Cancel 2016.11
Darla
I read this over the weekend and I found it so interesting. I agree 100% with his conclusions. This is Charles Pierce - I happen to be a fan.
"I am a child of the civil-rights movement. I did not know I was one for a very long time, and I am not yet matured into a full adult of the civil-rights movement. Along with the Vietnam War, its dark and horrible doppelganger on the televisions of my youth, it was the central event of my life. But the country I grew up in, and the country I still love despite the horror and waste and ignorance of which it is capable, is a country transformed by the civil-rights movement. It is our common property as Americans of a certain age the way the Civil War belonged even to those who were too young to fight in it, because they were the ones who had to grow up and own the change wrought by that other national trauma, the one that was tightly connected to the civil-rights movement by what Lincoln called the "mystic chords of memory." David Blight, in his lovely new history, American Oracle, which examines the work of a selected group of American authors who were active when the civil-rights movement coursed like Banquo's ghost through the ongoing 100th-anniversary celebrations of the Civil War, points out that a consensus among scholars is not the same thing as a popular agreement on the stark reality that the civil-rights movement was really the last battle of that war, that it was the civil-rights movement that ultimately provided what Lincoln in his towering second inaugural called the last "drop of blood drawn with the lash" that "shall be paid with another drawn by the sword." Blight writes:
For the majority, especially of white Americans — even as they watched TV images of civil rights marchers being clubbed by police and bitten by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama — to claim the centrality of slavery and emancipation in Civil War memory was still an awkward kind of impoliteness at best and heresy at worst. In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black and white.
In 1963, I was 10 years old, starting to become aware of the world beyond my neighborhood, starting to listen to the strange sounds from a transistor radio under my pillow, never feeling the change through which I would live. never noticing the change until I'd lived it for decades.
We were not ready for that change. We fought it. We struggled against what we knew was right in defense of what we knew was comfortable. We were mystified by the hate and the murder and the bombs and the dogs because that was easier than understanding them. By this time, it was eight years since Martin Luther King, Jr., had led the boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and still we were mystified. The Freedom Rides had been two years earlier, and the open insurrection at the University of Mississippi over the enrollment of James Meredith had erupted the previous year. In 1963, John Kennedy finally began to move on civil rights and, on the same night in June that he delivered his only great speech on the subject, a back-shooting coward named Byron De La Beckwith murdered Medgar Evers in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. Martin King came to Washington and gave a great speech. By the end of 1963, Kennedy was dead, and Beckwith was still free. It would take three trials and 31 years before he was convicted of a murder than many people long had forgotten. As a nation, we were very good at being mystified even after all of that.
Lyndon Johnson, of all people, called the last bluff. In March of 1965, he appeared before Congress to urge the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and he delivered the greatest speech an American president has delivered in my lifetime. He was an operator, far more than half-corrupt, and a Texan besides, but the one thing he wasn't was mystified. He knew power and he knew that power had no inherent mystery to it. It was raw. It was elemental. And it was power in this country that was changing. He looked the angry South and the comfortable North right in the eye and said it plain:
But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, "what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.
And then:
But even if we pass this bill the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Race has popped up in the campaign this year. Newt Gingrich tripped over it while talking about food stamps and let's not even deal with the preposterous lie that Rick Santorum told about how he really said "blah people." Both of them were talking in gussied-up code, and they professed to be mystified as to how anyone could possibly think such a thing. And, of course, race has been a central theme (never a subtext; don't even try to make that case) in the irrational hatred directed at the current occupant of the White House. And it's not possible to read Lyndon's great speech — in which he called out "every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right" — and not think of all the smart little clerks all over the country with their smart little voter-ID laws who are so damned mystified as to why people are so upset.
We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/race-in-america-2012-6638829#ixzz1jcVSNIXc
"I am a child of the civil-rights movement. I did not know I was one for a very long time, and I am not yet matured into a full adult of the civil-rights movement. Along with the Vietnam War, its dark and horrible doppelganger on the televisions of my youth, it was the central event of my life. But the country I grew up in, and the country I still love despite the horror and waste and ignorance of which it is capable, is a country transformed by the civil-rights movement. It is our common property as Americans of a certain age the way the Civil War belonged even to those who were too young to fight in it, because they were the ones who had to grow up and own the change wrought by that other national trauma, the one that was tightly connected to the civil-rights movement by what Lincoln called the "mystic chords of memory." David Blight, in his lovely new history, American Oracle, which examines the work of a selected group of American authors who were active when the civil-rights movement coursed like Banquo's ghost through the ongoing 100th-anniversary celebrations of the Civil War, points out that a consensus among scholars is not the same thing as a popular agreement on the stark reality that the civil-rights movement was really the last battle of that war, that it was the civil-rights movement that ultimately provided what Lincoln in his towering second inaugural called the last "drop of blood drawn with the lash" that "shall be paid with another drawn by the sword." Blight writes:
For the majority, especially of white Americans — even as they watched TV images of civil rights marchers being clubbed by police and bitten by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama — to claim the centrality of slavery and emancipation in Civil War memory was still an awkward kind of impoliteness at best and heresy at worst. In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black and white.
In 1963, I was 10 years old, starting to become aware of the world beyond my neighborhood, starting to listen to the strange sounds from a transistor radio under my pillow, never feeling the change through which I would live. never noticing the change until I'd lived it for decades.
We were not ready for that change. We fought it. We struggled against what we knew was right in defense of what we knew was comfortable. We were mystified by the hate and the murder and the bombs and the dogs because that was easier than understanding them. By this time, it was eight years since Martin Luther King, Jr., had led the boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and still we were mystified. The Freedom Rides had been two years earlier, and the open insurrection at the University of Mississippi over the enrollment of James Meredith had erupted the previous year. In 1963, John Kennedy finally began to move on civil rights and, on the same night in June that he delivered his only great speech on the subject, a back-shooting coward named Byron De La Beckwith murdered Medgar Evers in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. Martin King came to Washington and gave a great speech. By the end of 1963, Kennedy was dead, and Beckwith was still free. It would take three trials and 31 years before he was convicted of a murder than many people long had forgotten. As a nation, we were very good at being mystified even after all of that.
Lyndon Johnson, of all people, called the last bluff. In March of 1965, he appeared before Congress to urge the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and he delivered the greatest speech an American president has delivered in my lifetime. He was an operator, far more than half-corrupt, and a Texan besides, but the one thing he wasn't was mystified. He knew power and he knew that power had no inherent mystery to it. It was raw. It was elemental. And it was power in this country that was changing. He looked the angry South and the comfortable North right in the eye and said it plain:
But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, "what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.
And then:
But even if we pass this bill the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Race has popped up in the campaign this year. Newt Gingrich tripped over it while talking about food stamps and let's not even deal with the preposterous lie that Rick Santorum told about how he really said "blah people." Both of them were talking in gussied-up code, and they professed to be mystified as to how anyone could possibly think such a thing. And, of course, race has been a central theme (never a subtext; don't even try to make that case) in the irrational hatred directed at the current occupant of the White House. And it's not possible to read Lyndon's great speech — in which he called out "every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right" — and not think of all the smart little clerks all over the country with their smart little voter-ID laws who are so damned mystified as to why people are so upset.
We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/race-in-america-2012-6638829#ixzz1jcVSNIXc
