Rootsie

reprinted from Counterpunch
http://counterpunch.org/moses10012005.html
     Taking a page from his Book of Cracker Virtues, Texas trained philosopher William Bennett this week performed a little thought experiment where genocide by means of abortion might be used to bring down the crime rate. Of course it is appalling how Bennett's mind plays around with the souls of black folk, one moment imagining a whole peoples aborted, but such is the nature of the souls of white folk, flying right through the concept of genocide without noticing the horrific criminality in that.

In Bennett's concept of the American crime rate, of course, genocide never counts. Neither does theft of labor. With these two great and obvious categories of crime dismissed, the souls of white folk may then be quite easily imagined to have worked their way to Democracy in America by means of honest trade, fair elections, and saintly patience, never bothering no one, and only occasionally dismayed by inappropriate displays of ingratitude.

The logic of the club is how W. E. B. Du Bois once punned it. And everywhere one looks, that logic holds like double epoxy. Of course, the USA Senate is the ultimate club in both senses of the term, with its predictable traditions of genocide, labor theft, war, and today's nominee as Supreme Court Chief Justice who need not even bother to produce his work product as understudy to a civil rights bashing attorney general.

Or how about those grand juries? About half of white America is cheering the Travis County Grand Jury for yesterday's indictment of the House Majority Leader. But where was anybody last month when that same Grand Jury no-billed a white police officer who shot an unarmed Latino in the back? That killing wasn't even considered a tiny bit criminal. And that story barely made state news. But politicians taking money from Sears? My god, that sounds like a felony for sure.

So anyway, thanks again Bill Bennett for teaching your Intro to Cracker Virtues class again this Fall. Your instructions serve as an indispensable refresher course to the criteria of educational excellence that continue to dominate the definition of American intelligence. And your civics of justice remind us what the heart of the American system sounds like as it continues to make such a small world of us all, from Biloxi to Baghdad alike.

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net