Ebony and irony

 In America you get food to eat

Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet

You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day

It's great to be an American

Ain't no lion or tiger, ain't no mamba snake

Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake

Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be

Climb aboard, little wog, sail away with me

Sail away, sail away,

We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

Sail away, sail away, 

We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free

To take care of his home and his family

You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree

You're all gonna be an American

Sail away, sail away

We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

Sail away, sail away

We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

The death of irony has been proclaimed every year since Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.  It went on life support when Dan Quayle became vice president and signed a Do Not Resuscitate order when Sarah Palin was nominated for the same office.  By 2015, when Trump's campaign began, all we could do was monitor its breathing.  Now that Randy Newman's "Sail Away" is becoming a basic text of the American history curriculum, it's time to plan the memorial service.

If we delve deep enough we find that all societies have genocide, slavery and ethnic discrimination as part of their history.  Leviticus, that compendium of hate and recipes, also speaks of a year of Jubilee when the "servants" (slaves) of the Hebrews were to be freed.  India's caste system is nearly as old.  The arrival of the Normans in England in 1066 meant centuries of serfdom for the Anglo-Saxons.  In Russia, serfdom persisted until 1861; I wonder if Alexander II's Emancipation Manifesto inspired Lincoln to come up with something similar and equally selective.  The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, and despite more recent attempts at legal codification, is still a bit like pornography:  we know it when we see it. 

The United States is history in a nutshell insofar as all our conflicts and contradictions came about in a relatively short space of time.  Between 1492, when the first meaningful interaction between the inhabitants of the Americas and Europeans occurred, and the present, only five centuries passed, exhaustively documented by the Europeans and their descendants.  So why is it so hard to reach even a basic agreement about what happened?

Critical race theory has been around since the late 1970s but has only recently been drafted into the culture wars as the Right gropes for a scare-phrase to rival "international communist conspiracy" from the good old Cold War days.  CRT is also, of course, a conspiracy to make little white children feel bad or encourage violence or destroy America As We Know and Love It, depending on the mob being harangued.  (The hazier the definition the better, obviously.)  As no sane person could deny that this country's existence required the destruction of its original inhabitants and the labor of millions of enslaved people, mostly Africans, they have been unable to refute CRT through counterargument.  Which is why Republican legislatures are rushing to pass laws designed to make it go away, with grotesque penalties for daring to suggest that systemic racism is still alive and flourishing.  

Not good enough.  The private religious "schools" and the home-schooler industry are already leading the way and no doubt a second wave of legislation will soon mandate the adoption of their texts in the public schools.  Why stop at banning The 1619 Project when you can create a 2021 project where "the War Between the States" is again a tragic lost opportunity and the Klan is a fraternal organization that D.W. Griffith would recognize?  Barack Obama is now responsible for most racial strife, Islam is partnered with "murder" and slavery is the result of "black migration."  Folks, Randy Newman was joking.

Panic about the erosion of white power and white privilege escalated with the release of 2020 census data and the news that the US is becoming more ethnically diverse and more urban.  The total number of white people is declining and soon, horrors, we will be just another minority.  I assume this is behind the fashion for castigating whites who have failed to breed, or to breed enough children.  Also, probably, the deranged rumor that covid vaccine is a plot to make us infertile.  And when whites are a minority, maybe they will treat us the way we treat them now, and have for centuries.  That's the quiet part they don't say out loud, the part that confirms the importance of critical race theory.  And why we need to exercise the last days of our white hegemony to keep Them from immigrating, from voting, from breathing.  The history of South Africa suggests that we too will endure a period of minority rule -- the red states are already gerrymandering like mad to take control of the House -- before we emerge into democracy, and that it will be a bloody period.   The reluctance of Congress to expel members who supported the January Putsch is not encouraging.  

All we can do is speak the truth and refute the lies.  And as Frederick Douglass said to a young disciple, "Agitate.  Agitate, agitate."  Irony is not going to save us.