This Slave Country

 

One hundred and sixty-one years ago tomorrow a condemned man rose to address the courtroom in Charles Town, Virginia. He had been convicted of insurrection, treason - against the Commonwealth of Virginia, mind, not the U.S. government; this was a state, not a federal, court - and murder.

In his short speech, which included a surprisingly large amount of whining about the unfairness of the verdict and the amount of injustice done him, he included this:

"I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done"

 And with that he was taken from there to the place from whence he came where, after a month-long hiatus required by Virginia law, he was taken to the place of execution where the Commonwealth hung John Brown by the neck until he was dead. Whether the God he claimed was on his side has mercy on his soul, only he and he alone knows.

My understanding is that Brown was a symptom rather than a cause of the war that came soon thereafter. The country had been long divided on the question of chattel slavery. What Brown's aborted rebellion, trial, and execution did was simply push Americans further down the road towards war over that question.

What Brown did  was to help focus people's minds on the problem of a nation "conceived in liberty" that treated people that were born, lived, and died within that nation as property at worst and three-fifths of a human being at best.

Before Brown it was much more possible to compromise and prevaricate and elide that problem.

After Brown?

Not so much.

Not that you couldn't if you tried. And lot of people did; people are like that. We're good at doing everything we can to avoid looking straight at any really difficult, troubling, expensive, and (possibly or even probably) insoluble problem. Many, perhaps most, of us prefer the comfortable, happy lie to the unpleasant truth.

But Brown, like the harsh light on an aging actor's face, made that truth a lot harder to evade.

Donald Trump is the John Brown of our generation.

Personally he is as unlike Brown as a man could be; uninvolved, dispassionate, carnal, greedy, and foolish instead of driven, tempestuous, prophetic, and - perhaps - nearly mad.

But he exists in the same position in our lives as Brown did in the lives of his contemporaries. Trump is the balefire that throws an unforgiving light on the Great Issue of our time; the Conservative Question.

As slavery was in 1859, the current "problem" - American "conservatism" - is not a new one. It is rooted in the troubles of the Great Depression, grew to maturity through the Taft years of Republican exile, was watered by the Birchers and Goldwater and Wallace campaigns, bore the poison fruit of Watergate and Iran-contra, and burst into full flower with the rise of Limbaugh and Hate Radio, FOX, and the Wingnut Newsosphere that allowed the sort of people who were terrified and loathed Brown to be terrified of fictitious BLM terrorists and ANTIFA and Mexican rapists. To have not just their own opinions but their own facts.

Until Trump it was possible to pretend that these people were still "Americans", that they still had at least a tenuous link to the promise of this nation, that great promise of "equal justice under law". A promise, mind you, that had been ignored when not openly rejected many times over the history of this country, but still remained on the papers that founded it, in the amendments enacted after the great Treason to try and reform it, in the Civil Rights laws that attempted to force those traitors and their lineal descendants to accept it.

They didn't, not in any real sense, but until Trump we could at least sit next to them and try and ignore the Dixie Swastika patch on their camo jacket while we talked about sports.

But not now.

Trump has liberated them from the need to pretend. From public shame, and the need to hide their open contempt and hatred for "everyone else"; the liberals, the queers, the darkies, the women, the "experts" and eggheads and everyone else who isn't "us" conservatives, "us" Real Americans.

This coming Tuesday some 60 million of these people are going to vote for Trump. I have no idea whether it will be enough to re-elect him, and, frankly, don't really care. A re-elected Trump will likely be the quietus of a true popular democracy in this country. Four more years of Republican rule will do as much as humanly possible to lock in a "conservative" minority rule. 

But that's not the REAL problem

Because even if Trump loses the election - and by "loses" I mean by such an enormous margin that not even the most insane legal and illegal means of overthrowing that popular result will be possible, because you and I know that if it's even close to close the "conservatives" will just go full-on gleichschaltung to seize the nation they believe that they and only they deserve - we're still left where we were after Brown was cut down from the gallows that December. 

The problem will remain. Then, slavery. Now...that there will still be a hard, vicious, irreconcilable, indigestible knot of somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the U.S. public who will burn the statehouse down and sow the ruins with salt before they accept that somewhere, some time, in some library commons room, Bubbles LaRue is hosting Drag Queen Story Hour.

We are a house divided against itself. 

The Right realizes that and plays our politics as if it's true.

Now, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, the choice is on the rest of us; do we continue to pretend otherwise, or do we respond as if those people are, as they say they are, committed to not just our defeat but our destruction? Not just to their triumph but their tyranny? Not just to the advancement of their own causes but the utter ruin of any and all of ours?

To "bind the wounds" of the first Civil War first required four years of hard, bloody, unrelenting war that forced the unconditional surrender of the first "conservative" traitors.

We know that even if their current leaders are defeated at the polls the modern "conservatives" will not surrender. If anything, their fanaticism and lunacy are likely to redouble.

Trump's only accomplishment is to lay that bare, to force the choice upon us as it did on the Americans of Brown's time. 

We cannot remain undecided; we must become all one thing or all the other; we must become as close to the promised nation of equal justice under law as we can, or go back to the Constitution of 1789, to the Three-Fifths Compromise, to the Gilded Age, to the nation of White is Right and the nation of Corporations are People, my friend.

How will we now choose? 

Because there is only one way past the gallows where the body now hangs.

And that way is narrow and steep, and promises nothing but the same hard and bitter choices we faced one hundred and sixty-one years ago.

Because on that morning Brown wrote:

"I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

And he was not wrong. It was, and is, only through that way, only by making those hard choices, purging this land of "conservatism", fighting that fight to the bitter, bloody end, can we hope to see the dawn of that new nation.