Invoking the Declaration of Independence, in order to rationalize as patriotic the call for a violent revolution, is a pathetic old communist trick. The Declaration was written to call into being a new nation, not to destroy that nation.
Quoting from the Declaration of Independence, Clemons demanded that President George W. Bush be removed from office, and suggested that violent means be employed. My response follows.
At first, I thought: Oh, a patriot. And that was your intention. But when you started complaining of the few patriots you had encountered via e-mail, that they were “racist,” “homophobic,” and “nationalist and militaristic,” and you held up illegal immigrants as greater patriots than those who support and defend America, it became clear that you are an anti-American. Did you really think anyone would read your screed through, and think you were a patriot who cared about America, rather than a communist and/or traitor?
You aren’t even a trenchant critic of President Bush and his “program.” (What that “program” consists of, you never tell us.) Your criticisms are variously contradictory, vague, exaggerated and dishonest.
[My] ancestors worked their entire lives – in factories, in offices, in fields, in homes, and even in the military – to create …. the wealth of this country and upheld the early ideals of this country and served this country in whatever ways they knew how….
I understand that this country's wealth has been created first on the backs of slaves from Africa and forever on the backs of those with the least monetary wealth and more recently on the backs of people in developing countries …
Well, which is it? Are you saying your ancestors were slaves? I don’t think so. After all, you are a daughter of the American Revolution on your father’s side, and of immigrant stock on your mother’s side, going back 100 years.
Are you saying, then, that your ancestors were slave masters? If so, that would make you part of the one percent or so of white Americans now alive who indirectly benefited from slavery. (The percentage of today’s black Americans that indirectly benefited from slavery is much higher, since most of them wouldn’t even be alive today, had their forefathers remained in bondage to their African slave masters, and those whose blood lines had lasted until their births, would likely know nothing but poverty and pestilence in Africa.) But you don’t say.
And you don’t follow up the logical implications of your bold statements. Apparently, you think that you can make any statement in any context, as long as it makes you sound morally superior, logic be damned.
In any event, the claim about “slaves” is at best a gross exaggeration, and the one about “people in developing countries” is a lie.
but I also recognize that many Americans today and many Americans in the past didn't realize these scaled power structures, repeated from international dynamics to class dynamics and race dynamics, etc.
“Scaled power structures”? “International dynamics to class dynamics and race dynamics”?
Let me guess. You picked up the preceding dogmatic catch phrases in college. In the immortal words of the philosopher Sonny Corleone, “What do you go to college to learn to be stupid?”
You are only able to throw around dogmatic catch phrases, because your professors never provided any facts in support of them. They “addressed” skeptical students by variously flunking and expelling them, and seeing to it that they were whitelisted from ever becoming teachers, thus leaving the field increasingly to totalitarians like yourself.
You also falsely claim that America was founded as a democracy. Aside from the falsity of your claim, I’m at a loss as to how that would be something praiseworthy to you, seeing that as a Marxist, you are yourself violently opposed to democracy, and in favor of dictatorship. (As the Founding Fathers were well aware, democracy is an undesirable form of government, which is why they founded the U.S.A. as a republic – “If you can keep it,” in Ben Franklin’s immortal warning – but Marxists like yourself have this thing about presenting themselves as “democrats.”)
And yet, before my very eyes, the Bush regime is bucking all of those protective devices against intolerance and despotism – the right to one's own religion, the separation of powers, the right to privacy and fair trial . . . the list doesn't end. It is time to throw off this government.
Evidence, please.
If anything, via an overly liberal application of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, Bush is permitting Moslems to slowly impose Sharia. If I were president, your beef might have some substance. But then, had the Founding Fathers been confronted with the Religion of Terror, they would have expressly outlawed Islam, and Moslem immigrants.
As for the separation of powers, I’d like to see some proof that President Bush has usurped either the legislative or the judicial branch; you provide not so much as a single example. In fact, it is the judicial branch that continues to usurp power from the other branches, as in for example, the recent case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court usurped the prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief in running a war, while inventing new, unjustifiable rights for unlawful combatants in the bargain.
Your invocation of the Declaration of Independence, in order to rationalize as patriotic your call for a revolution, is a pathetic old communist trick. The Declaration was written to call into being a new nation, not to destroy that nation.
When you do get specific, it is to deride as a “violent homophobe” someone who mocked Frenchmen’s manhood for refusing to fight in the War in Iraq. But even then, you expect the reader to take your word that a joke that you can’t even remember was so offensive that we should hold an entire patriotic organization, and indeed, the very notion of American patriotism, in contempt.
Sophistry is not your strength, Ms. Clemons. Don’t give up your day job.
On the other hand, if your letter is any indication, you are doubtless propagandizing your students to death, and expecting the taxpayers whom you hate, to subsidize your revolution. So, I wish you would give up your day job … but I know you won’t.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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