America is not some fragile thing

Archbishop Demetrios of America—that's his real title!—with Representative John Lewis. If you think this is not a great country you're crazy. Via Esperinos.

Well, that speech certainly does it for me. (If you haven't watched it, a happy place to do it is chez SmartyPants.) I'm not going to start agreeing with President Obama about everything that he thinks needs to be done or the way to do it, because, as he might say himself, that's not America. Right? But I'm really glad to belong to the same party as he does, and proud (and as startled now as seven years ago) that he leads it, and more hopeful than I have been most of the time that in the medium-to-long run his presidency will have made a truly important and fine difference to our peculiar, excessive, but lovable country.

It may seem a little comical to watch the president who insisted so notoriously from the start on his "belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" taking such a strong look at the America of half a century ago and the Selma heroes we're celebrating this weekend:

Back then, they were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse –- they were called everything but the name their parents gave them.  Their faith was questioned.  Their lives were threatened.  Their patriotism challenged. And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place?  

I was a little taken aback by that at first. Every crime he mentions as imputed to civil rights leaders is one that's been imputed to him. Does that mean he's appropriating to himself that demiurgical status of Dr. King and Mrs. Parks? No, I think it serves to remind us how that particular line of calumny and threat isn't at all new, but a diabolical persistence over the 50 years. They did say Dr. King wasn't a Christian and didn't love America, all the time.

And let us note, by the way, that the racism aspect is only part of it; there's also the conservatism in the strict sense of the term, the idea that if you love America you should stop complaining about it, because the Quality can decide what is and what isn't a problem, and there's no need for you ordinary folk to trouble your tiny brains. Not so, says Obama, the real, original American patriotism is a progressive patriotism,

the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths.  It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo.  That’s America. 

And he instantiates it, as appropriate in the Selma commemoration, in the terms of the story of American racism:

To deny this progress, this hard-won progress -– our progress –- would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better. Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that Ferguson is an isolated incident; that racism is banished; that the work that drew men and women to Selma is now complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the “race card” for their own purposes.  We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true.  We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. 

Bipartisanship is a cynical joke most of the time, but not to Obama. When we talk about Selma, we're talking about voting rights, and he wanted to stress what an American as opposed to partisan movement the work for voting rights has been. Tears really came to my eyes, and kind of stayed there for the duration:

The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic efforts.  (Applause.)  President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office.  President George W. Bush signed its renewal when he was in office.  (Applause.)  One hundred members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right to protect it.  If we want to honor this day, let that hundred go back to Washington and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore that law this year.  That’s how we honor those on this bridge.

Of course it did not have that effect on some, such as Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who

called Obama’s comparison of the legacy of the march to the need to renew the Voting Rights Act “a political statement.”

That would be the same Jeff Sessions who mounted fake voter fraud cases, so lacking in evidence as to be virtually unprosecutable, as an Alabama US attorney in the 1980s, with such egregious unreconstructed hostility to voting rights—

labelled the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "communist-inspired". Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people."

In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. [DOJ official Gerald] Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases.

If that weren't enough, a black former assistant US attorney, Thomas Figures, testified that Sessions had called him "boy", and that he had joked about the Ku Klux Klan in ways that implied he wasn't particularly appalled by their appalling tactics.

—that he became the first nominee to a federal district court judgeship since 1958 to be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Commitee (where he now, ironically, serves, getting his revenge by shooting down Obama nominees by the dozen), and I'm sure the first to be rejected on grounds of undisguised racial animus. Or, putting it another way,

RT @theonlyadult .@SenatorSessions The VRA is political? Can't you hide your racism for one fucking day? // no. next question?
— RunTheBallFruitfly (@sherifffruitfly) March 8, 2015

Anxiety to suppress voting rights, such as Senator Sessions has been displaying for 30 years now, and still going strong, is certainly political. Senator Sessions and his party push a list of policies that can't get majority support in this country, though they can often get a majority of the white vote alone, and so they seek to prevail by stopping certain people from voting. That fear of "voter fraud" was a mirage when Sessions started with it at the beginning of his career, and it still is; but efforts to keep black people out of the voting booth, going back to Reconstruction, keep on. Anxiety to increase the number of citizens who take the trouble to vote can be nonpartisan, even though we understand it tends to favor the Democrats at the moment. (I love the story of the greatest of all Conservatives, Benjamin Disraeli, pushing universal male suffrage in the Reform Act of 1867 with the thought that being more radical than the Liberals was worth the gamble. He lost the next election, but he was right, it was worth it.)

I have a new appreciation for what Obama meant with that looking-forward-not-looking-back meme. Not that you shouldn't learn from history—we must!—but that you shouldn't in a sense waste time litigating it. In a literal sense, as far as the specific crimes of the Bush administration went, and the banksters of 2008: he didn't want to prosecute them.

He did want to respond to them: he wanted to outlaw torture, end the unwarranted surveillance of US persons (I know some of you think it hasn't ended, but I think you're reading the evidence wrong), establish a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop banks from acting as loan sharks, and all the other little pieces down to the reconstruction of a CIA under executive control (we'll have to wait and see how that one works). He's certainly the only US president who has ever signed away executive power. I think he didn't see how taking all those bad people to court would advance those aims (he might have felt differently if he, or Holder, had been more confident the cases would win; Holder, I believe, really hates to take a case that's not a winner), and it's the aims he cared about.

He loves visiting history, but he doesn't want to live there. Sessions does—let him! Obama wants to pick up understanding, and project it into the future.

Can we survive AP US History? Probably, except maybe for Oklahoma:

That’s what America is.  Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others.  (Applause.)  We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past.  We don’t fear the future; we grab for it.  America is not some fragile thing. 

If John Lewis can endure the touch of George W. Bush's hand, I'm not saying I could do that myself, but I have to respect it. Gerald Herbert/AP.