Black Republican

I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
-George Bernard Shaw



What if Barack Obama wasn’t the first black president? What if he was the second?

What if I told you the Republican Party had a universally-respected, erudite black man courting them for their nomination who enjoyed a razor thin edge over Clinton and was ahead of all his opponents? They’d be crazy not to pick him, right?

(Remember, we’re still in hypothetical.)

This black man was just young enough to project vigorousness, but with wisdom that far exceeded his years. He served with distinction in Vietnam. He had national security experience in the deified Reagan White House. He usually had something generous to say and when he didn’t, he kept his mouth shut.

Sounds bulletproof, right? It is, so long as you’re not being shot in the back.

He wasn’t far enough to the right on abortion, gun control and civil rights for the newly minted Faustian contract with America, so he had to be taken down. But how? You can’t assault him to his face and you can’t question his patriotism. This is a man who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest rank one can achieve in the Armed Services.

Instead, the fix was in like this: Purple Heart, Bronze Star and multiple Distinguished Service medals (2 for the Army, 4 from the Defense Department) notwithstanding, Colin Powell was deemed a “milicrat”, that is to say, a paper-pusher, just with a different color suit. I wonder how it felt to be Colin Powell, to hear from people that had multiple draft deferments with no military experience that he was a glorified middle-manager.

To be fair, that charge has the élan (sorry, wrong elan) of the chicken-hawks. It’s factually, intellectually and truthfully wrong, but what takes it over the top is not what the slur is, but how it’s expressed. It’s dismissive in a way that utilizes a populist and class-ist rhetoric that hides just how sanctimonious and silly the statement is.

Colin Powell wasn’t a man who served in Vietnam, winning multiple citations for bravery and dedicated his youth to the service, he’s actually like your narcissist corporate shark boss, so went the line from the religious right.

The real despicable thing was the allegation of mental illness. But wait, you say. I’ve never heard of Colin Powell ever having a mental illness. That would have come up again, like when he was Secretary of State, right?

Well, yes. But it wasn’t Powell that was being accused. It was his wife.

His wife, who was not out on the campaign trail, not hustling for attention. His wife, who was raising two kids at the time. His wife, who takes medication for depression. To keep Colin Powell out of the race, the rightest of right wing, back in 1996, sent the message that if you keep going, we will make it personal and we will make it bloody. Powell would drop out of the race soon afterwards, claiming “he didn’t have the stomach” for politics and he was right.

It still begs the question, though. What if?

How would the political landscape in 2009 be different if the self-proclaimed Party of Lincoln was the first one to nominate a black man for POTUS? How would the political landscape be different 20 years from now when little kids grow up and the party animal they affiliate with is the elephant and not the donkey?

It’s not that the Republicans or the Democrats (or any party, for that matter) is the party of the future, but that in 1995 and 1996, the Republicans revealed their commitment to be the party of the past, which in a bit of black humor, would carry them surprisingly far into the future.

Cue 2008. Powell, after having his legacy and professional reputation destroyed by Bush’s War on Terror, had stayed quiet during the presidential campaign, not stumping for anyone and keeping a low profile. And then it’s announced that he’s going on Meet the Press, most commentators speculating he’s finally going to make an endorsement in the race.

He endorses Obama and as soon as he does so is branded a traitor to the Republican Party by the blogs, but the blogs were just in the numbers game anyway, they’re tangential at the moment. They missed the part where Powell speaks generously about McCain, a friend, and says that it’s lack of respect for the people surrounding McCain that led him to endorse Barack Obama, whom he believes is the right person at the right time to become a transformational figure in American political history. I wonder, though, when Obama was elected did he think, hell, it’s about time, or hell, it’s 12 years too late?

Marathon: The Numbers Game (1 of 13)

I teased the possibility of a series of blogs inspired by Marathon's self-titled record early last month and finally, I have the first of thirteen installments ready for consumption. I've been wondering how to start off the feature and I drew up a couple weak outlines for things that kind of fit the bill, but didn't really ring as closely to the sound of the first song, "Painting By Numbers" as I wanted it to.

Painting By Numbers is a fast number about the money paid for the war in Iraq, with references to the choices made in our pocketbooks and timepieces. "We hold the purse/we hold the reigns/We can deny these spoiled kids their next allowance/but when they start shoving around/like bullies in a playground/we shake our pockets for more change" is the image that stuck out to me, but I couldn't find something that fit it, until three days ago, when I stumbled upon the story of the USS New York. It's a battleship made out of the metal from the attacked World Trade Center, who'se assignment is "terrorist hunting" duties. A picture of the battleship is below.

My knee jerk reaction was that I was incredibly depressed and only after I wrote out my thoughts as to why elsewhere did the parallel for the feature make sense. So. Below is my perspective on the USS New York and how it fits into Marathon's Painting By Numbers.







1) Battleships were designed for ship to ship combat, but since have become prominent in shelling land targets close to the shore. Seeing as naval terrorism is not really used by Al-Qai'da, except against the USS Cole, but that was while it was docked, I don't see the battleship actually going on terrorist hunting missions except to fire off a cruise missile from thousands of miles away.


2) The U.S. response to the attack on New York (from which the metal comes) was to blast Tora Bora back into the Stone Age and then to invade Iraq, causing massive casualties for innocent Iraqis, thousands of American troops dead and those that are still alive suffering from PTSD or lost limbs. In short, the response was wasteful, expensive and in a direction away from the threat. The people who orchestrated the attack are still at large and the only winner were the gigantic defense firms who, with public funding (because the Rumsfeld-era Department Of Defense contracted out just about everything they could) made tons of money making weapons for Americans to use on Iraqis.

They also made money, get this, from the reconstruction of Iraq, since another part of Haliburton and KBR is in disaster management. Shit went bad, and whenever anything blew up or went wrong, they billed the government for it, cost plus. If you're thinking well, Iraq was a fluke because of mitigating factor X, they were also the groups in charge of reconstructing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

So. With the tax dollars given to the defense department, Haliburton and KBR made money three times. First on making the weapons (bought with taxpayer money), second on billing for "defective" equipment (bought with taxpayer money) and third on rebuilding what the weapons had blown up (bought with taxpayer money).

Now with more taxpayer money, the metal is being used in a symbolic rebirth. Great.


3) 40+ years after a retiring president (who was also one of only two five-star generals) warned us about the dangers of a military industrial complex, I see this battleship, called the USS New York as the singular feather in the cap of that same complex.

Why? Because pieces of a shared traumatic experience of the country are being melted down and being used to make a ship which will never fulfill its stated purpose, but instead, go around, at taxpayer expense, protecting the seas (something which hasn't been used in warfare and probably isn't used anymore except as a nebulous place to store nuclear weapons on submarines) as a colossal waste of money, which coincidentally makes money for those same profiteers that were invited in by another President.

Instead of being used for something positive and inclusive, the metal is being used for something wasteful, hollow and ultimately putting more money in the pockets of war profiteers at the expense of the people who were affected by the attack. But there's symmetry: Our response to 9/11 was wasteful, expensive and not addressing the threat so it should make sense that the products from that attack are used for something just was wasteful, expensive and wrongheaded.

And this money comes out of our tax dollars. And this money was allowed, after a fashion, by us. We pass the buck off to the government. I know I did. I trusted George W. Bush. But it's not just trusting Bush in 2003 and 2004. It's in not calling my senator, representative or even getting involved in a meaningful anti-war effort.

It doesn't have to be a bake sale for Amnesty International or putting on a mask and going to a protest, but my shame and culpability comes from something easy: it was as simple as not asking myself the most basic question when I can't get to the bottom of a problem: Who profits?

It's in seeing something my government does, not liking it and figuring well, no one's gonna change it (and I'm powerless to change it), so sitting back and watching clips from the Daily Show to keep myself righteously angry when I'm sitting on my couch at home, tired and not wanting to put in the energy to fight something else. It's that assumption.

The call from President Eisenhower, a man who was at the top of the military food chain before becoming the President of the United States was simple: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Painting By Numbers answers that call. It's sarcastic, humorous and compels, or tries at least, to get the listener to understand that the military fights with our dollars and it's up to us to reign it in by taking nothing for granted (actual quote from that same Eisenhower speech) and using the levers of power and influence we have access to. Ugh. That assumption that I can't change what's going on is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy that odds are, is counted on by the military-industrial complex I say I can't stand.

There's a numbers game and it goes on in the pocketbooks of Congresspeople, and I'm not going to deny that. I'm going to lose that numbers game, always. I acknowledge that, but that's not the only game in town. Maybe there's another citywide organization that's doing something that I can join or add to.

Some people can be bought off, some can't, but the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened if everyone sat at their TVs and waited for the perfect opportunity to present itself. It wasn't all marches on Selma. It was getting together with seven or eight or other people and figuring out how and where to protest effectively between flashpoints.

It's up to us and Painting By Numbers reminds the listener of that drain on their account that they somehow forget about. The reigns are in our hands. We just have to pull back.