The Red Skull would be, ironically, a consultant for Goldman Sachs rather than the Koch Bros.

—CAC

auntada:

Rally at the Arkansas state capitol, protesting the admission of the “Little Rock Nine” to Central High School

August 20, 1959

John T. Bledsoe, photographer

U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

Children and grandchildren of these same people seem to be on the wrong side of side so much these days. Why is that?

I did not die at Harpers Ferry for this. I died for liberty, dignity, and for my wife. Why have so many of my people drained themselves of virtue, and the quiet contemplation of their freedom? Note the prisoner’s togs, proudly displayed. The females, prone. It is not immoral. It is worse: a silly waste. And now Professor Chambers tells me of a self-defacing television play featuring a failed rapper and his harem & illegitimate children. My wife and I are ashamed of all of you.

—D.N.

Woody Allen. effete New Yorker style art. An ottoman. Everything needed to stick a thumb in the RNC’s and Mitt Romney’s eye. Thanks, Clint…

We were patriots. We still are. Yet, ironically, the descendants of those who wore the gray and made war on the flag, and on our citizenship—indeed humanity—seem to say we never were patriots. They say they are the true Americans. They warbled then and now about state sovereignty and private property, yet when they controlled the federal government until 1860, it was about federal paramountcy. They were hypocrites then; they are fools now. We were patriots. We still are.

Please check out the piece by Joan Walsh in Salon, which links to Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine about the current state of the GOP in 2012, then pop back to Dangerfield Newby’s place.

I love the image in the article. Compare it to the one above from Gangs of NewYork. The interesting contrast rather than comparison, however, is not between the images but rather her Custer analogy in the piece. I think she misapplied it. Custer wasn’t some mindless bulwark sacrificing himself to protect a way of life and power (cue the John Wayne version of “The Alamo”). He was an arrogant self promoter recklessly thrusting himself into danger, confident his way, his power, would win the day. It always did. It always would. Just as the British wiped out at at Isandlwana in South Africa, when their repeating rifles, rockets, breach loading cannons still couldn’t stop Zulu warriors carrying spears and shields, unafraid to die. (Better still, ask the British in Malaya/Singapore in 1942. Nice metaphor for underestimating Asians).

Apologies for the Custer digression. Recall, Dangerfied joined up with John Brown because a system that broke up his family benefitted not only the plutocrats, but the folks who found meaning in their lives solely because they believed there was always one or two segments below them on the totem pole. Dangerfield Newby even gave contemporary life to historian Eric Foner’s thesis that these big sprawling issues like slavery—and the incidiary, acidic politics and fractured polity of 2012—were and are based in ethno-cultural clashes. Back then it was buried under fights over Catholic versus Protestant, native over immigrant (Gangs of New York had a point, folks), temperance over booze. Even arguments over the role of government tend to get cloaked and pinned up in white tribal politics. It is an axiom tested within Joan Walsh’s piece who much white people deride “dependency,” yet curtain off their own: billion dollar government contracts, welfare, WIC, Medicare, HCD grants to developers, military bases, the military itself as employer and educator (ask the diploma mills, nee, “for profit colleges”) of last resort—before meth lab employee prison guard guarding daddy in prison for meth. Couple that with the perfidy and hypocrisy of Nell Paynter’s honorary whites like Irish, Italians, Jews when they speak of their own bootstraps, or organized crime, or the complicity of the Catholic Church therein, or shady business practices all designed to enrich a tribe and its members. Finally there is the perfidy and hypocrisy of the whites who consider themselves powerful, elite, and thus this is by divine right: not simply the 1% but those who perceive themselves more worthy. Middle managers who listen to Rush Limbaugh during their lunch break, soccer moms feeding off of Fox & Friends in the a.m. and regular network TV at night. They talk about bootstraps, too, and divine right. So let us talk about how their dads and granddads, without government GI Bills, astronomical military/aerospace/security spending, health care research and direct aid to institutions, housing (building and finance) and transportation endeavors, infrastructure investments, student loan aid—even Social Security— would have had nothing. How their air, water and food would be toxic. How the very cars they cherished would have exploded from right under them. The New Deal saved the middle class, not the poor; it’s DNA grew the middle class into the behemouth it was, and protected the health, welfare and safety of its children, before those very children, not black or brown orphans, began murdering it in 2006-07-08. Not just on Wall Street, but in board rooms, in deal meetings, in plain vanilla white papers. Downsize, degrade, de-fund, outsource. Maximize shareholder value, ROI. Replace our storied main streets with Walmarts, full of cheap and cheezy stuff made in sweatshops…

…that’s just the beginning…

…and when I think of Dangerfield Newby, laying in a muddy rut, face devoured by pigs I wonder what these people are so angry about. But who says anger is rational?

Tomorrow I will explore the flipside of this universe. I will tell you a story about some idle, cursing, spitting, angry, ignorant young black men, a toddler, and a petite white woman pushing a stroller—all sharing space on 14th St NW in Washington, D.C., capital of an ever less-white America…

Christopher Chambers