As you
probably already know, they executed Dale Leo Bishop in Mississippi
last night. I had urged readers to write to Governor Haley Barbour and
respectfully request that he commute Bishop's death sentence to life
imprisonment, since he did not actually murder anyone, although he did
take part in a terrible crime. Barbour refused -- even though he had
just released a man who had murdered his wife in the street: blew her
head off with a shotgun. But that actual murderer had been a servant in
Barbour's mansion; wiping the dribble off Barbour's jowls is obviously
a qualification for clemency. So the wife-murderer is free, while the
non-murderer Bishop is dead.
The execution took place at the dinner hour, 6 p.m. Perhaps Barbour was
just sitting down to a nice juicy steak as his minions were putting a
syringe full of poison into Bishop's bloodstream. We can only hope the
dead flesh Barbour devoured during the course of the execution will
clot the bowels of the bloodthirsty, graft-bloated son of a bitch. (And
we mean that in the most respectful sense, of course.)
Well, the deed is done. The world moves on. It's just too bad for Dale
Leo Bishop that he was only involved in a single murder; if he had
slaughtered a million people, like Barbour's good buddy, George W.
Bush, no doubt he'd be a free man today.
Dale Leo Bishop is scheduled to be killed tomorrow by the state of Mississippi -- despite the fact that he did not kill anyone, although he assisted an attack that turned into a murder. The actual murderer, oddly enough, was sentenced to life in prison; but Bishop, who is mentally ill, was sentenced to die. [For more, see previous post on this subject.]
All of his judicial appeals have been exhausted now. Outside a highly unlikely intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, the only hope Bishop has is a commutation of his death sentence to life in prison by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.
As the Jackson Clarion-Ledger points out in an excellent editorial on the case, just last week Barbour pardoned a man convicted of a heinous murder. Michael Graham walked up to his ex-wife's car at a streetlight in Pascagoula and shot her in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun, blowing her head off in front of her own father, who was standing across the street at the time. Graham had served 19 years of a life sentence for the killing when Barbour pardoned him. The reason? Graham had been a trusty, a prisoner working as a servant, in the governor's mansion.
From the Clarion-Ledger:
Trial testimony - undisputed trial testimony - indicates that Bishop was not the man swinging the hammer that delivered the fatal blows to victim's head....
If Bishop, who suffers from mental illness, receives a lethal injection on Wednesday, he would be only the eighth person put to death - and the first since 1996 - who did not directly kill the victim (not including contract killings) in the more than 1,100 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
There is ample evidence that Bishop's mental illness led to his waiving rights that might have spared his life at trial. There are also allegations that his post-conviction counsel representation suppressed evidence of Bishop's mental illness....
If there is mercy in Barbour's heart for a killer like Graham who was definitely guilty of a cold-blooded, gruesome murder, then the governor shouldn't blink an eye in granting clemency to Bishop - who took part in a killing but didn't deliver the fatal blows.
Bishop didn't get a chance to serve as a domestic servant at the Governor's Mansion. Graham did. That's the apparent difference.
Bishop should at most share a jail cell for life with Jessie Johnson, the man who is serving life without parole for Gentry's murder. But he should not pay the ultimate price if he did not commit the ultimate crime.
As we noted here earlier, Barbour is a rank political hack, a lobbyist, bagman and fixer from way back. His good buddy George W. Bush has steered millions of dollars in federal money earmarked for Hurricane Katrina relief to Barbour and his corporate cronies. His pardon of Graham is all of a piece with the plutocrat's code: "Everything for me and mine, diddly-squat for everybody else."
It is not very likely than an appeal to a conscience that Barbour has shown little sign of possessing will move him to spare Dale Leo Bishop from the poison needle. However, our high and mighty officials do like to appear to be figures of great moral depth, and so occasionally they can be moved to some gesture of clemency, some show of humanity, as long as there is no significant downside to their bottom line.
Therefore, we urge you once again to send a very respectful message to Haley Barbour, asking him politely to give his profound and prayerful consideration to Dale Bishop's plea for commutation. The address is below:
I think it is time for all those who have opposed the American invasion of Iraq to stand up for Barack Obama and acquit him of the ludicrous charge hurled at him by so many on the so-called "left": namely, that he has somehow "sold out" the anti-war movement with his recent statements about "refining" his long-held plans for a carefully calibrated end to the war.
Of course, the candidate himself has spoken most eloquently on this issue, pointing out that the idea of refining the details of the pullout according to the facts of the ground in Iraq has always been a key element of his plan all along. Sen. Obama is entirely correct: his views regarding American involvement in Iraq have been clear and consistent throughout his campaign for the presidency.
Although in a perfect world, Obama would need no defense on this matter, its truth being so self-evident, the distortions of the corporate media -- always looking for a trivial "gotcha" issue to goose the day's horse-race coverage -- compels the "reality-based community" to step forward and set the record straight.
And Sami Ramadani -- an Iraqi writer and academic who was persecuted by Saddam Hussein and driven from his native land -- has done just that in a column in Monday's Guardian. He brings a perspective almost entirely absent from the Washington's navel-gazing debate over Iraq: the Iraqi perspective. He makes a brilliant case for Obama's rock-solid consistency on the Iraq war, and explores some of the far-reaching implications of the candidate's plan.
From the Guardian: As November's American presidential elections approach, Barack Obama's message on Iraq is being widely interpreted as "flip-flopping" and a "retreat" from a previously unequivocal stance of fully withdrawing the US occupation forces. This is to misunderstand Obama, who is not someone who shoots from the hip. There is much more to his words than cursory reading could unravel...
Obama himself has reacted angrily to claims of a policy U-turn: "For me to say I'm going to refine my policies is I don't think in any way inconsistent with prior statements and doesn't change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I'm going to end it as president." Earlier this month he resorted to an op-ed article in the New York Times to emphatically state: "On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war."
As always in examining the words of politicians, let alone Obama (who now has 300 foreign policy advisers), the devil is in the details. Here, Obama's "ending the war" declarations begin to look far from reassuring, even before he "refines" his line after meeting the US commander, General Petraeus, in Iraq.
Obama sees Iraq as part of a wider theatre of war and potential wars engulfing the entire Middle East, where US strategic goals and interests are at stake. So his obvious shift on the "surge" operations in Iraq (underlined by deleting criticisms of it from his website last week) is strengthening his call for "redeployment" from Iraq to Afghanistan. His current strategy could be summed up as: de-escalate the war in Iraq, escalate it in Afghanistan, and talk to Iran. On Iran, his offer of talks was coupled with an alarming, Bush-style threat. "I'll do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything," Obama told a gathering of the pro-Israel lobby group, Aipac, in April. He is echoing the sentiments of his famous anti-Iraq war speech in 2002, in which he repeatedly stressed that he was not opposed to all US wars.
It is worth noting that the term withdrawal, let alone a full unconditional withdrawal that will satisfy most of the Iraqi people, has never been part of Obama's vocabulary. His first carefully considered statement on Iraq was made in January last year, when he introduced the Iraq war de-escalation act to Congress. It was then that he envisaged stationing troops in Iraq on a longer-term basis: "A residual US presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces and pursuit of international terrorists." Using similar phrases, this is what he outlined in the New York Times last week.
....But it doesn't require rocket science to know that keeping "residual" forces requires heavily fortified areas, installations and a state of readiness to go to war. Unless Obama has discovered something new, such areas are known as military bases.....
Obama has even pre-empted a possible line of attack from hawks by chillingly suggesting he would possibly invade Iraq again if necessary. His website states: "He would reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq." The word potential is worth pausing over; it is salutary to remember Bush and Blair occupied Iraq and caused the death of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people for "humanitarian" reasons.
Neither is Obama opposed to signing a military treaty with Iraq. He has two conditions to make Bush's current attempts to impose a pact acceptable: the pact should get Congressional approval, and renounce "permanent" military bases. However, leaked drafts of this colonialist-style pact do not mention the word "permanent" at all. And his "benchmarks" for continued support for the corrupt Iraqi politicians protected by US forces in Baghdad's Green Zone are strikingly similar to those of the Bush administration.
Tactical differences and issues of style aside, Obama's message on occupied Iraq is deeply troubling - not because it has U-turned but because it has been consistent. His 300 foreign policy advisers are making sure that he will not stray from protecting US imperialist interests, even if it does mean launching new wars and bolstering puppet regimes and corrupt dictatorships throughout the "greater Middle East".
A bit under the weather, so apologies for the light posting. Hope to be back in gear soon, so keep checking in.
Meanwhile, here is some abiding wisdom on the inevitable ramifications of macro-economic cycles in an unrestricted "free" market system (also known as "One law for the rich, another law for the poor"). This learned disquisition originally appeared in 1854, and was updated in 1993 by one of our most eminent men of letters (doctorates from Princeton and St Andrews University). Perpend:
Next week, the State of Mississippi is going to strap Dale Leo Bishop to a prison guerney and shoot him full of deadly chemicals. He's going to die for murder although he killed no one. He's going to die even though his case was grossly mishandled by a lawyer who refused to present mitigating evidence of the horrible abuse Bishop suffered as a child and his life-long struggle with mental illness. He's going to die even though the man whom prosecutors admit is the one who committed the murder has been spared, while Bishop has been condemned to execution by lethal injection.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear his appeal last month. The Mississippi Supreme Court then scheduled his killing for July 23.
It's a complicated case. It's an ugly case. Bishop took part in the brutal murder of Marcus Gentry ten years ago. Gentry was set upon by Bishop and Jessie Johnson, who believed that Gentry had ratted out Johnson's younger brother, Cory, to the police on grand larceny and burglary charges. In the course of a beating in which Bishop landed a couple of blows with his hands and held Bishop at one point, Jessie Johnson repeatedly struck Gentry with a claw hammer belonging to Bishop and finally killed him. Bishop was 24 at the time of the attack; Gentry was 19 years old.
At the trial in 2000, Bishop admitted taking part in the beating but said he didn't know Johnson was going to kill Gentry. After his conviction, Bishop, crushed, refused to make any mitigating statement, but instead declared that he was bound for Hell and asked the court to do what Gentry's family wanted to do: kill him. The judge said, "Mr. Bishop, I'm going to grant your wish."
After the trial, Bishop changed his mind and appealed the verdict. His case was handled by the state's Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, set up in 2000 to help indigent death row prisoners. Here the case took a curious turn. As the Jackson Free Press reports:
Bishop’s lawyers accuse Robert Ryan, former director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel...with “extreme dereliction of duty” in Ryan’s failure to present mitigating evidence in Bishop’s appeal. The brief includes affidavits supporting the defense’s allegations that Ryan deliberately suppressed his own staff’s investigation, which revealed Bishop’s life-long mental illness, and summarily dismissed the volunteers working on the case.
“The director simply discarded this proof and substituted his own unsubstantiated and frivolous allegations (with the appeal). All the while, Bishop himself had no idea his lead lawyer was sabotaging his main chance to escape execution,“ the lawyers wrote.
“I don’t really know if Ryan was overworked or in over his head,” [James] Craig said... "but whatever the reason is for his lack of performance, it’s just another situation where the quality of justice you get is dependent on whether you have any money. That’s been such a theme for Dale Bishop, because his mother tried to have him taken for (psychiatric evaluation and treatment). They quoted her a price and she couldn’t possibly afford it. This was a situation that probably could have been avoided if somebody would have intervened in (Bishop’s) life.”
The attorneys contend that Bishop's illness prevented him from making a rational decision during the original sentencing. Back to the Free Press:
The brief goes on to say that Ryan failed to have Bishop evaluated although he knew Bishop was taking Lithium after doctors at Parchman diagnosed his illness. Lithium is prescribed almost exclusively to people suffering from bipolar disorder, the brief states. Instead, Ryan made the claim in his appeal that Bishop was mentally retarded, while attaching evidence indicating clearly that he was not.
“I think it’s close to criminal fraud to take the state’s money and handle a case like this,” Craig said.
Ryan's successor in the post, Glenn Swartzfager, is working with Bishop's lawyers in their appeal. In court papers, Swartzfeger called Ryan's work on the case "a sham," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. Ryan also buried evidence of abuse suffered by Bishop as a child and youth, as the human rights organization Reprieve notes:
Reprieve volunteers assisting on the case gathered documents and witness statements which proved that Bishop suffered from a chronic mental illness (bipolar depressive disorder, formerly known as “manic depression”) and had undergone horrific trauma when he was young, which clearly affected his capacity to make rational decisions at trial. Bishop’s family noticed problems with his behavior and thinking when he was four years old. His elementary school records from Texas have many references to these problems and to evaluations that showed that Dale Bishop needed serious help. When he was in middle school, his school counselor recommended a psychiatric consultation. The psychiatric hospital Dale’s mother took him to advised immediate inpatient hospitalization, but Mrs. Bishop could not afford the high price of this care. He was only diagnosed and treated for his mental illness when he got to death row.
Also, Dale Bishop’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children – including Dale Bishop – on a weekly basis. The family was incredibly poor. When Dale was an infant, the family had no running water, no indoor bathroom, and no money.
This is evidence that almost surely would have required a new trial, where Dale Bishop could present his case for a life sentence, giving a jury the background about his youth and illness, and letting them weigh up these facts alongside the fact that Dale Bishop was not the killer of Marcus Gentry.
The last-minute appeal also stresses the lack of evidence that the killing was premeditated, which is "one of the components required to impose the death penalty in Mississippi when a defendant is not the actual killer. Bishop’s co-defendant, Johnson, stated in an affidavit that the murder took place after a two-week drug binge and that they had been smoking marijuana, and injecting crystal meth and cocaine prior to the crime," as the Free Press reports. Johnson, who admitted killing Gentry, was given a life sentence at his trial, which was held after Bishop's conviction.
And so this is how "justice" is going to work in Mississippi next week. Dale Leo Bishop, a man riddled with genuine, even suicidal remorse over his part in a drug-addled murder, will be killed by the state next week. Meanwhile, the man who actually committed the murder will live out the rest of his natural life as a ward of that same state.
Reprieve notes:
Dale Bishop never had a real chance in life. If the death penalty is going to be anything more than just a lottery, it’s not fair for some prisoners to lose appeals just because their State-paid lawyer discarded valuable, relevant evidence. We are shocked and sickened by what has happened in this case, and we hope others who look at the facts will feel the same. Dale Bishop’s lawyers are preparing a Petition for Executive Clemency, to present to Governor Haley Barbour if the courts deny the new appeal. We ask all those who are concerned about the justice system to write to the Governor...to ask that he seriously consider, in this case, commuting Dale Bishop’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Or, at least, we ask the Governor to grant a temporary reprieve and ask the Parole Board to study the case and make a recommendation for or against a commutation to life imprisonment without parole.
The chance that Barbour, a long-time right-wing political hack and backroom fixer, will actually commute Bishop's sentence or even delay his killing are slim. For one thing, Bishop is white -- or "white trash" as he'd be called amongst Barbour's neo-plantation set -- and his death could help redress the statistical imbalance between the executions of black and white prisoners: an imbalance that always threatens to bring in some busybody judge to interfere with the politically popular operation of the death chamber. But a slim chance is better than none.
“The death penalty feeds a mentality of revenge and vindication and further reduces the dignity and worth of human life,” said Fr. Jeremy Tobin of St. Moses the Black Priory in Raymond. “Executions teach us that killing people is OK, and in fact, should be celebrated,” he added. “Killing is immoral, it is not justified, it is anti-Christian. … Only non-violence can end the self-destruction of a blood-soaked world.”
Below are contact details for Haley Barbour:
Haley Barbour Governor of Mississippi P.O. Box 139 Jackson, MS 39205 Fax: + 1 601-359-3741 E-mail: governor@governor.state.ms.us
Reprieve also provides text for the letter that you can send or adapt here.
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop Chris - very good post, and a travesty of justice.
[i]What is, is that there is no "state of Mississippi" that will strap this man down and shoot poison into his veins. There are the the men who do it, the men who order it, and then men who support...
Death for Dinner: Haley Barbour Kills Dale Leo Bishop Everybody (Dennis Prager, the Supreme Court and the people who appropriate funds for public defender budgets aside) is opposed to the death penalty for provably innocent people. Being against capital punishment for them takes no courage. Being oppose...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge [quote]No candidate for President would get any media attention if they did not kiss the various rings of the oligarchs. Obama has been consistent because he is the proverbial slick lawyer who understands the angles and the lay of the land. Having sa...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge obama is just a smoother rapist,
one who will convince more people
to enjoy it
kahoneez above has it right -
a more elegant occupation of iraq
is a lead-in to the next war
we're 'merkins and we need more
victories - we can never have enough
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop clemency for one who becomes known to the prince
cold steel for the other who is not
many think we live under a state of fascism
we don't
royalism
News That Stays News Despite being a Dylan fan from 1964 on, personally, I rather prefer this....
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm
"Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? "...mediocre translation, but still....
hope you're feeling better, please kee...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge 1 . Obama On 60 mins. " we must keep troops in Iraq , to protect out interest " , aka permanent military bases , to project U.S. power .
2 . Wants to " bring combat troops home " , we'll I figured it out right away and that's COMBAT troops are about...
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop THe US lost it's national conscience, IMHO, at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, not that there was much of a conscience to lose. Barbour, on the other hand, never had one, but an appeal to his vanity and political self-interest might reach something in that sh...
Color-Coded: Jeremiah Wright and the Real Deal on Race
Sunday, 04 May 2008
You want a "national dialogue on race"? Arthur Silber's got one for you: a real one, not the heartland hokum being served up on the campaign trail, or the panicky poltroonery issuing forth from the "progressive" commentariat. In his latest piece, Choosing Sides, Silber digs deep and ranges far, taking off from the Jeremiah Wright "controversy" -- if that's a fit word for the congealed mass of willful ignorance, partisan zeal and national delusion that has gathered around Wright's name. Silber examines liberation theology, the unacknowledged history of hideous medical experiments on black Americans from colonial times to the present day, and the "loony anti-Americanism" of Martin Luther King Jr. -- whose last scheduled sermon, forestalled by his murder, was entitled, "Why America May Go to Hell."
You should read the whole piece -- which is framed with a moving and pertinent autobiographical aspect, with the personal element illuminating our political moment. But here are a few choice morsels to whet your appetite:
It is only one of the many calumnies heaped on Wright's head that the mythical, non-existent King is used to condemn him. There is no question that, if King were to reappear among us and speak as he did in the last few years of his life, he would be vilified and loathed in terms at least as harsh as those now directed at Wright. This is to not even mention what some of these same liberals and progressives might say about certain of the views of radicals such as Thomas Jefferson. As I often note these days, we are drowning in lies. Yet it is still no small wonder that this entire conversation about Wright, King, et al. proceeds in the almost complete absence of a discussion of what Wright has actually said, just as no one seems to remember what King actually said.
Silber also quotes from Margret Kimberley's review of Harriet Washington's new book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present:
The name Josef Mengele is so infamous that it needs no introduction. Mengele was the German doctor who performed medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. An American doctor, James Marion Sims was equally monstrous, but his name is less well known.
Sims was a doctor who routinely performed unnecessary and sadistic surgeries on slaves in Alabama. He opened the skulls of babies and performed gynecological surgeries on women. They were forced to endure unimaginable treatments, all without the ether that had by then become available as an anesthetic. Of course, being enslaved people, they had no choice in any decisions that Sims made about their bodies or their lives.
Sims allegedly sought to treat vaginal fistulas caused by complications of child birth. One woman underwent this treatment, without anesthesia, 30 times. He obviously didn't cure her of anything.
Because Sims' victims were black Americans their stories remained largely untold. They were not the first or the last black Americans to be subjected to what can only be called torture in the name of scientific investigation. Sims is called "the father of gynecology" and eventually became president of the American Medical Association. He has been immortalized in a monument that still stands in New York's Central Park.
And from a Washington Post review of the book (available on the Amazon site linked above):
The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.
This is just some of the context that Silber provides for the Wright imbroglio, which, as Silber notes, has been very enlightening indeed:
Reverend Wright has performed an invaluable service, for those able to recognize and appreciate it. He has spoken a number of truths of critical importance -- see here and here for some background on that. And he has also caused a number of people to reveal themselves as significant frauds. I refer, of course, to many liberals and progressives, especially white liberals and progressives. When the moment of testing arrived, many liberals and progressives denounced Wright in terms that are indistinguishable from those employed by writers at National Review, or people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. You would think it might trouble these self-proclaimed liberals and progressives that they find themselves in such company, but it doesn't. This is useful information. Thanks, Reverend.
Wright committed the ultimate blasphemy of telling the truth about the American Secret History, to Americans. These people not only can't deal with truth, they are agressively hostile to it, or anything that strips the myth of comforting fatuity off the ugly history we have inherited. Dr King was murdered for doing this.
While Caucasian myself, I've never been one of those terrified by the idea of "Black Rage", which I feel we certainly deserve, but so many ARE, as the orchestrated venom from "progressives" demonstrates. But the feeding frenzy serves the larger goal of the MSM, to destroy the Dim's candidates in the fond hope that a disgusted electorate will flock to the dribbling senility of McCain. If there is an election.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly acculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
One of the most important things that we all have to come to grips with is that RACISM KILLS (as do sexism and homophobia, and all the other oppressions.) If NOLA didn't show the world that for once and for all, it showed us nothing.
So many people don't seem to understand what racism even is. "Are you saying ________ is racist?" "Oh, no, I'd never say THAT." BULLSHIT. Of course ________ is racist. And so is everyone else who can't see that it was the racism (and classism) killing NOLA residents more even than the flood, or who shies away from charging most of our leaders and our whole government, the entire system is racist to the core.
It's as if they think racism (or any of the other oppressions) is necessarily a CONSCIOUS construct: "I really don't like black people -- I think they're inferior, so let's not fund the levees and then someday they may die."
No, perhaps the worst, but certainly the most intransigent aspect of racism is the part(s) based on SUBconscious or even UNconscious beliefs that there are people who simply don't count as much, for whatever reason. But the funny thing is, those people tend overwhelmingly to fall into the oppressed groups. "Oh, it's only black folk (so who cares?)," or "Oh, it's only poor folk (who are lazy and therefore deserve what they get) and old people (past their prime and useless) anyway."
The US is a nation born of genocide, suckled on slavery, and weaned on apartheid, and the weaning process has been largely confined to a bottle at board meetings.
And of course the sin, in the eyes of the white and affluent, is not the racism itself, but being reminded of it.
To be fair, it is so deeply ingrained that most do not even realize it, and their indignation is quite sincere when they insist that they are not a bit racist, some of their best friends are black, and they (or their parents) even marched in Selma.
It has to do with some fucked-up middle class liberal-elite culture of fucked-up white people striving and succeeding and living a fucked-up so-called lifestyle and being complete assholes wasting all of our time and making everyone around them miserable.
It doesn't take years of study, or deep understanding, or special knowledge, or the right guru, or the right theories.
Just look around everyday, all day, everywhere you go. And it doesn't take baby steps, we aren't on the path to anything, we aren't getting there, we aren't improving and all of the rest of that drama.
It isn't difficult, it isn't hard to understand, it isn't arcane or esoteric. The hard, miserable work, the really difficult, soul-smashing thing to do, is to keep participating in this ongoing and omnipresent and insane discussion going on all the time by the upwardly mobile good people. It takes a huge amount of thought, time, and energy; it is immensely unpleasant and stressful, to play along and keep propping up an insane world view..... It only sounds weird, or difficult to fathom or grasp, because we are embedded in an ongoing insane set of social interactions.
Modern liberalism is occupying the space where the Left should be, confusing and misleading people, steering people away from accurate perceptions and clouding their minds, preventing them from asking the right questions because they think they already have the answers. That is dead wood that needs clearing. If we are willing to kick over the beehive of modern liberalism you will see the true face and the true nature of the ruling class war against the people with crystal clarity. As it is, we can't even see the enemy now. We are looking out the tent flap watching for the approach of those dreaded right wingers, and the enemy is behind us right in our own tent.
“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
I don't see how Arthur Silber can call himself an "Anarchist" and then speak so rapturously about Reverend Wright whose views I think Patrick Martin of WSWS describes quite accurately as:
an eclectic mixture of black NATIONALISM [my emphasis], radical criticism of US foreign policy and conspiracy theories, with a dollop of anti-Semitism—or at least tolerance for the anti-Semitism of figures like Farrakhan—thrown in.
I don't believe it's wise to jump in the corner of every big mouth who spouts a little truth in the MSM (as superficialy refreshing as it is to hear). In fact I'd be very wary of anyone given the megaphone. I'd be asking "Why would the MSM let a guy like this--a suppossed truth teller--have his say when their whole mission statement is to lie to protect the corporate powers that be?"
At best Wright is saying nothing Floyd and Silber haven't been saying (without all the religion) for years. At worst, by giving any edge at all to "Afrinicty" as he calls it, and by giving a huge edge to religion, he's dicing up people along dangerous lines. the working people of this country need not to see themselves as black, white or christian, they need to see themselves as--working people.
What Wright has done is simply to tell the truth about America's history and its present government. He does that within the context of the Christian faith because that's his job. I don't share that faith or need it to bolster my moral judgment, but a majority of Americans claim to do so. I wonder how many white Christian pastors commended his words to their congregations or even discussed his understanding of the Christian gospel respectfully? My guess is that it was a very small minority.
One thing we all should learn from Wright, Silber and Floyd is that we cannot claim to love our country while denying its history, refusing to rage against the obvious crimes of our current government, or believing in the pipe dream of change through the ballot box.
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