Obituary of the Republican Party

As originally published July 15th 2005

A popular political party that rose to tremendous power in the 20th century, the Republican Party redefined the nation’s political agenda and dramatically reshaped the role of government in the private lives of its citizens.

The resilience of the party was observed throughout such morally testing times as the Nixon resignation and the Iran-Contra affair hearings. The party was symbolized by an elephant and possessed the animal-like quality of stubbornness that was often imitated but never duplicated.

Placing an inordinate amount of “political capital” in an oft repeated but rarely defined term known as “values,” the contradiction between the party’s actions and its rhetoric on the subject ultimately lead to its demise. The beginning of the end started on November 7th, 2000 with a great revolutionary crisis that eventually caused the party to wind up on the ash heap of history.

The party is survived by 62,040,610 bewildered citizens. Eventually those that supported the party came to learn of its great hypocrisy and strict adherence to its single tenet of profit and power before country.

The beginnings of the schism which ultimately lead to an unrepairable fracture of the party was fostered by the group’s recruitment of corporations and the religious right, whose competing interests and dogmas were too diametrically opposed for a public ultimately concerned with political pragmatism. The final shot to the great political beast was administered by the ideologue and capitalist President George W. Bush, who embodied what the party had morphed into, from a pragmatic organization into the world’s biggest corporate and religious special interest group.

Bush, while leading the party towards the “ash heap,” never came to realize that his wanton lust for power and profit would never allow his moral motivations to be ratified. Some claim that this internal tug-of-war was created by Bush’s political master, Karl Rove; conclusions cannot be easily drawn except to say that Rove’s obvious Machiavellian machinations lead a majority of the public to question the validity of their initial judgment that the party and its leaders were trustworthy. In fact, while many of the “religious right” claimed that there did indeed exist a morally unambiguous truth, their observations of the Bush administration and the Republican Party lead them to believe that truth as the party observed it was malleable and justice would only be doled-out to those who dare question the right of the ruler to rule.

At a time when the party held its greatest political power, a small minority was calling for a return to the moderation that they believed the party once stood for. Unfortunately, the voices of the reasonable were drowned out by those that claimed that the results of the elections were enough for the party to forsake respect for the truth.

The Democratic party issued the following statement,
“We offer our condolences to those unsuspecting souls that were blindsided by these events. You are in our thoughts and our prayers and we wish you the best.

The Republican Party was a fierce political adversary and the competitor in all of us will miss their fighting spirit. In years past the Republican Party has tried to keep us honest, sometimes more so than we tried to keep ourselves. For this we thank them for their shining example of what becomes of a party that fails to turn that discerning eye inward to introspectively correct faults and remain humble.

The example that has arisen out of the ashes could not be clearer. Whatever organizations come to represent the disparate groups affected by these events will be better off for it. Homage, no matter how bizarre, must be paid posthumously to the Republican Party for allowing this much needed evolution and for this we again thank them.”

Services will be held at the Lincoln Memorial at 900 Ohio Drive, S.W. Washington, DC 20024. Memorial donations may be made to Amnesty international, Children’s Defense Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, NAACP, the United Nations, Sierra Club, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Public Broadcasting Service.

Cannibals’ Ball

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, the stories still the same, the rationalization of what should be a shame.

Wouldn’t it be nice if propagandists were so bold as to tell you in the opening line of their books what they were honestly trying to accomplish? If George Fitzhugh was so honest to do so in his book Cannibals All it might have looked like the opening line to this little ditty. Alas, one can find Fitzhugh’s true message by digging through the lines of inanity.

A purely superficial critique of Fitzhugh’s book may include the observation that while Fitzhugh starts out by convincing the reader that the writer is going somewhere, he is quickly read as jumping off the deep end after what a modern day psychologist would surely conclude is the reaction of his subconscious mind driving him to the point of hysteria due directly to the obvious contradictions that his conscious mind fails to see when it allows his hand to grab the pen and put these thoughts to paper. For instance, Fitzhugh perceives despotism to be inherent in the Constitution,

“‘ the new governments were self-elected despotisms, and the governing class self-elected despots,”

while he fails to see how despotism is truly inherent in the master/slave relationship.

In fact it is rather easy to destroy Fitzhugh’s arguments for the status quo. Just as he puts so much stock in reframing the argument by ignoring the despotism inherent in his proposals and enhancing it in the democracy that he condemns, he also puts too much stock in his description of the relatively easy going life of the slave and by simply describing how and why he’s wrong in his portrayal weakens if not destroys his entire argument.

However, it must be said that Fitzhugh, if by chance, wasn’t entirely wrong either. It may be hard for the modern reader of Fitzhugh to see any correlation between a slave and a free laborer, after all liberals have been fighting against the likes of people like Fitzhugh for time eternal and at least in this case have been successful in securing what ironically modern conservatives have come to take for granted, such as the 8-hour work day, overtime, workers compensation, workplace safety standards, child labor laws, etc., etc., etc. The fact is that in the day and age of Fitzhugh and prior to these liberal benevolent benefactors, free laborers, including children as young as 5, toiled in conditions at least as bad as those of the slave. As the PBS special on Andrew Carnegie and the “Gilded Age” points out,

“While the rich wore diamonds, many wore rags. In 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families earned less than $1200 per year; of this group, the average annual income was $380, well below the poverty line. Rural Americans and new immigrants crowded into urban areas. Tenements spread across city landscapes, teeming with crime and filth. Americans had sewing machines, phonographs, skyscrapers, and even electric lights, yet most people labored in the shadow of poverty.”

Yet Fitzhugh’s description of what it was like for a slave would make almost anyone living in a tenement wonder where to sign-up for such a gig. After all as Fitzhugh rosily describes, wouldn’t we all like to work less than 9 hours a day, be provided shelter, food and clothing and have holidays, sick days and the Sabbath off? For some of us this isn’t too far from our present reality but as I have already described you only have to thank a liberal. Even still, to neglect that Fitzhugh’s description of free laborers, at least in part, prevails for many millions of workers in this country today, would be to discount the truth of the matter in much of the same way that Fitzhugh is guilty of,
“We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so; for, whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploitate them. The free laborer must work or starve.”

Additionally, Fitzhugh is partially correct in pointing out that free laborers are,
“‘more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.”

Fitzhugh is only partially correct in his characterization of free labor slaves as being “more of a slave than the Negro.” Though it would never have occurred to Fitzhugh to do so and would have run entirely against his conservative philosophy, the act of simply asking a slave what his life was really like would be sufficient in utterly destroying Fitzhugh’s argument. Since the modern United States are thankfully lacking for slaves we can still lob Fitzhugh’s argument atop the ash heap of history merely by describing how the life of a slave truly was in opposition to Fitzhugh’s cheery and almost entirely fictional portrayal. In the book Charles Ball, The Life of an American Slave written in 1859, we at least come to understand, albeit academically, what the life of a slave was truly like.

The book describes a life filled with endless toil, violence and beatings, rape, hunger and the forced dissolution of families, which doesn’t exactly jive with Fitzhugh’s description of the south as upholding,

“Love and veneration for the family is with us not only a principle, but probably a prejudice and a weakness”

It would seem to the modern reader that “prejudice” and “weakness” are all Fitzhugh and his ilk are capable of communicating.

Charles Ball describes what the life of a slave was truly like in the south that supposedly had “love and veneration for the family,”
“My story is a true one, and I shall tell it in a simple style. It will be merely a recital of my life as a slave in the Southern States of the Union - a description of Negro slavery in the “model Republic.”

My grandfather was brought from Africa and sold as a slave in Calvert County, in Maryland. I never understood the name of the ship in which he was imported, nor the name of the planter who bought him on his arrival, but at the time I knew him he was a slave in a family called Maud, who resided near Leonardtown. My father was a slave in a family named Hauty, living near the same place. My mother was the slave of a tobacco planter, who died when I was about four years old. My mother had several children, and they were sold upon master’s death to separate purchasers. She was sold, my father told me, to a Georgia trader. I, of all her children, was the only one left in Maryland. When sold I was naked, never having had on clothes in my life, but my new master gave me a child’s frock, belonging to one of his own children. After he had purchased me, he dressed me in this garment, took me before him on his horse, and started home; but my poor mother, when she saw me leaving her for the last time, ran after me, took me down from the horse, clasped me in her arms, and wept loudly and bitterly over me. My master seemed to pity her; and endeavored to soothe her distress by telling her that he would be a good master to me, and that I should not want anything. She then, still holding me in her arms, walked along the road beside the horse as he moved slowly, and earnestly and imploringly besought my master to buy her and the rest of her children, and not permit them to be carried away by the negro buyers; but whilst thus entreating him to save her and her family, the slave-driver, who had first bought her, came running in pursuit of her with a raw-hide in his hand. When he overtook us, he told her he was her master now, and ordered her to give that little Negro to its owner, and come back with him.

My mother then turned to him and cried, “Oh, master, do not take me from my child!” Without making any reply, he gave her two or three heavy blows on the shoulders with his raw-hide, snatched me from her arms, handed me to my master, and seizing her by one arm, dragged her back towards the place of sale. My master then quickened the pace of his horse; and as we advanced, the cries of my poor parent became more and more indistinct - at length they died away in the distance, and I never again heard the voice of my poor mother. Young as I was, the horrors of that day sank deeply into my heart, and even at this time, though half a century has elapsed, the terrors of the scene return with painful vividness upon my memory. Frightened at the sight of the cruelties inflicted upon my poor mother, I forgot my own sorrows at parting from her and clung to my new master, as an angel and a saviour, when compared with the hardened fiend into whose power she had fallen. She had been a kind and good mother to me; had warmed me in her bosom in the cold nights of winter; and had often divided the scanty pittance of food allowed her by her mistress, between my brothers, and sisters, and me, and gone supperless to bed herself. Whatever victuals she could obtain beyond the coarse food, salt fish and corn bread, allowed to slaves on the Patuxent and Potomac rivers, she carefully, distributed among her children, and treated us with all the tenderness which her own miserable condition would permit. I have no doubt that she was chained and driven to Carolina, and toiled out the residue of a forlorn and famished existence in the rice swamps, or indigo fields of the South.” (Ball, 10-12)

The problem for Fitzhugh is not only in his mischaracterizations of slavery but also in his haste to reframe the argument he neglects to see that we do not have to make a choice between slavery or free labor slavery. That’s the beauty of living in a country that derives its governing power by the consent of the governed but Fitzhugh is almost entirely blind to this reality. Workers and voters can and did unite to create the conditions that negate Fitzhugh’s argument.

Additionally, the fact that free laborers lived difficult lives tantamount in many ways to the lives of slaves, in no way lends credibility to Fitzhugh’s argument. Both systems were inherently evil and bad for human beings. Fitzhugh’s attempt to justify the southern system by basically saying that the northern system was more evil is simply bad logic and childish form of debate.

Nonetheless, this is why “the show never ends.” The iniquitous will always try to rationalize their actions through cliche’ excuses. Fitzhugh’s legacy, if anything, is a case in point of how ordinary people should never allow self-ordained know-it-alls to despotically command the lives of others whether they be slave owners or capitalists. However, the truth is that while modern elites may pick on an easy target like George Fitzhugh the masters of capitalism have countless numbers of Fitzhugh’s that often go without criticism and indeed to the opposite extreme of praise. The quote of the Christian builder in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives is as applicable to the capitalist creator of the tenement as it is to the slave owner,

“How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?”

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