What, to the American slave, is the ...

Even a casual visitor to this blog would have noticed the pinned blog-post on the right: How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

In that post, which was one heck of an educational lesson for me, I quoted Frederick Douglass:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The 4th of July is a symbol. As much as the flag is a symbol. Or the national anthem.

Douglass's protest lives on even now because white supremacy has not gone away.  In fact, white supremacists have been able to even get one of their own in the Oval Office!

In an interview with the New Yorker's editor, Hillary Clinton has a lot to say about trump, to whom the GOP loyalists and bible-thumping Christians, including past commentators at this blog, flocked in the millions.

She castigates Trump for inflaming and giving “permission” to misogynists and racists. “Those attitudes have never gone away,” she told me. “But we had successfully—and this is part of the role of civilization—we had rendered them unacceptable: being an overt racist, being an overt misogynist, saying the terrible things that Trump said about immigrants or Muslims. All of that was not political correctness. It was respect. It was tolerance. It was acceptance. But there was a growing resentment, anger, that came to full flower in this election. . . . The Internet has given voice to, and a home for, so many more people. And so with Trump to light the match, from the first day of his campaign to the last, there was a sense of acceptance, liberation, empowerment for these forces.”

The racist lit another flame by attacking black athletes who channeled Douglass--they did not stand for the national anthem.

In response, players, activists, and commentators alike want to remind the fascist that we are well past the days of the white plantation owner telling blacks what to do.

We’re not on the plantation anymore Chump. There will be no “buck breaking” out here. Fingers on the hand form a fist. #TakeAKnee ‘til free.

— jesse Williams. (@iJesseWilliams) September 23, 2017

Or, here is the NY Times columnist, Frank Rich:

This isn’t complicated: To Trump, NFL players are slaves with no right to challenge their masters (and his friends), the plantation owners.

— Frank Rich (@frankrichny) September 24, 2017

Of course, fascists love to wrap themselves up with the flag and demand unquestioning obedience to the national symbols.  The proto-trump in the old country--modi--did that a few months ago when he and his minions mandated that moviegoers stand in attention to the national anthem prior to the movies.  My friend and her daughter were in the tiny minority who protested.  Of all things, women daring to protest.  How dare they, eh!  They were whisked off to the police station.

modi and trump have fucked up things so badly that it will take generations to recover from them.  The list of charges against the 63 million keeps getting longer and longer.

I will wrap this up with one of my old favorite poems.  By e.e. cummings :

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water