I Likes It When You Call Me Cool Papa (Part IV)

"To put it drastically, if war, as (Prussian political theorist Karl von) Clausewitz insisted, is the continuation of politics by other means, it requires little imagination to see American Life since the abandonment of the Reconstruction as an abrupt reversal of that formula: the continuation of the Civil War by means other than arms. In this sense the conflict has not gone unresolved but the line between civil war and civil peace has become so blurred as to require of the sensitive man a questioning attitude toward every aspect of the nation's self-image." -- Ralph Ellison, Introduction to 1960 reissue of Stephen Crane's, "The Red Badge of Courage"


You can bet Muhammed the Elder knows history. And like his griot predecessors, he conveyed it to Malvo the Younger, who frequently corrected his teachers at Bellingham High. M & M are no doubt familiar with Crispus Attucks, another Invisible Man whose bodacious acts foisted his name into the country's consciousness. They surely know you can't keep a bruhtha down.

Attucks -- the first American to fall in the Revolutionary War -- was initially whited-out from the "official" history. This sanitation is much like how George Dubya's misstatements are routinely airbrushed from White House transcripts. It was only after Abolitionists began demanding freedom for AfroAmerican slaves that Attucks was included in depictions of the Boston Massacre.

Sired by an African and a Natick Indian, Attucks grew up as chattel. When he audaciously expressed a taste for freedom, he was sold. His next owner proved little more tolerant. Yet he somehow let Attucks, a first-generation slave, go along on a business trip to Boston, where the 27-year-old slipped onto a whaling ship.

Attucks returned to Boston nineteen years later. At the time, King George III was busy showing the colonists who their daddy was. He didn't mind using soldiers to make his point. Somehow, those freedom-lovers didn't appreciate the lengths to which Boy George was willing to go.

After returning from sea in February 1770, Attucks walked into a ruckus. Enraged by taunts from townspeople, a Redcoat fired on a young boy. The outraged Attucks mounted a platform and fired up the crowd to "Get up, stand up, stand up for yer rights."

A month later, the townspeople, hearing fire bells, filed outside to see Attucks leading a small group up the street. He encouraged all within earshot to gather at the town square for a confrontation with the British. Eventually, he rounded up enough men for some fisticuffs. The Brits, those famous proponents of fair play, gunned him down with four others.

As always in America, this AfroAmerican man became a cultural Rorschach Test. Attucks' courage in the face of dehumanizing bigotry became one of the colonists' greatest inspirations. Then, he was cast aside like a couple of other brothers.

Prince Whipple appears in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. His presence may not count for much, though. James Monroe, the fifth President, also appears, despite being nowhere near the chilly river on Christmas Eve 1776.

At ten-years-old, Whipple's "comparatively wealthy (African) parents" sent him and a cousin to America to be educated. Upon their arrival in Baltimore, they were sold into slavery and purchased by William Whipple of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During the Revolution, Whipple served as an aide to Washington, rising to the rank of general. Meanwhile, the Prince served at his master's side and "was emancipated during the war."

James Roberts wasn't so lucky.

He served his master, Colonel Francis De Shields, throughout the Revolutionary War. After the colonel's death, Roberts carted De Shield's belongings from Philadelphia to Maryland. When he reached the homestead, he was summarily separated from his wife and children, stripped of his uniform, and sold to a Louisiana planter for fieldwork.

Ashcroft appreciates history, too, although he's partial to a dash of revisionism.

No better expression can be found than his 1998 interview in Southern Partisan Magazine. Published in Columbia, SC, the magazine promotes an unblemished view of Confederate Life, regularly running defenses of slaveholding practices and avowed racists like David Duke. Other esteemed senators who've graced its pages include Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Phil Graham (R-TX).

Ashcroft said, "Your magazine helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like (Gen. Robert E.) Lee, (Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall") Jackson and (Confederate President Jefferson) Davis."

"We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect," he said. "Or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. A man willing to stand up for what he believes. Someone willing to battle the wicked armies of tolerance and liberalism. Someone who knows what America is about. Someone willing to stand up and say, consequences be damned.

Just kidding.

When questioned about the interview during his confirmation hearing, Ashcroft claimed ignorance. "I can't say that I knew very much at all about the magazine. I don't know if I've ever read the magazine or seen it." He said he'd been told "that they were involved in a group that opposed revisionism. It was presented to me as a history journal, and on that basis I made the remarks."

Disclaimers aside, Ashcroft's kow-towing garnered mucho brownie points from white supremacists. After the interview, the newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (the suit-and-tie wearing wing of the Ku Klux Klan, whose ghostly garb recalled Confederate dead returned from the battlefields ) urged readers to support a petition saluting Ashcroft "for your courageous comments concerning Southern heritage."

A little more than a year ago, council founder Gordon Baum issued a plea for an "American Renaissance conference of people who believe in white superiority to become more politically active," the News stated. Baum said he created the council to address racial issues, telling them, "If politicians think we'll help or hurt them more than the liberal media, they'll pander to us."

I'm all for pandering. In fact, the more pandering the better.

Let's start with those devotees of "tradition" and "family values," the reactionary (defined as "one who seeks to undo political progress or revolution") descendants of Mosby and Barnes and Davis and Lee. We can sit down at a Texas-sized ash table plopped in the middle of a great hall where brown-skinned men with downcast eyes wait on us hand and foot, making ever so sure not to soil their starched while jackets and cotton gloves with the blood of peacenik rabble-rousers and pussy communists.

Being well-trained (with scarred backs as proof positive), these "uncles" (calling them "fathers and sons" would be too much an acknowledgment of manhood) won't be so rude as to mention how many generations their families have scrabbled in American soil. They won't pull out their wallets and shove before our faces pictures of their children, aborted Reconstruction and swollen-bellied Civil Rights. Nor will they impose and bore with woeful tales of pockmarked Jim Crow and dim-witted Dixiecrat.

Instead, they'll serve up what George Dubya kilt this mornin':

A big ol' helpin' of truncated civil liberties bleedin' at the stumps (readin' USA Patriot Act on the menu), laid next to a mess of disinformation (a.k.a., the War Against Terrorism) and a helpin' of emancipated regulation (another way of saying, "Free Markets"). And if we're real good, we'll suck on the irradiated bones of starving Afgans and Iraqis for dessert, or use them for toothpicks, at least.

When we're full (but still unsated), we'll retire to the porch for a tumbler of sippin' whiskey, a cigar and a little entertainment. After Ashcroft and Lott and the other Singing Senators regale us with "Amazing Grace" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy," the DOJ Boys will fire up the cotton gin and start choppin' the heads off those black sumbitches M & M.

Meanwhile, we'll backslap O.T. Fears, the "tragic" yet celebrated bass fisherman from Sallisaw, Ok., whose 18-year-old son, Daniel, went on a shotgun shooting spree that left two people dead and eight wounded during the same period the dynamic duo did their evil, if alleged, deeds.

Ashcroft: What were you thinkin', son?
Muhammed the Elder: I'm not sure.
Ashcroft: What do you mean, you're not sure?
Muhammed the Elder: I don't know. I was just so...angry.
Ashcroft: Anger is good. Anger is strong. Strong like America. But you've got to control it, make it work for you. Didn't we talk about that?
Muhammed the Elder: Yeah.
Ashcroft: Excuse me?
Muhammed the Elder: Yes, sir.
Ashcroft: Well, you know I have to punish you, don't you?
Muhammed the Elder: Yes, sir.
Ashcroft (opens desk drawer and withdraws a bullwhip): Before we start, is there anything you'd like to tell me?
Muhammed the Elder: It was my idea, sir. Please spare the youngster.
Ashcroft: You know I can't do that.
Muhammed the Elder: Please, sir.
Ashcroft: Sorry. No can do.
Malvo the Younger: I can take it, sir. Gimme your best shot.
Ashcroft: I like your spunk, son.
Muhammed and Malvo (together): Spank me, pappy. I've been a bad boy.

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SOURCES

"Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," 2002 Exhibit; Tuskegee Institute Archives
"Suspects Spent Year Traveling, Nearly Destitute," October 25, 2002, New York Times
ibid
ibid
ibid
"Ashcroft's Iron Will Molds the Law," June 2002, San Jose Mercury News
"Mentor and Disciple," Nov. 3, 2002, New York Times
"Snipers Strange Odyssey," Oct. 27, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle
"In Trail of Red Flags, an Ex-Friend's Warning to the Authorities Stands Out," October 28, 2002, New York Times
ibid
"The History of the British Sniper"
"Some Important Sniper Moments," www.cybersniper.com
ibid San Jose Mercury News
case descriptions from Missouri State Archives and St. Louis Historic Old Courthouse websites
ibid San Jose Mercury News
ibid
"High Degree Of Terror Swayed Military To Act," October 17, 2002, Los Angeles Times
"No Posse Can Stop Them," George F. Smith
["Freedom-loving people have always been distrustful of the military, and our colonists were no exception. The troops that King George III garrisoned here in 1763 after he kicked the French out were a major grievance with Americans, and not just because they were taxed to pay for them. The signers of the Declaration of Independence specifically attacked military independence from civilian control, a standing army in time of peace, and the quartering of troops in private homes. The Washington University Law Quarterly in 1997 notes that fear "of a standing army helped to motivate the enactment of the Bill of Rights . . . ."
But the lessons learned slipped from memory. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, federal marshals were empowered to use the military to help return a slave to his owner. The marshals went beyond the letter of the law, frequently calling out the army to control hostilities between pro-and anti-slave forces.
During Reconstruction, the military became the enforcers of the North's political agenda for the South, a situation that fomented massive injustice, corruption, and crime, and led to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. The election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel J. Tilden by a single electoral vote, turned on Grant's imposition of the military. Hayes won the disputed votes of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida after Grant had sent troops to those states for use at the polls, if needed. "This misuse of the military in an election--the most central event to a democracy (sic)--led Congress to enact the PCA in 1878," the Law Quarterly notes.]

"In Absence of Parents, a Voice for the Accused, " January 19, 2003, New York Times
"The Fundamental John Ashcroft," March/April 2002 issue of Mother Jones Magazine
"Prosecutors in Sniper Cases Are Death Penalty Veterans," November 10, 2002, New York Times
ibid
ibid
www.mosbysrangers.com
ibid
"The difference between DC democracy and DC representation: A Fact Sheet," Progressive Review
ibid "Mentor and Disciple"
AfroAmerican soldiers serve in the military in numbers disproportionate to those of the general population. Most serve in the enlisted ranks, many as noncommissioned officers, or NCOs. Increasing numbers are in the officer corps. They occupy more management positions in the military than they do in business, education, journalism, government, or any other significant sector of American society, according to "Success Story: Blacks in the Military," May 1986, Atlantic Monthly
"Harlem is Nowhere," Ralph Ellison, 1948 essay
"Moving On," April 29 & May 6, 1996
Like today's semiconductor industry, the whaling business enjoyed a prominent place in the early-American psyche. The novelist, Herman Melville, transformed his oceanic experiences into a series of increasingly biting social commentaries culminating in the 1851 publication of "Moby Dick." Some modern literary critics believe the story of Captain Ahab's pathological pursuit of the Great White Whale was a critical and commercial failure because of its apparent refutation of the period's social and racial hierarchy.
"This hierarchy put white males as most important, then white females, then all people who did not qualify as white were considered 'niggers.' Any non-white, including Native American, Indian, African, Chinese, Arab, Palestinians and Polynesians would fit into this biologically inferior class of human or sub-human beings," wrote Gregory D. Shell in "Racism in Moby Dick."
Scientists of the era, foreshadowing modern day proponents of the Bell Curve, argued "there is good reason for classifying the Negro as a distinct species from the European, as there is for making the ass a distinct species from the zebra; and if, in classification, we take intelligence into consideration, there is a far greater difference between the Negro and the European than between the gorilla and the chimpanzee," Shell noted in "Cultural and Racial Hierarchy in Antebellum America.
"America's Forgotten Patriots," The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Autumn 2000.
ibid
ibid
ibid San Jose Mercury News