The saddest story written about the United States

Buchanan's ascendancy boded well
for the forces of resistance in
the Southern Democracy - and it
boded even better when the new
President began selecting a heav-
ily pro-Southern cabinet . . and
it would wreck the nation. It be-
gan with the momentous judicial
ruling about an obscure Missouri
slave, Dred Scott . .

The saddest story ever written about

the United States is the one the na-

tion keeps on writing, of its failure

to vanquish slavery. I cite historian

Sean Wilentz's prelude to the infamous

Supreme Court case which shattered the

unstable, degenerate truce between the

slave states and the free, not for the

vitality of that lie but, today, for 

its manifestation of bigotry's endur-

ing corruption of American government.

In a masterpiece of journalistic tim-

ing, Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman

of The New York Times track today the

very zombie of that corruption, to a

courtship between an American President

and a Supreme Court Justice which mir-

rors precisely the meddling by James

Buchanan in the precipitation and the

writing of the Dred Scott decision,

detailed by Wilentz at pp 707-715 in

his Bancroft Prize-winning The Rise of

American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln.

Already we all had read, the identical

denials of the Dred Scott case in the

horrid handiwork of our zealot of the

day, Samuel Alito. Lipton and Haberman

pull back the poultice of judicial re-

view, itself, in tracking the hand of

politics in the temptation of judges.

Yesterday we admitted a putrescence to

savor, once it had dried. It never dries.

It suppurates like the wound of Philoc-

tetes, fulminating now from the throat

of our own President of the slave states.

Why seek his monument? It's omnipresent,

he is but its momentary embodiment.