Free at Last?
If you ever want to have some fun, ask a group of U.S. college students to guess which historical document says that “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” any form of government that is destructive to them and that, when a form of government “evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” If they’re like my Social Change students back at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, they’ll guess the Communist Manifesto. If you then quote the famous phrase from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program — “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — they will tell you that comes from the U.S. Constitution!
Those first quotes are, of course, from the Declaration of Independence. When I used to do a talk radio show on WCBN-FM/Ann Arbor, I loved to do holiday shows. For the Fourth of July, I liked to read and discuss the implications of the Declaration, taking a break to play Jimi Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner. The most interesting phrases for me are “or abolish” and “it is their duty” because even lefty liberals who like to cite the Declaration tend to be unwilling to contemplate the idea of abolishing what has turned out to be a form of government that definitely does not meet the needs of the people and nobody — not even puppet-wielding protesters at anti-war parades — seems to take seriously the duty to overthrow a despot like Bush.
I’ll never forget the day he was inaugurated after the bloodless coup in which his father’s appointees on the Supreme Court handed him the presidency by ruling that Florida had to stop counting the votes cast by its citizens. Now, of course, it was the duty of the congress to refuse to confirm a president who had not been elected but only the Congressional Black Caucus made even a token attempt to resist the coup. Similarly, the Inauguration day protesters who lined the streets confined themselves to mere symbolic shows of dissent. It was a surreal day here at the sanctuary, where we were dealing with a deluge of inexplicable deaths (blood tests and necropsies never did reveal the cause), coming inside for a break only to see the sickening spectacle of people pretending to resist the takeover of their government.
What if all of those tens of thousands of Inauguration Day protesters, instead of holding silly signs like “Bush is bad for women” — as if his platform, rather than the fact that he stole the election, were the biggest problem — had laid their bodies in the path of the motorcade, making it clear that they would use all nonviolent means necessary to impede the installation of the Bush regime? What if their alleged representatives in congress had refused to certify the election and refused to submit any legislation for the signature of a self-proclaimed president who had not been elected? What if all of the millions people who knew they had been disenfranchised by the installation of the Bush regime with the collusion of congress stopped paying taxes?
You don’t have to be an anarchist like me to see the seeds of the post 9-11 power-grabs of the Bush regime in the passivity of the loyal opposition that day. As Frederick Douglas said, “find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.” The Bush regime learned that U.S. citizens will submit to the complete erasure of self rule as long as they are allowed to make jokes about the president and march around in circles carrying signs.
In Zanzibar that same year, by the way, citizens responded to election fraud more effectively, rioting until the government agreed to hold the election again. Speaking of effective activism, I wonder what all of those liberals who decry direct action that involves property damage think about the Boston Tea Party? Was that, too, unconscionable violence? What about Harriet Tubman, who broke all of those locks around the wrists of enslaved Africans? Was she, too, a domestic terrorist?
I’ve got to stop asking questions and go outside, where Deb (of Invisible Voices) and Kate are spending their Independence Day helping out the liberated chickens here at the sanctuary. (They brought me some vegan cupcakes from a bakery in DC!)
Let me leave you in the capable hands of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jimi Hendrix. Here’s a mashup made by the UK DJ known as Bak3rs Choic3 called “Somewhere I Dream.” It’s the MLK “I have a dream” speech backed by Hendrix playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as an electric guitar solo. It’s beautiful.
