The Monster of Monticello

[Peace Patriot]

43. LBJ slaughtered a million people in Southeast Asia AND passed the Civil Rights Act and...

...the Voting Rights Act, at great political cost, as well as other progressive legislation.

Do we call him a "monster"? Some would, I guess. But I don't. You could say that he only got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed because he needed "cannon fodder." I don't. I think he believed in civil rights but the only way he could achieve it was by alliance with forces that DID want African-Americans as "cannon fodder" for Vietnam. I see a complex man, with some startlingly progressive instincts, superbly talented in one particular field--legislative pol--and trapped in a CIA-MIC spider's web and wrapped up good and properly by its sticky, deadly filaments*.

The trouble with this thread on Jefferson--and maybe it's a fault of American politics in general, or of the American people in general--is that we have no understanding of tragedy, at least in the political field. A "tragic hero" in the classical sense is a person of extraordinary virtue, talent or accomplishment--a brilliant person, a "great one"--who has a flaw--a blind spot, a weakness--that precipitates his or her downfall and often--as in "Hamlet"--the downfall and deaths of everybody around them, or--as in "Antigone"--the downfall of a high principle (the law, as upheld by Antigone in defiance of her king). More simply, a tragic hero is a good person, in the opinion of the society around them, caught in a vise of their own making or of society's making.

Tragedy is not bad things happening--car accidents, earthquakes. It has to do with HUMAN NATURE. With hubris, with ambition, with egotism, with blindness, with making mistakes, with doing wrong to do right, or being unable, because of circumstances, to follow the right course or even to determine what it is, despite noble efforts.

There are far more important matters to consider, in judging any person's life--including leaders and "great ones"--than, were they right or were they wrong? And it is a kind of enforced stupidity or enforced boredom to demand that everyone judge people that way. Instead, we should stand back a bit and ask, a) Would we have done any better?, and b) especially for historical figures, what personal history and social context formed their beliefs and actions and to what extent were they able to overcome these circumstances and see ANYTHING AT ALL outside of them, let alone envision anything better or act to produce anything better in the future?

And I would apply these questions in examining the lives of, say, a slave or a garment worker, as well as Thomas Jefferson, the tragic hero of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," or Tom Paine (perhaps the most extraordinary individual in our history), or George Washington (the man who refused to be king), or anyone for whom there is some historical record (persons we can know about). Would we have done any better? What is the CONTEXT of their lives and actions?

As with the distance between Paris and Virginia in revolutionary times, the distance between Boston and Virginia was very great, if not in as many miles, certainly in psychology. They were two vastly different cultures--the one, in Boston, was building up to the incineration of young factory girls in locked-door slave labor conditions, while the one in Virginia was building up to the Civil War in bloody defense of its slave economy. Boston was to become the symbol of oligarchic fortunes built on the horrendous exploitation of labor and stultifying Puritanism and exclusionism. How dare we judge Boston as virtuous and Virginia as evil, or Boston's leaders as "the good guys" and Virginia's leaders as "the bad guys"?

We need to understand HUMAN NATURE and fight this PURITAN "judgement of God" bullshit in our culture, which consigns some to Heaven and some to Hell, in current situations as well as with hindsight. Thomas Jefferson's ownership of slaves did not mean that he could not ALSO believe in "the rights of man" and write about it with timeless eloquence in documents that, to this day, inspire people all over the world, and that laid the permanent foundation for religious and civil liberty everywhere. We need to understand that he did this AND was a slave holder. We need to really understand it--to grasp the excruciating contradictions and complexities of human life, and admire him for the one thing and condemn him for the other at the same time.

That is the glory of Annette Gordon Reed's book on the Hemingses. She NEVER reduces Jefferson to formulaic notions of what he should have done or should have been. She sees the whole human being IN CONTEXT, and does the same for Sally Hemings and her brothers, in a magnificent effort at creation and humanization, despite two centuries of obfuscation and bigotry between now and then.

Progress occurs by increments and is always furthered by FLAWED people. Look what happened to the revolution in France! Look what happened to the revolution in Russia! The members of "the masses" are not particularly admirable either. They, too--the slaves and the slave laborers--can be vastly unjust. They can be horrendously violent and bigoted. They can enslave, rob and murder each other. Yet both revolutions contributed to human progress--to ideas of what might be possible in a better world--despite their horrid flaws. So did ours--and our leaders did better than most, with no small contributions from slave holders.

Jefferson truly, genuinely longed for the liberation of the human race--and could not achieve it in his own household. I admire Jefferson for his dreams more than I admire Tom Paine for his clarity! Because Jefferson's dreams of liberty were not possible in his circumstances, yet there they are.

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*(Re LBJ: Highly recommended, James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." Douglass lays out the tragedy of Lyndon Baines Johnson (among other things), which had its origins in the assassination. Douglass, who wrote by far the best book on the Kennedy assassination, doesn't believe that LBJ was part of the assassination plot but that he was part of the coverup for complex reasons, including the CIA's misdirection to Russia in order to force his hand--as they had been unable to do to JFK--to nuke Russia in retaliation. He was also probably afraid of the CIA. Three days after the assassination, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam. It was the alternative to nuking Russia! War, one way or another, but war there WOULD be. This brilliant leader who won one of the biggest presidential victories in our history on a platform of world peace, was caught like a wrapped up fly in the CIA-"military-industrial complex" spider's web. THAT is tragedy! COULD he have disentangled himself? No. That is what tragedy IS.)