Remember Harry. You are not the little Dutch boy…

…and your blog is not a Holy Dam. [pun intended]

Blog posts born of an overactive mind are a pain. I got Rosebud started but went farther afield with it than I intended. I was going to upload it as an incomplete Part 1 and then do the Part 2. Then, of course, I had the Octoroon series to finish and a passel of emails between my Buddy and me on civil rights and then there are all those old posts I promised to write like a series on the teacher’s union and the Edison Schools and then, and then, and…

I’ve got a life to live, a school system to save, and while I’m glad my Buddy keeps my wit sharp I have to put things in focus. His last email that I was charged up to rebut got to his only real argument for not yielding to race hustlers – the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Kapow! Take that Harry. Just now I chortled at the thought of debating that subject ad nauseum. Well Buddy. Your point is this. Never mind that for two hundred years the US refused to treat blacks as equal even after the Civil War. We should start treating them equal now, no special privileges, screw Affirmative Action, insure voter purity by imposing photo identification cards. If poor folks just care enough they can become a success. Nevermind that one in three blacks end up behind bars compared to one in seventeen whites because that’s all the fault of our drug laws. We should go all libertarian and free blacks then we’d have nothing to worry about while saving beaucoup bucks on the cost of imprisoning a greater share of our population than any other country in the world except maybe Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Yeah Buddy. I know I’m putting words in your mouth but I thought it was pretty funny to Google “race hustler” and find it used in some self righteous idiot’s speech at a Republican Lincoln Day Dinner. He was throwing Lincoln’s name around like a cross in a vampire’s face to protect the poor rich Republicans from disgruntled black folks. Talk about a race hustler.

I’ve been keen on Malcolm X’s contemptuous description of racial progress since I read it back about the time the Supreme Court decided the “Loving” case that guaranteed that the South’s laws against interracial marriage could no longer be enforced. X said:

“You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress … No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me.”

Now that’s a man demanding the enforcement of the Equal Protection Clause.

There is another troublesome clause you might remember studying in your Constitutional Law class – “the Elastic Clause.” Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the power to pass all laws necessary and proper for carrying out the enumerated list of powers in the Constitution. I think the Elastic Claus justifies Affirmative Action, considering two hundred years of slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, Lynchings, the wholesale imprisonment of black “vagrants” by selling them to Big Corporations as cheap labor while they served out jail time. That system ended only a little before you were born Buddy. But you want that Equal Protection Clause to protect you from giving their grandchildren any leg up.

Ah, but there I go being the Little Dutch Boy again. I think I’ll stick to handing out my school board business cards to blacks when I see them in passing. According to this recent story in the Trib some of them don’t think they are getting a very fair deal in the Zenith City. I’ll see what elasticity I can apply to their misfortune and hope I don’t undermine the Constitution.

I’m still nursing the book on the Presidents. I’m about 25 pages from the end but I kind of hate finishing it too soon. I’ve gotten those Presidents down pretty well between Van Buren and Buchanan. I decided I wanted to form the pictures of them in my head better so I sketched them out this morning. Pierce is missing on the left because the sketch pad was too wide for my scanner.

He was a winner. He is responsible for the worst of Bleeding Kansas that I studied in Topeka, Kansas when I was in fifth grade. Here’s a picture of good old John Brown reaping Pierce’s whirlwind in the State Capitol. I saw it many times when I was a kid visiting my Dad and my Grandfather George Robb. My Mom was a little girl when John Stuart Curry was painting it.

Malcolm’s nine inch knife is pretty well laid out in this section of the secession resolution from the State of Texas:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.

Hell, this thinking didn’t die easy. I heard Governor George Wallace utter the immortal words, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” on the TV news when I was a kid. I also lived long enough to hear George apologize to blacks for being such a, dare I say it, “race hustler.”

You sent me a paper by a “Darwin professor of Anthropology” to prove that race is a nonsense term. He said, and I agree, “None of the marginal differences between races and ethnic groups warrant the kind of convulsive politics conducted by political protagonists of formalized differences.” I guess you take that to mean we shouldn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause by offering the offspring of ten generations of persecution any redress if we white folks don’t get the same piece of the action.

There’s one problem with the anthropological equality. Some Folks who can see African ancestry in others give the afflicted warning tickets, deny them their vote and resist hiring them. I know that’s not your problem Buddy. If we followed your advice we’d stop throwing people in prison for drug crimes making everything hunky dory. I guess I’ve decided that this is easy for you to say. You’re a defender of the Constitution, you’re an equalitarian. You’d leave three inches of knife in someone’s back.

Oh, I forgot. You want vouchers too. That would take care of everything.

As I told you before. I’m a lousy politician race hustling votes from the four or five percent of black Duluth voters when I could be liberating the white 95% from the unfair little advantages black people get.

Geez. Did I ever enjoy writing that.