June 4, 2016

Michelle Obama, she of the $4,000 – repeat - $4,000 a week raise, a raise that she got about 45 minutes after her husband, then a United States Senator, got her employer, the University of Chicago School of Medicine a $1,00,000 “earmark”. [“Earmarks” have replaced cash stuffed envelopes changing hands at midnight in deserted parking lots. Think quid and quo, with a pro owning the middle] She said yesterday that she “wakes up every day in a house built by slaves”.

Who says that “satire closes on Saturday night”? Not I. It may not be Swift but it will do ‘til something better comes along.

“The upturned neck awaits the ax” is a great line from a forgotten movie.

One of the criticisms tossed at your husband in 2008, perhaps “hurled violently” might be a better way of saying it, and one that left righteous Caucasians dumbfounded, was that “he had no slave blood”. Please, please don’t throw me into the briar patch reserved for racists but unless you subscribe to the Sanger/Lysenko School of Eugenics was a ginormously dumb thing to say.

On the other hand….

Would it be completely beyond the pale of the acceptable limits of political commentary to suggest that someone with your husband’s paternal DNA may have had a hand in gathering up some of those soon to be slaves? How, pray tell, did all those African-Africans get from the interior to the coast from whence they began the long journey to become African-Americans? Is it more than a coincidence that 6 countries in Africa, countries living under the lash of Islamic Sharia law, still allow slavery? #BringBackOurGirls is 2 years old. How is that working out?

I suggest that a trip back, say 3 generations from his paternal grandfather, might find an entrepreneur in the field of human transportation. A Masai/Kikuyu Uber forebear dude perhaps.  

Speaking of fathers, isn’t it about time we honor your father-in-law? He has one son living in the White House, a place where he can spit on his English colonial background by banning Churchill, and another son living in a mud hut in Kenya where he makes a living as a bum.

 Father of the Year? Hell no! Father of the Decade or nothing!

But I digress.

My father’s father had 2 uncles who came from Ballyglass, Galway, Ireland – before it was a Republic – to free the slaves. They joined the 69^th New York Regiment, a group of soldiers who came to be known as the Irish Brigade. Late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863 they marched into the Wheat Field at Gettysburg “line abreast”. One of them is still there “wrapped in his faded coat of Blue”. I hope he died quick and I hope he died clean like my wife’s uncle, Corporal Putnam,  did on Okinawa.

I seek no survivor’s benefits.

I ask only that if reparations for slavery come to pass that my portion of that bill is settled by using the carry forward tax loss caused by the death in combat of a relative. 20^th century probate lawyers may recall “flower bonds”.

Maybe a simple “thank you” should be included also. After all, it was the country of my forebears that first outlawed slavery. We did it 15 centuries ago. That’s a whole millennium and half of another one. That’s 1,500 years. Maybe somebody should tell the 1%ers who run Chad and Mali, inter alia, that slavery is an infamia.

Speaking of ironies…You remember that the Democratic Party was the one favoring slavery, don’t you? And that the New York Times called Lincoln a “baboon” when he ran for re-election in 1864? “Politically incorrect”? Don’t be silly! Even then modern American Liberals were able to defy gravity. It is an inconvenient truth for modern American Liberals but Lincoln’s 2^nd term was made possible when General Sherman, Uncle Billy to the soldiers he commanded, led a lot of White farm boys from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, doubtless most of whom were “bitter clingers”, into Atlanta in the fall of 1864.

Civil discourse? Probity? Fuhgedaboutit.

One more thing.

Why didn’t you send your daughters to any of the really, really fine public schools in Washington? The children of every other tenant in public housing in D.C. had/have no choice. Why should school choice be limited to the 1%ers?

I hear that you have been offered a job as a litigator in the D.C. public defender’s office. If you take it, remember Rumpole’s First Rule: “Never plead guilty”.

You go, girl!

Kevin Smith

PS – Here’s another thing you might be able to help me with. I was still living in New Jersey when I saw a Black woman in her ‘30s wearing a tee shirt in a super market that said “It’s a Black thing. You wouldn’t understand”. I saw her 3 or 4 times as we crisscrossed the aisles. Finally, I couldn’t resist. “You’re right. I don’t understand.” 30 years  later and I still don’t understand. Am I asking too much?