While we were out

Contemplating the racist, xenophobic, scabrous and, at long last, candidly neo-Confederate movement styling itself as a Tea Party, is not even remotely an inclination of this page. More and more, how-ever, I find the positive, progressive pages of which I know - The Slab and Little Augury, notably excepted - failing our obligation to readers whose education we know to have been so castrated of history as to impose a duty of reasonable care. 

This movement has gained possession of the only political party which stands to benefit from the incumbent President's manifestly deserved unpopularity. Not constituting any form of Hobson's choice, yet poised for unprecedented monstrosities, the Republican Party now openly vows to ruin all it can of the United States in which the pre-Reaganite generations grew up. This party, wholly indebted to the un-Reconstructed lower middle class and ignorant nouveaux riches beneficiaries of oil prices and the Clinton boom, detests that country; and that country, saddled with an Executive of shocking frailty, deserves defense by comment now, more than ever since the centuries of African enslavement.

And to think, today's posting was to have been on the loveliness of a sunrise glass of orange juice in Ocho Rios, but for the Collect of the Day in The New York Times. Merely to mention Jamaica, of course, is to revive memories of Nancy and Ronnie's first-ever State Dinner (and weren't they darling), fulsomely bestowed upon Jamaica's new prime minister, Edward Seaga, after bitter years of Kissinger's covert war on Michael Manley's progressive government. How a Jamaican could dine at the White House to celebrate the political cleansing of his nation, with that amiable instigator of so many Central American assassinations and massacres, is rather beyond the ordinary conception of diplomacy - unless, needless to say, he were ours.

But I stray, into well-tilled fields of unanimous consent, in what I supposed must be an entry of argumentation. Now, exploiting the lust of its base for hallucination, leading Republicans are demanding, inter alia, (a) the closure of a Court (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) whose founding is unrepealable, and (b) the removal of equal rights to matrimony from the jurisdiction of any judiciary, inscribed in the Constitution as one of the few conclusive and responsible outcomes of the defeat of slaveholding secession. 

"Grounds for celebration," you say; and I'm not far behind. Fewer laws, happier parties, after all. It used to be, of course, that the Party of xenophobia and bigotry would campaign on such dementia to rally its base, and then govern dimly within the purview of preced-ent and pragmatism. No longer. Down the road, we have a zealot dandy in Richmond who is running this Party in the House, to destroy the United States as the creature of the Union that he loathes. I know him, and he knows I know him. His protectors read this page. (Hi, guys; country ham biscuits are on the porch). What they say, they mean to do.

Now, of course, the removal of the Equal Protection of the laws from the purview of the Yankee judiciary really can not be done, without precipitating a crisis foretold in Marbury v. Madison, settling judicial review in this country for centuries. But what do these ignorant thugs have to fear; the less one knows, the more one can fantasise. And they fantasise very, very big. It's wondrously sweet of them to credit homophiles with the keys to their kingdom, when before it was card-carrying Communists, and before that, organised wage-earners. But you know, they don't care what they fear, so long as they can claim vengeance.

This calls for some dynamite orange juice, and the laving wash of the supplest tides. But let's drive a belated stake through the depravity of the Confederacy, first. Then we can find our peace with Jamaica. You and I, if we know anything, know this will not come cheap. How much, then, we can risk by not resisting these people, is what we can afford to lose of ourselves. They are the Party defeated at Appomattox. They are the Party which exulted in the gay men's health crisis as their own vengeance. They are the Party reduced to using us to revive their humiliation. We embody their unadmitted damnation by history. Let them see us, everywhere.