EDDIE GLAUDE, DIANE REHM AND UNRAVELING THE AMERICAN MYTH

EBONY & IVORY PLAYING TOGETHER, BUT WAY OFF KEY

Ishmael Sol Servaivor

By Ishmael Sol Servaivor, CPW News Service

     Princeton University is blessed with an articulate surveyor of the Black American experience.  Dr. Edward “Eddie” Glaude from Moss Point, Mississippi is a graduate of Temple University, Morehouse College and Princeton University where he is the William Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies.  Dr. Glaude has published four books on Black American culture, three with the University of Chicago Press and one with Westminster/John Knox Press.  Appearing on the Diane Rehm Show on January 13, he challenged an array of predominantly Anglo-American callers to continue to question the prevailing American myth of power and privilege….that the stereotypes that characterize Blacks are as misguided as those defining some white Americans.

     “I tried to call in to challenge Dr. Glaude after I heard two comments.  One was about his own child being enrolled at Brown University and facing the threat of drawn weapons by police in Baltimore simply because he is black.  The other was his comment about Obama being a “snake oil salesman for Melville.”



     Dr. Lowell P.Wigglesworth though not incensed by the statement was clearly irritated.   “I called you Ishmael,” said Dr. Wigglesworth, “because I couldn’t get onto the show by phone.  Herman Melville was a prophet and challenger of the American myth, not a purveyor of it.   Think of Queequeg the enigmatic character from Melville's Moby Dick about whom Melville wrote: "And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; but whose mysteries not even himself could read. And these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last." 
      Melville's exotic character, Queequeg,  read the mysteries onboard Ahab's ship well enough to have the ship's carpenter build him a coffin!  This minority islander with the strange customs was the first to assess Ahab's lunacy even though, like Colin Powell wielding the yellow cake harpoon, he chose to continue the pursuit that he knew in his gut was ill-advised! His single mindedness made Queequeg a hero to many in the story of Moby Dick.   Was Queequeg's chicken bleeding much different than Nancy Reagan's astrological anomalies and interests?   The brutal Ahab went down with the ship chasing the great white myth…..which I actually believe Melville knew damn well was the drool of the opium poppy that Melville could see from his catbird seat in New England.  The New England China trading Brahmins knew that there was one hell of a lot more intoxicating pursuits than that of whale oil, tooth ivory and dress hoops or than even the gold in the hills near San Francisco.   Beyond that, Dr. Glaude, heck everyone, needs to read the 1999 book by archelogist Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford University Press).   In that book Layton documents that the Heard's opium cutter, Frolic,  that wrecked near Cabrillo Point near Fort Bragg north of San Francisco was built in Baltimore’s Gardiner Shipyard where Fred Bailey, a slave, had been laying the cutter hulls before he became the famous abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass.  I have meticulously laid out the case that the American Civil War was much more a drug run gone bad, a run to the Middle Eastern opium fields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq and Turkey than it was a battle over slavery.   You can't easily nor legitimately build broad consent for war over poppy-greed. The South owned the easiest rail route to the Pacific across the flat Great Southwest with proposed terminals laid out by Jefferson Davis in the 1850’s and coveted by New England merchant Brahmins Caleb and John Perkins Cushing and their close ally and friend President Franklin Pierce.  Historians have spun the big one that the fierce indigenous people of the Southwest made the Rockies look easier.  Poppy cock!  They were no match for the Sharps rifles or Iron Horse!  Ask the plains buffaloes and Geronimo whose name his tribe wishes Leon Panetta had not used for the killing of Osama Bin Laden!  Unlike our alliance with Al Qaeda and the Mujahedeen in their rocky terrain, higher than our Rockies in Afghanistan, the Apaches didn't have as Osama Bin Laden's guys did against the Russians the equivalent of our Stinger missiles..... thank you Charlie Wilson and Joanne King Herring!   Franklin Pierce had backed the unrepentant slaver and exporter of human misery to the Caribbean, William Walker, a man whose body I believe should be exhumed from its grave like Sally Hemming's to prove his relationship to George Herbert Walker Bush who lives not far from Robert Herring Hall on the Rice University campus next door to the library housing the silent....silent until now.... letters of Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce and whose family owns One America News....and who owned HL&P that became that bastion of stalwart business practice....Enron!  With the DNA analysis we would know once and for all that the apples don’t fall too far from the tree and that the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra fiascos were a disguised resurrection of William Walker’s lame filibustering attempts from the 19th Century hiding as it did under the Monroe Doctrine just as the invasion of Iraq by GWB was hiding under the guise of yellow cake uranium,” said Wigglesworth.

     Wigglesworth pointed to a number of articles on the subject, but he was especially concerned that Dr. Glaude understand that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had been working in the San Francisco area to consolidate the rail head there in order to bypass San Diego, Jeff Davis’ proposed Pacific rail terminus.   “Leaving San Francisco for Vicksburg where the Davis rail route would cross the Mississippi, Sherman then went on to Atlanta where he turned the Atlantic terminus into flaming pretzels. Sherman showed his true colors by his actions at Ebenezer Creek and by the fact that the no-good scoundrel and lying montebank, General Braxton Bragg, brother of the Confederacy’s Attorney General, Thomas Bragg, was also the pre-Civil War business partner of Sherman who was working in California just before the Civil War with George C. Bragg on a rail line from Sacramento to San Francisco.   With the 1867 patenting of Alfred Nobel’s nitro-glycerin-stabilizing formula called Dynamite the South was bypassed, but Reconstruction was also brought to a very quick end, another indication that Sherman, Cushing, Pierce and friends were motivated by something more than liberty and justice for all.  There was still slavery, but it was from the product that Melville was cryptically warning all people about through his writings and not the chains that 600,000 were said to have died for,” said Wigglesworth noting that the sale of crack cocaine that Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance showed was part of an ongoing program of government bamboozling that emerged later and which the power brokers in the press wished to silence by killing the messenger.

      Wigglesworth has made much of abolitionist John Brown and  his backers in Boston where Douglass spoke at Faneuil Hall. “John Brown’s secret six backers included Boston’s lead bullet merchant, George Luther Stearns who always said, as weapons dealers do, "I'm betting on war".  The Boston Brahmins ordered their cutter from Baltimore home of Alexander Brown the progenitor of Brown Brother Harriman, Brown and Root, Kellogg Brown & Root.....where, not surprisingly,  the first test case for the Fugitive Slave Laws was that of the slave with the well-chosen Anglo name, James Hamlet, who worked at the Brown’s Merchant Shot Tower making lead musket balls for bullets while singing "To be, or Not to be".  Nearby was the Mt. Misery Plantation owned by Donald Rumsfeld where Douglass was “rendition” before he was returned to slavery and before he emerged as the Brahmin sponsored orator for abolition to steel the resolve of the people toward a convenient war, a story covered astonishingly by Amy Goodwin of Democracy Now.  Now we have Bill Clinton campaigning for Hillary and saying that ‘Franklin Pierce could not stop the drift toward Civil War because of the death in a train accident of his young son. Poor ancestor or Barbara Pierce Bush!   Clinton's empathy seems legitimate, but ' drift toward war'?  Shit!," said Wigglesworth.  This was Clinton's second faux pax on the same botched factoid of history.  The first was at his alma mater as he misled the student body of Georgetown University. 
     "Pierce like William Walker whom he supported was pushing headlong in the race toward war for the poppy railroad used to anesthetize the bloodly limbs and other body parts of civilians and soldiers alike.....a godsend to Eli Lilly and his cannoneers!  Here we see the Rhodes Scholar, Clinton, acting as Madison Avenue spoof meister to manage our moldy memories away from the truth of the matter. The proof of the pudding is in the reading…..in this case…..the 1861 letter from Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce that Clinton’s Rhodes Scholarship either did not impart a knowledge of, sadly, or which has been a deceptively omitted element of our common history and like the rest of our collective history covered in myth and not fact.”

      Indeed, Wigglesworth’s assessment has been well covered by Denise De La Tio in a recent article on Clinton’s remarks when she writes:

Like Frank Vandiver, President Clinton doesn't make the obvious connections for us about our own Civil War when so much was right in front of them for so long. If there is a “smoking gun” on America’s motivation for the Civil War it is the letter from Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce dated January 20, 1861 (Jefferson Davis, “The Papers of Jefferson Davis,” The PJD Project of Rice University, retrieved from https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=86 on 7/5/14). It reads:

"When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war and, leave a soi dissant democratic administration responsible for the fact. Genl. Cushing was here last week and when we parted it seemed like taking a last leave of a Brother."

     "Do you hear in this letter a concern about Pierce's a tragic 'drift toward war' as Clinton asserts?  Who would benefit from such an assertion and why?" asked Wigglesworth.  "A close reading of Bill Clinton's Arkansas experiences with Dan Lasater, Fahmy Malak and there is no reason that you wouldn't ask...."Was Franklin Pierce an ancestor of Barbara Pierce Bush?"

      According to Wigglesworth Dr. Glaude’s concern should not be Obama working as a snake oil salesman for Melville, but that the truth of our history….the truth…..the whole truth….and nothing, but the truth….not be covered over by a swarm of lies on every skinned ligament of the nation’s bloody carcass.  “Today, the issue is not that Melville was a voice in the wilderness of white folk spinning white priviledge.  Was Mellville warning Queequeg and all minorities not to mess with the Great White Whale of white privilege?   Or was he warning all humanity of the danger of chasing decadence in whatever blubbery form it takes?   The later!  Unlike Cormac McCarthy, Melville died broke and in obscurity....in a way similar to Jefferson Davis and Braxton Bragg, except that Melville wasn't chasing the same whale in the same way.  The Cushing family and their galaxy of business fortunes, the Franklin Pierce progeny and theirs, would soar while Davis and Bragg were dragged under by their ambitions.  It seems that the real captains had jumped ship to another thanks in part to Alfred Nobel and his 1866 patent on Dynamite.   Today you better be more worried that the Dumbledore of U.S. literature at Yale....home to the Heard's business colleagues....Huntingtons, Russells, Tafts and others, Harold Bloom, like the Dumbledore of U.S. journalism at Columbia University, Steve Coll, are tauting the works of Cormac McCarthy whose book Blood Meridian tells us where our ship of sad-state has birthed itself….not at Nemo’s feet…..at Kratos’ groin……and Cormac McCarthy says 'War is God'", said Wigglesworth.    
     And now we know, according to Wigglesworth just where we were in 1850 when Davis was laying out the South's rail route to San Diego, when William Walker was the Oliver North of Central America and when the Frolic wrecked on the Mendicino coast near Fort Bragg.   We also know the reason why our soldiers die in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2016.   “One Nation Under God….Kratos!”