell and drag the old woman up to heaven using the onion, the material symbol of that one good act. When the beggar woman reaches the shores of the lake in which all the damned are burning she holds out the onion to the old woman who grasps it. The beggar woman then begins her journey back to heaven drawing after her the old woman. When the rest of the damned see this they grab onto the old woman and to each other. Ultimately the beggar woman and her onion are dragging out of hell every damned soul ever condemned. Salvation looms for all sinners but at the last minute the old woman yells, "Get of! It's my onion!" In that instant the onion breaks apart and all the damned, including the old woman, fall back into their lake of fire.

I'm not sure who John McCain represents in that story. Perhaps he's both the beggar and the old woman but if this I am certain, that John McCain, at the critical moment for the American people, understood that it was not just his onion but that it belonged to us all. He thereby brought many of us a kind of salvation. John McCain was a decent man, a good man who has joined those many dead, good Republicans leaving us all the poorer for his passing and worse for those of his party that remain behind.

ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS

I, Oliver Laurence North, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

That is  the oath that Oliver North swore both verbally and in writing when he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland and, indeed except for a change of name, the oath which every Federal employee swears upon joining Federal service. Please note that those swearing this oath are swearing their allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. No one swears allegiance to a president, a flag, a senator, congressperson, or even Congress. Much less is there any reference to any religion or philosophy or political party. It is the Constitution of the United States to which we swear our allegiance, pledges to the flag not withstanding.

Yes, Oliver North swore that oath and then violated it. It is why Oliver Laurence North, the new president of the National Rifle Association is a traitor and a criminal, the very outlaw that the NRA for decades claimed to oppose having guns. By electing Oliver North to the presidency of the NRA that organization has finally acknowledged that their current management has no regard for the Constitution of the United States, the laws and traditions of the nation or anything but gun manufacturers' profits and neo-Fascist politics.

Let's look back at North's career to understand why he is a criminal and a traitor.

Before he left the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland North had already killed a fellow classmate in an auto accident. North served as a Second Lieutenant during the Vietnam War and received a number of decorations. He also appeared at the trial of Lance Corporal Randall Herrod four other soldiers accused in the murder of sixteen Vietnamese civilians in the village of San Thang. Thanks in part to North's efforts Herrod and one of the other private soldiers were acquitted of murder though three of the four under Herrod's command on that day were convicted.

Once his tour in Vietnam was over North became an instructor at the Marine training facility at Quantico, Virginia. With its proximity to Washington, D. C. and frequent visits by major political figures as well as his contacts with fellow Annapolis classmates and rabid anti-communism, North parlayed his career as an instructor into an appointment to the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan.

It was at the NSC that North received his appointment as Lieutenant Colonel and reached the infamous height of his career. Under National Security Advisors Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter and with the cooperation of CIA Director William Casey, North managed the secret and unlawful sale of arms to the Iranian government and appropriation of the cash proceeds to finance that vicious Contras of Nicaragua and the spill over of that conflict into El Salvador. North was famously a friend of Panamanian Dictator and drug smuggler, Manuel Noriega, who spent most of the time from his capture in 1991 until his death in 2017 in U. S., French and Panamanian jails for a variety of crimes including drug smuggling, fraud and various human rights violations including murder.

North escaped prison for his treason, obstruction of justice and documented lying to Congress through the aid of his many ultra-right wing and neo-Fascist pals as well as the good offices of the American Civil Liberties Union. He's gone on to attempt a political career and then settled down to live off the largess of Rupert Murdock and those other alt-right pals alluded to above. And now he's the president of the NRA. Is there any wonder that the NRA is now tainted by Russian Spy Maria Butina and questionable money flowing into the NRA's coffers and thence out to the political campaigns of a lot of neo-Fascist candidates including one Donald J. Trump? It seems that once a traitor, always a traitor. Once a funneler of dark money, always a crook. The fact that the outlaw North is the figurehead for the organization making sure that outlaws have guns is just too ironic and delicious to let pass without comment.

This fanatic ideologue, North, who betrayed his oath of office, betrayed the Constitution and his nation has no criminal conviction on his record yet the absence of a conviction does not expunge the crimes against the United States that he committed. Thousands of people nationwide now have the voting rights withheld because they were convicted of felonies of infinitely less consequence than the treasonous acts of Oliver North but North, having escaped prison on a technicality is a darling of the neo-Fascist right and is now the president of the National Rifle Association. It seems perfectly consonant with the election of North, no fan of American democracy, that the NRA is now being investigated for ties to the Russian government and its attempts to undermine American democracy.

I am not opposed to firearms ownership. I was once a member of the National Rifle Association. I joined in the early 1970s. I was a gun owner with a small collection of replica black powder and more modern cartridge weapons.In 1977 when the neo-fascist lunatics led by Wayne LaPierre among others took over the NRA I dropped my membership rather than be associated with their misinterpretation of the Second Amendment and ultra-right wing politics. The idea that even my small annual dues might finance a legislative program and a political philosophy that was anathema to me was something I could not brook.

Let me be clear here. I believe that there is a right to keep and bear arms...for self-protection, for hunting, target shooting, trap (clay target) shooting and similar sports. I believe that the National Guard and similar official units such as police forces have a right to keep and bear military style weapons but I think that the weapons available for personal protection and those used by sport shooter and those used by the military and police are and should be different. The former group has no need of weapons similar to the AR-15 or AK-47 designed for military use and that, in fact, those weapons are completely unsuitable for home defense or hunting. The NRA, on the other hand, shilling for the gun manufacturing industry, promotes such weapons despite their unsuitability.

Let's consider that issue of suitability for home defense and hunting for a moment. Following the murder  of twenty-seven very young children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012 Vice-President Joe Biden was roundly derided for suggesting that a shotgun was a preferable weapon for home defense to any assault rifle. No one managed to point out that pre-1977 articles in the NRA's magazine, The American Rifleman, and other gun sports magazines had promoted shotguns as the optimal home defense weapon. I have written in detail about this in a now lost post so let me briefly explain the logic here again.

We have all heard of children and adults wounded or killed inside a home during a drive-by shooting whose target was someone out on a sidewalk in front of the home. People inside a house get killed or wounded as collateral damage because the high energy bullets from an assault rifle or high-powered handgun penetrate the siding, insulation and interior wallboard of the house with enough energy to kill or wound. Most shotgun pellets, on the other hand, have significantly lower energy and are more easily stopped or slowed to less lethal force by intervening obstacles. So let's consider a home owner roused in the night by the noise of an invader in his or her home. The homeowner wakes, bleary, uncertain of time or what's going on. This homeowner may have to find glasses, decide whether or not to turn on a light (don't) and then retrieve a weapon. In the dim light and uncertain situation the homeowner is as likely to shoot a child up for a drink of water as a violent intruder. Still, we will suppose that the children are still in bed across the hall.

So the homeowner is awakened by an intruder in the house. He hears through his sleep some odd sound and is suddenly awake. First let's consider "suddenly awake". I have been awakened by odd noises in the night. I have to fumble for my glasses, put them on and blink a few times or wipe my eyes to get anything like clear vision. I have to get out of bed. If there's an intruder on the stairs or in the hall I need to be as quiet as possible. I don't want to turn on a light because my eyes, adjusted now to the darkness, are going to be momentarily blinded by any light source, a light source that could signal the intruder to either flee or take some violent action. I will not know which until one or the other actually happens so keeping the light off gives me something of an advantage.

If I have a handgun or an assault rifle, I need to be sure of my target but can I be in the darkness and confusion of my sudden waking? Have I managed to get my glasses on or my vision cleared when a figure looms in the bedroom doorway? If I aim and miss the high energy bullet from my handgun or rifle is going to travel until it hits something substantial enough to stop it's flight. In most homes built since the 1950s the walls are going to be wood or metal framing covered with sheet rock and filled with insulation of one sort or another. Unless the bullet hits a wood or metal frame member, it is unlikely to lose enough energy to stop or even be significantly slowed. You have a significant chance of killing the child or other relative sleeping in the room across the hall with your miss with that single bullet. In a worst case scenario your stray bullet might even manage to kill or wound a neighbor in the next house.

Now you may say, "I'm an excellent shot. I keep my cool in stressful situations. I'll get the bad guy." I'm sure that you think so but we are not in an ideal situation and, given all the deficits in the scenario, all your preparation and composure may be insufficient. So let's consider an alternative.

Let's say that you have a shotgun and let's suppose that you have loaded it using some foresight. The first shell to fire is full of number 6 bird shot and the second shell contains 00 Buckshot. You see the intruder and fire the first barrel or shell and the 394 .106 diameter #6 pellets from your 1¼ ounce load in your 3 inch shot shell. Those pellets spread out rapidly forming a wide wall many of which will hit your intruder unless your estimate of your aiming skills are exceptionally overrated. Your chance of 1 of 394 pellets hitting your target is greatly increased as is the likelihood of many pellets hitting the intruder. Unless this person is seriously trying to kill you or insane, the intruder is likely to think better of this intrusion and get the hell out of your home at this point. However, if he doesn't leave you have a second shell loaded with 10 .33 diameter 00 (pronounced Double Ought) Buckshot pellets, a blast that is likely to rip your intruder apart.

But aren't a lot of those many pellets going to miss and go flying across the hall? Many of them will miss, especially the #6 pellets but the energy of those pellets is low enough that they are likely to be stopped by 2 or 3 layers of sheet rock plus insulation. Your family members or guests in your home are far less likely to be killed or injured by lower energy shotgun pellets than by high energy bullets from rifles or handguns. Even the much higher energy buckshot is likely to be stopped or rendered relatively harmless by all the intervening materials through which the pellets would pass before reaching someone in another room.

So why does the NRA promote assault rifles for home defense if they are not ideal and liable to kill or injure unintended targets? Because the NRA was taken over in 1977 by a group financed by ultra-right wing gun manufacturers who were primarily interested in promoting their weapons. In 1977 the Vietnam War was lost. The demand for assault rifles was very low but manufacturers had lots of factory space committed to making parts for and assembling such rifles. Convincing the gun owning population that these were appropriate weapons for hunting and home defense meant that the assembly lines for AR-15s and the like could remain active. Editing out the reference to a "well-regulated militia" in the Second Amendment was also key to this nefarious plan. These fanatics knew that no one in the general population would bother to read the documents from the 1790s relative to the adoption to that amendment.

Corporations have the best lawyers that money can buy. Gun Manufacturing corporations like, Colt, Ruger, Remington and Winchester amongst others have the best and most craven lawyers that money can buy.  Of course those corporations don't have to buy the worst and most craven lawyers directly. They can funnel money through the NRA, Gun Owners of America, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Association for Gun Rights. They can even buy members of The Federalist Society and Judges like the late, but not late enough, In-Justice Antonin Scalia and current Supreme Court In-Justices like Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.These bought and paid for shills for the firearms industry have managed to twist an amendment created in 1790 to protect the rights of states to maintain militias as a counter to excesses by a Federal standing army into an individual right to keep and bear arms which was never intended when the Bill of Rights was drafted.

For decades the NRA has promoted the bumper sticker slogan, "If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." Perhaps we now need a new bumper sticker. It should have a photo of North and the NRA seal with the slogan, "Guns aren't outlawed and now an outlaw has the NRA." Maybe throw in an image of Vladimir Putin applauding North too.