Spite from the Right

Today seems to be spite day at Townhall.com. Townhall seemingly went for spiting up their whole Sunday edition after they decided to publish an excerpt from Tom DeLay's new book.

1. DeLay leading the way. My recommendation to people on the left for Tom DeLay's No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight--Buy It! Yeah, buy it! Today excerpt, "the criminalization of politics," has everything you'd expect from DeLay--the mean-spiritedness, the vindictiveness, and the allergies to anything resembling a fact. DeLay's also incredibly whiny. "Those horrible liberals just never stopped persecuting him." Boo hoo! From DeLay's account, you'd think that Patrick Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi are the two most relentless forces for evil on the planet. And needless to say, DeLay wasn't going to discuss the various lawsuits, ethics committee findings, and indictments against him. And he wasn't going to talk about the staff of future criminals with which he surrounded himself. Or his friendship with Jack Abramoff. No, was all a conspiracy against him because he was just so darn successful. Damn those liberals!

As an added bonus, DeLay's a ridiculous pompous and wooden writer who couldn't analyze his way through a two-ply tissue. So, if you want to confirm all your stereotypes about conservativism, you can't do better than to read DeLay's book. Or catch his wretched blog. It's free!

2. Slavery Splatterspite. Mary Garang responds to the Virginia legislature's apology for slavery and attempts to promote such legislation in her state of Georgia with a Cheneyesque splatter approach. Not limiting herself to trashing the proposed legislation, Ms. Garang lashes out at the extremely wealthy "liberal elite," the Port Huron statement, grad students writing dissertation topics about blacks, black liberals, black rappers, and "blacks in general and the white liberals who exploit them."

Oops, I forgot to mention the "overthrow of Western civilization." My bad.

But Garang doesn't say anything about the relation of slavery to the present except that we ought to move on.

I agree.

And the best way that we can move on as white people, black people, and Americans is to remember slavery in all its gory, disgusting, and heroic details. The organization of plantations as forced labor camps, the lack of food and clothing, the rape of slave women, the breaking up of slave families, the brutality of the punishments--all of these things need to be remembered in their full evil and chewed over again and again if the United States is going to "move on as a society."

There's an image in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that applies to the memory of the slave past. Dumbledore stands over a green potion and tries everything to render a poisonous green potion harmless--vanishing, transfiguring, charming, etc. Finally, Dumbledore understands that he has to drink glass after glass of the potion if he is to get to the bottom. The same is the case with the poison of slavery. We can't wish it away. We can't forget it. If we're going to move on, we have to drink it cup after cup.

The same is true of the many heroic aspects of slavery, including slave escapes, the mutual support among the slave population, the work of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, and participation in the underground railroad among other things.

Slavery was central to the American experience and we won't be able to move on from slavery until we embrace that centrality into the marrow of our shared culture. Like the Confederate flaggers, Republican warriors against black vote fraud, and other reactionary impulses in white culture, Garang's bitterness over just about everything associated with blacks is evidence that she does not want to move on from the master side of the slavery issue.