though i speak with the tongues of men and of angels
and have not charity
i am become as sounding brass
or a tinkling cymbal
and though i have the gift of prophecy
and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge
and though i have all faith
so that i could remove mountains
and have not charity
i am nothing
They were ready, the wingers, able, eager, there they go taking off running now, torches and pitchforks on high, storming the citadel of Michelle Obama . . . then suddenly they are frantically called off, furiously diverted to defend the ramparts of John McCain, accused of leeringly awallowing in a smelly pig-sty of sordid lobbyists.
I thought, then, that Ms. Obama had somehow, by a near New York Times miracle, escaped the slings and arrows, avoided the burning pyre.
Not to be, not to be.
For now rabid ratdog Sean Hannity has minutely sniffed out every scrap of gutter-slime he plans to upchuck on the Obamas, has yipped and yapped that he plans to down and dirty Ms. Obama for her honest expression: "Let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country."
A short aside. I am 51, white, male, out from under the working class. My father was scooped up in 1941 and shoveled into becoming "highly decorated" through four years in the South Pacific. He came home with lots of medals, yeah, and his body came back, sure, but dern if they didn't manage to forget to return his spirit. That, there, was extinguished.
This is what war did to my father:
down there by the river is a man
whose horn is twisted into shapes
unknown to the wicked and the wise
and he bears the look of an animal
who has seen things
no animal should ever see
he has been driven
beyond all towns
and all systems
until now
though it is
long past too far
he keeps going
because it's a desert
because it's a desert
Meanwhile, my lover's father, a major in the US Air Force, was refused in 1942 permission to marry my lover's mother, on the grounds that, as a half-native Hawaiian, he was a "wog," unfit to marry an English woman.
So, yeah, I can taste it, at least a smidge, what Michelle Obama was saying. Yeah, yeah--I know what she later said she meant. But I, like you, know what she really meant. Know too she had to say what she said later, when backing off. Because, still, in this horse-laughing lie of a "land of the free," if and when you really speak truth to power, once caught out, you best take it back . . . lest you'd like your tongue, figuratively if not physically, cut right out . . . and tossed, just as in the days of yore, to the crazed, slavering mob.
But the point of this diary, such as it is, is the astonishing argument the wingers use on Michelle Obama, against her expression that "for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country."
From Limprod to Hannity, O'Liely to Levin, the argument ceaselessly centers on this: you're rich. You went to Ivy League schools. You're seeking the presidency. How in the hey can you not worship this country?
In this, I submit, is the essential difference between Republicans and Democrats.
For Republicans, it is, always, "all about me."
"I am a Republican: the country has been good to me: for it has allowed me, yea, to wallow like a hog in an overspilling trough: what is essential now is for government to keep any nest of runt piglets from trying to climb in after me."
The secret slogan of the Republican Party: "I've got mine: fuck you yours."
What Republicans cannot understand is that in the Democratic Paarty there are patricians, from FDR to John Kerry, who really do believe in a levelling that would top their own private fortunes. Who have evolved enough to feel outside their own skins. Who intuit at a cellular level that in loving the lord thy god as thy neighbor as thyself all three bleed tear-streaked colors into one: that it is not possible to serve god without serving thy neighbor as thyself.
Did LBJ, born a stone racist in a stone racist state, need, for political advantage, to break American apartheid? Fuck, no. He estimated, to Bill Moyers, that, in elevating the status of black people to something at least approaching the perch of white folks, he had killed both himself, and the Democratic Party, the latter for at least a generation. Off by at least another generatrion there, Lyndon. But we forgive you. Why? Because you extended your soul.
To evolve today into people--Democrats--who can conceive of even sharing a skin with an enemy. Good Democrats who do not, as the wingers would have it, oppose torture, or Guantanamo, or senseless needless wars, because they are somehow "soft on defense." Instead, Democrats opposing these obscenities because they have expanded in empathy beyond their own corporeal containers. Expanded towards the place of William Blake:
it is an easy thing
to triumph in the summers sun
and in the vintage
and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn
it is an easy thing
to talk of patience to the afflicted
to speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer
to listen to the hungry ravens cry in wintry season
when the red blood is filled with wine and with the marrow of lambs
it is an easy thing
to laugh at wrathful elements
to hear the dog howl at the wintry door
the ox in the slaughterhouse moan
to see a god on every wind
and a blessing on every blast
to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm
that destroys our enemies house
to rejoice in the blight that covers his field
and the sickness that cuts off his children
while our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
and our children bring fruits and flowers
then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten
and the slave grinding at the mill
and the captive in chains and the poor in the prison
and the soldier in the field
when the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead
it is an easy thing
to rejoice in the tents of prosperity
thus could i sing
and thus rejoice
but it is not so with me
In a recent diary, this site's Avila expressed this:
If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
She next quoted from Barack Obama's 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention:
It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.
People spooked by the biblical language--"brother's keeper"--can try instead these secular lines from C&W songwriter Danny Flowers:
how would you feel
if the world was falling apart all around you
pieces of the sky were falling
in your neighbor's yard
but not on you
wouldn't you feel just a little bit funny
think maybe there's something
you ought to do
The wingers like to describe America, in words cribbed by Ronald Reagan, as "a shining city on a hill." They rarely, these days, cite to the man to first utter that phrase--John Winthrop, a discouraged Puritan, who flogged to the New World ships stuffed with true believers Winthrop ordered The Lord to allow to spread like a sickness across America. No surprise that the wingers never quote what Winthrop said towards the end of his life, when, having realized that his attempt to establish on these shores a "New Jerusalem" had failed, as all such attempts must, he damned the entire European egress to the New World a mistake, concluding: "this land grows weary of her inhabitants."
The Founders, unlike wingnuts like Winthrop, were Enlightenment people. They knew human perfection to be impossible. They hoped only that, instead of forever beating our boats back into the past, we'd, now and again, nudge those boats, even if but the slightest bit, into the future. They didn't love--disgraceful compromise that it was--the America that they created. And they didn't expect us to love it, either. They expected, instead, that we would work to make of what they started, something that, someday, would be worthy of both their, and our, love. They wanted us to listen, as the years ticked by, to somebody like Langston Hughes:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose flow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again . . .
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was, America to me,
And yet, I swear this oath--
America will be!
They wanted us never to stop . . . .
i believe
in kingdom come
when all the colors
will bleed into one
bleed into one
but yes i'm still runnin' . . . . .