A More Perfect Union

Consider the state we are in as a nation. 

National Guard troops have been deployed in two American cities; Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.  Our president has been planning and now threatens to send National Guard troops to Chicago. The reason the President gives for his efforts to federalize the National Guard and deploy soldiers in these American cities is to combat what he describes as rampant crime. His description is not substantiated by facts.

Hearing the news that National Guard troops may be sent to Chicago, the Governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, made a most sobering speech. I quote several excerpts:

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country…

…over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American…

… Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

It is difficult to take in the daily onslaught against representative democracy in our country. It is maddening to watch the presidential power grab taking place as he signs Executive Orders (often illegal) allowed to take effect by a complicit and threatened Republican majority in Congress. 

Feeling powerless to stop the national slide into a white supremacist, would-be evangelical Christian theocracy is a daily burden to bear. It is overwhelmingly outrageous to witness a White House administration that is seeking to take control of the arts, medicine, science, public education, colleges and universities, establish invested interest in corporations, banking, crypto currency, computer chips, all the while deporting law abiding brown people, building a series of prison-like camps, and bullying for a sanitized, error-filled, rewriting of American history. 

To think that this President would be considered worthy of a place on Mount Rushmore (the mountain is too cracked to safely accommodate an additional head) or of receiving a Nobel Prize is indication of a collective civil blindness and a new dark age. 

One of the few methods of coping with the reality of our present national situation has been to read American History. The study enables me to discover that we have not only been in similar conditions before, BUT THAT WE HAVE COME THROUGH THOSE TIMES PROGRESSING TOWARD BEING A MORE PERFECT UNION. There is great hope in this!

Ron Chernow is a remarkably able historian. His books on Washington, Hamilton, and Grant are extraordinary. His most recent work is titled, “Mark Twain.” 

Samuel Clemens – Mark Twain – was born and raised in the pre-civil war South. He reflected the political and racial views of white, Southern planters and a wider culture deeply divided by race and profiting from the enslavement of black people.

But Mark Twain changed not only his mind but also his heart.

Part of Twain’s great change occurred as a result of hearing the great preaching of Henry Ward Beecher and Joseph H. Twichell. They were both, along with many other abolitionist voices, remarkable antidotes to the religious white nationalism endorsing chattel slavery that gripped the Southern economy, mindset, and pre civil war slave trade.

Following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Vice President, Andrew Johnson became President of The United States. Johnson was a racist who sought to overturn the results of the Civil War. He did not support freeing the slaves, approving the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, or the entire effort underway for the Reconstruction of the once slave states.

Chernow publishes Mark Twain’s newspaper piece, “The White House Funeral” that gave an imaginary version of Andrew Johnson’s final speech to his cabinet. In Chernow’s description, the piece was a “savage burlesque” by Twain of Johnson’s presidency. It reads:

My great deeds speak for themselves. I vetoed the Reconstruction acts; I vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau; I vetoed civil liberty; …I vetoed everything and everybody that the malignant Northern hordes approved; I hugged traitors to my bosom; I pardoned them by regiments and brigades…I smiled upon the Ku-Klux, I delivered the Union men of the south and their belongings over to murder, robbery, and arson; I filled the Government offices all over this whole land with the vilest scum that could be scraped from the political gutters and the ranks of the Union haters.

Twain’s President Johnson sounds like the current President we know. Sounds like a present-day pardoner of insurrectionists. Sounds like a present-day leader who would ignore the very Constitution he swore an oath to uphold and defend. Sounds like a description (albeit with updates of names and descriptions of present cabinet secretaries) of a deranged man who rolls out a red carpet for a war criminal and arms American soldiers as they are ordered to patrol American cities and empowered to arrest their fellow citizens.

Johnson and his minions did not win. His vision for America did not prevail. 

I am uplifted by the record that shows that such presidential injustice with twisted religious support does not win.

I am hoping that in our time such history will repeat itself.