Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America — or a Green America?
What’s the matter with America? That question still nags me, even after Joe Biden – day by day -- undoes the poisonous legacy of Trump. (And thanks, Mr. President, for the latest reset – cutting off the weapons flow to Saudi Arabia’s criminal war in Yemen.) I understand Biden’s “America is back” refrain – but it still has an ominous ring to me. Because like Langston Hughes, I feel that “America never was America to me.” Long before Marjorie Taylor Greene and today’s GOP/Q, as Chris Cuomo cuttingly describes the current Republican Party, there were members of Congress like Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina who in May 1856 attacked abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, beating him so savagely with a heavy, gold-tipped cane that he inflicted serious brain damage on Sumner and shattered the cane. A South Carolina colleague of Brooks, Rep. Laurence Keitt, held horrified onlookers at gunpoint so they couldn’t intervene. Brooks was not jailed or even given a congressional reprimand for his near-murderous assault. And pieces of his “True Cane” were cherished as holy relics by his gleeful South Carolina constituents.
So yes, America never was America to me. It’s a strange, blood-soaked, genocidal, beautiful, freedom-loving land. It was founded in slavery and in the mass slaughter of its native people. And yet it created jazz and rock ‘n’ roll and skyscrapers that are works of art and life-saving medicines. It gave birth to Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, John and Robert Kennedy and so many other inspiring figures.
But yes, then there’s today’s Republican Party. Only 11 House Republicans voted to remove the deeply unhinged Rep. Greene from committee assignments, even though she has endorsed the assassination of their Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, among other violent and bizarre positions. Many of their congressional districts might be gerrymandered and secluded, but the 199 Republicans who voted in support of the QAnon-aligned Georgia congresswoman represent a big slice of America. These are your and my fellow Americans -- like members of Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s (R-Illinois) family who call him a soldier in “the devil’s army” for acknowledging Trump’s defeat and other fundamental facts.
Who elected Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, after she embraced dangerously cuckoo ideas — like the one about the Jewish banking family who ignited California’s wildfires with a space laser — and chased a traumatized Parkland shooting survivor down the street, bragging that she was packing? The article about Greene’s congressional district in today’s New York Times was well-timed to address my curiosity.
Yes, the report contains some hair-raising tidbits about “those people” – like the billboard that greets visitors to the district, proclaiming,“Every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord – even the Democrats.” The NYT reporter adds, “To underline the point, ‘Democrats’ is red and adorned with the devil’s trident.”
Now I admit – it’s hard to have a rational dialogue with people who deeply believe that you and your kind are Satan worshippers who feast on the blood of infants. But America is teetering on the brink of another civil war – just as it was in 1856 when a racist congressman thrashed a Capitol Hill colleague to an inch of his life. And when, the same year, a pro-slavery mob invaded the free-state town of Lawrence Kansas and killed every male – man and boy – about 200 in all. In response to today’s growing extremism on the right, we could arm ourselves and respond in kind like John Brown and his righteous army. Or we could try to understand these fellow Americans and bring at least some of them to our side.
It’s no surprise that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s white, working-class district – wedged between the suburbs of Atlanta and Chattanooga at the base of the Appalachian Mountains – is economically distressed and besieged with opioid addiction. These people are desperate, and in their desperation they’ve turned to a crazy lady who has convinced them she understands their plight. But wacky conservatism will never deliver struggling men and women from the clutches of poverty. As I’ve written often, only FDR-like federal relief programs can do that. Franklin Roosevelt won over Southern whites for generations with big projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority that not only brought power and light to benighted rural districts but put thousands of people to work with good jobs.
To his credit, President Biden gets that. He wants to go big. He wants to retrain and employ many thousands of out-of-work coal miners and others sidelined by the global market in the new green economy. Biden’s only obstacle to this sane future is the GOP/Q, with its crackpot explanations for white America’s miseries. Biden – and we – have to brush aside these Republican extremists and win over our fellow Americans. The alternative is too grim to even contemplate.
