This Republic of Undead Norms
The concerted effort to stop the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that those who lose wars, especially civil wars, never stop fighting.
America is many different things to many different people.
This, I believe, is what makes it the land of great contradictions.
It is not a new phenomenon; the country was born that way. Our Founding Fathers, as we are still expected to refer to them, scribbled their signatures below a declaration that stated “all men are created equal.”
A brave move to be sure — everyone knew that if the chips didn’t fall their way, they could be hanged as traitors by the British. Then, 41 of the 56 signers did something that wasn’t brave at all: they went home to their plantations and to their slaves, and lost not a wink over such a supernaturally bizarre contradiction.
I suppose, then, that it should come as no great shock or surprise that Americans can at once be observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and be in open combat to protect voting rights — to, literally, ensure the right to vote and “prevent any changes to voting rules that could discriminate against voters based on race or background, giving voters an equal voice nationwide.”
Protecting the right to vote…in a representative democracy. Let that sink in for a moment.
It would, of course, take a great deal of impertinence to strike down the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and still consider our frame of government a “representative democracy,” although what a country is and what a country says it is are rarely, if ever, thoroughly aligned.
It will however be a downright lie to keep calling the 50 states “The United States of America,” not when 19 — count ’em, 19 — states have as of this writing enacted 33 laws designed to make it that much more difficult for Americans to vote. To make it a crime, in fact, to so much as give water to those waiting in line to vote, as is the case now in Georgia. To make it a crime for social workers to return ballots for the disabled, like it is now in Iowa and Kansas. To make it a crime in Texas to even request a mail-in ballot form.
All this and more because a record-breaking number of Americans did in 2020 what every American has a right to do: vote. Given the election results, and the margins, it’s no wonder one party is doing whatever it can to make it harder for members of the other party to cast a ballot in the future.
What will of course be more accurate is to simply refer to a large part of this nation henceforward as the Confederate States of America because the defeat of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and Freedom to Vote Act will, in ways that are neither too nuanced nor too complex, effectively overturn many of the immediate and not-so-immediate legal outcomes of the American Civil War with regard to what many still regard as the casus belli of the conflict — states’ rights.
Confederates at The Stuckey’s
We took a lot of family vacations when I was a kid.
I would not be surprised to learn that we put at least one million miles on our paneled, Country Squire station wagon, motoring from Chicago to some destination in Florida and back again.
Driving from North to South, one couldn’t help but notice the proliferation of Confederate battle flags on flagpoles, on bumper stickers, on mud guards. You’d see them on bicycles, on cars, on trucks; you’d see them for sale in the Stuckey’s gift shops, along with assorted Civil War trinkets. (When we moved to Houston, we made the same trip to Florida, although the culture shock wasn’t as intense — Confederate paraphernalia was endemic to Texas, much like the heat and humidity.)
One bumper sticker made a lasting impression. It declared: “The South Will Rise Again.” I knew it was a threat, though I didn’t know the reason behind it.
My older siblings helped me understand what it meant, though no one in the car would assure me that the diehards south of the Mason-Dixon and torchbearers of The Lost Cause — that demented rationale designed to ennoble the Confederacy cooked up by those who fought for and supported the South during the Civil War — weren’t still planning on making good on the threat.
Later, I took some solace in the observations of Bruce Catton, who in the last volume of his Civil War trilogy, told readers in so many words to thank their lucky stars that Robert E. Lee was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, for had there been another leader who was less inclined to exhort his soldiers to lay down their arms and call it a day, the rebels would have surely carried on as partisans of “The Cause,” making war on citizens throughout the country, guerilla-style, for years and years to come.
What Catton failed to grasp, and what so many of us are just starting to apprehend, is that those who lose wars, especially civil wars, never stop fighting.
Some could argue that the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, the political sabotage of Reconstruction as Lincoln envisioned it, and all those public monuments to the “glorious dead” of the Confederacy, were an extension of a scaled down, and much more contained war by other means.
The fact that voting rights are even up for debate in 2022, let alone in need of a law to protect them, makes it really, really hard to argue against that point.
This latest battle is just one more sign from the present generation of “Lost Causers” that the South really never fell, that its beliefs and customs — its norms — are alive and well, and that the war goes on.
A Battle of Dreams
Today should be a true holiday — a time to rest and relax; to reflect on and rejoice in everything Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished before he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet at The Lorraine Motel, now home to the National Civil Rights Museum.
Unfortunately, one political party in our two-party system, or “two-party duopoly” as Ralph Nader calls it not incorrectly, is doing its best to make sure today, and every day henceforth is a work day for those who believe in a true representative democracy.
A work day that may never end.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, explains in a recent tweet::
“Republican legislatures are pressing a state-by-state assault on voting rights and fair elections that should trouble anyone who values our democracy. Democrats are meeting them on the frontlines of this assault, to save our democracy for *all* Americans.”
What this means is that Dr. King’s “dream,” made that much more real by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is being beaten back into its former, idealized state; to once again exist only in the imagination.
It also means that the Republicans have a dream of their own: to stop the march of progress, and return to the days of old, the days of Jim Crow. They’re not ashamed to admit that they’re dreaming it; neither are millions of white Americans who have known the privileges of race for so long that, as the line goes, any form of equality feels like discrimination. Many remain blissfully unaware that such white privileges even exist as they have never tasted or felt or seen life in America as a non-white. (They’re like those two fish who don’t know what water is, only in this case privilege is the water.)
Certainly, today feels like a holiday: federal, state, city, and county offices are closed; so are the courts. And the U.S. Post Office will not deliver mail. So, naturally, we think “holiday.”
Whereas it once was a glaring and shameful omission to not commemorate Dr. King in such a way, I admit that it feels even stranger for us to be honoring the great man in a manner that suggests, falsely, that the struggle for racial equality is over and his “dream” is fulfilled, especially now as Jim Crow returns like an undead revenant menacing everything the man fought for and died for.
It’s more than just another in a long line of great American contradictions; this muddies the point and the purpose of today: Dr. King didn’t give his life for a federal holiday in his name. That wasn’t the win, as much as Republicans would like Americans to think so.
The win was and still is equality and justice for all, a goal that remains as elusive now as it did during Dr. King’s lifetime.
Unless those who believe in a more perfect representative democracy, regardless of their party affiliation, can stop a concerted, strategic effort to make it harder and harder for people to vote — and turn what is in every way a full-on, full-blooded last stand of The Lost Cause into its once-and-for-all death rattle — Dr. King’s dream will remain a dream.
And another less human and less humane dream, a nightmare actually, shall become our shared reality.
