the language one adopts

Sun 6.21.20

      Looking at what’s happening in the world, in spite of much effort to crush globalism, the corporations want a global market and global power to sell their wares and it’s inevitable, they will get it.  I remember Yvon Labbé who was then Director of the Centre Franco-Américain at the University of Maine in Orono speaking about the French language declining among its people in Maine.  It couldn’t be avoided, he said.  The language a people adopts is the one in which they use to engage in commerce.

That explains how the world’s culture has become to a great part indistinguishable.  The United States once was the acknowledged center of violence, corruption, illegality, a Godfather ruled country.  Not so anymore.  Statues are being torn down in a whole slew of countries.  Culture has become omnipresent.  We are ruled by the stories told to us and the stories we create and support.  I find the tearing down of statues notable.  Are we fooled into thinking that our forefathers were great guys who were fearless heroes, and whose pristine motives were for the good of all?  Kids in school, maybe, but for the rest of us we give these honored men and some women some slack.  I am saddened to see the civil war’s great generals defiled and by extension the slaughter of countless soldiers in a horrific massacre.  The history of this conflagration may not be reduced to the dire motives of slave masters.  It was more than that.  The war was based on whether the country was to remain agrarian or as the North wanted and was moving in the direction of industrialization.  Was it about slavery?  Of course.  The North was in the process of creating wage slaves.  My own people, the French, worked in cotton mills, men, women, little children worked 10 and 14 hours, 6 and 7 days a week in these mills.  And the wages, that the whole family had to spend most of their waking hours to amass enough money for a roof and food on the table barely kept them fed and sheltered.  Were they slaves, a new kind of slave with the illusion of choice to subdue them?

What happens if we erase America’s myth?  What replaces it?  They were all sons’ a bitches that created a horror of a country and it’s time we own up to it?  I don’t think so.  We want to believe in something positive, because if those honored folks were so rotten, quite obviously, so are we.  The role of victim does not rest comfortably in oneself.  It is the role given to Americans of African descent.  Until they realize that in order to rid themselves of this role they have been accorded they must resolve the situation within themselves.  Blaming the Americans of European descent is antithetical.  Best first, says Yvon Labbé to look at the money.  Money is not Robert E Lee standing victorious at the Battle of Gettysburg, it is the European and American barons financing the endeavor which set a new agenda and a new quasi-slave trade for the country.  I found after coming back to Maine having spent the last twenty years in New York, that my own people the French Canadians who settled in Maine, have conquered the state.  They are in every aspect of business, the arts, statesmanship, law, medicine, agriculture, finance, real estate.  We have surpassed Yvon’s struggle with the label identifying the French as frogs. 

To not even own one’s own body is an unimaginable horror and what followed slavery was not better.  Here were a people treated as domestic animals set free in a country that looked askance at this bedraggled penniless horde.  But they made it.  They have to own up to that.  Blaming whites and tearing down statues detracts from that accomplishment.  Pitting one group against another is the bedrock of political rule and only they gain from it.  The problem with the police is not solely a black problem.  We all suffer from a law enforcement system that has been given permission to mistreat and kill citizens at will, that demands obeisance at the point of a gun.  It is encouraged by a federal government that hands out gratis military armor to police stations throughout the country.  They are handing out weapons of war to use against their own citizens. 

We are a “Godfather” type country, I never for one moment trust all the Kumbayas coming from nonblacks.  It is mostly motivated by either ego boosting and/or profit motive, nor should African Americans place any faith in them.

The favorite essay this month has again been, Opening Moves