Shakedown in the Windy City Lehman Brothers. Bank of America. J.P. Morgan Chase. Wachovia Corporation. Sounds like roll call at a meeting of the vast, right-wing conspiracy, doesn’t it? It’s not; it’s a list of firms browbeaten by the shakedown lobby dominating the Chicago city council. Lehman Brothers, one of the underwriting firms involved with the 1.5 billion dollar project initiated by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to expand O’Hare International Airport, has recently capitulated to pressure from the grievance lobby to go through their records and see if the century-and-a-half old firm [that started in Alabama] had any links to slavery. Alderman Dorothy Tillman of the 3rd Ward is apparently very exercised over the fact that Lehman, Durr & Co. [as the dry goods firm was then known] owned between one and five slaves… one hundred and fifty years ago - before the Civil War. A nauseating, hysterical circus of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing has ensued and forestalled the project, no doubt doing more harm to living blacks in Chicago than the pretentious self-righteousness doing well by long-dead blacks in Alabama. Alderman Tillman has already dismissed the abject prostration of Lehman Brothers as “playing with us” and is surely holding out for the number of ‘apologies’ to number around five million, what the ‘reparations’ movement extorted out of Bank of America a few years back. It is incumbent upon me to relate the stunningly obvious: the idea that living, pinkish Americans owe anything to living, brownish Americans on account of what happened between dead pinkish and dead brownish Americans is a sweltering pile of steaming bullshit. The prospect is absurd; non-victimizers are being bullied and bullshitted by non-victims into legitimizing an irrational platform of nonsense. Through the meat-grinder of the Civil War, Americans of predominately pinkish pigment already paid more than 8 billion dollars [in 1860’s dollars] and more than 600,000 lives to reconcile the moral repugnancy of slavery. Yet, should the racial grievance lobby exert enough pressure in deluding the public and twisting the arms of enough invertebrate politicians, the settled burden will be expanded to include tens of millions of Americans who have never had any contact with slavery – white and black. So much for ‘malice toward none, with charity toward all.’ What’s remarkable about America, and even its evil corporations, isn’t its intermingling with slavery and slaveholding. That characteristic is intrinsic to every culture and every nation from the beginning of time until about… 1865. It was only eighteenth-century Britain and nineteenth-century America that a peculiar philosophy of abolition began to take on not only a missionary zeal for uprooting what had been a cornerstone of civilization up to that time, but an evangelical fervor in destroying the institution of human bondage worldwide. It was not shallow negotiation and diplomacy that liberated the world from slavery; it was British and American arms and armor. Not only did slavery end in America, but in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and around the world. The cost of abolishing slavery is incalculable, but its ethical rectitude is unquestionable. What remains open to criticism, however, is how people can regard themselves as educated and yet evade this glaringly obvious fact their country and history. In the end, it isn’t history that’s important to Dorothy Tillman, Al Sharpton or whoever picks up the mantle of chest-beater primus for the reparations lobby tomorrow. If it were, one could only hope that they would spend as much time and money fighting real slavery that persists to this day, from the whorehouses in Bangkok to the slavers of Mauretania to pre-teen camel jockeys in Yemen. Rather, it’s the maintenance of group identity and group grievance that keeps their attention – the presumed wounds and paranoia that maintains their political power. It’s a pretty simple game to play, regardless; why would anyone go to the trouble of establishing their own identity when an agenda-laden collective can give you one at the one-time cost of your reason and your soul? What’s more difficult to understand is how so many honest, decent people get suckered by this juvenile guilt-trip. If I had a large enough rolled-up magazine with which I could swat the whole Chicago city council on the nose to the accompaniment of a stern “No,” this problem would be much easier to redress. Alas.
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