Lincoln's Declaration of Equality Is What We Need To Defeat American Nazism

This thing that has got FOX and so the captive mind of Donald J. Trump in such a lather, Black football players kneeling during the rote and meaningless playing of the Star Spangled Banner is full or irony.  The repeating question at the end of the verses:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

is apparently answered, "Hell, no", by Trump and the white supremacists at FOX.  Not because the piece of cloth isn't waved, but that this country is no longer "the land of the free and the home of the brave.  The craven, cowardice of for-show patriotism has always been one of its most ubiquitous features.   If I hadn't declared an attempt to cleanse my writing of the "i-word" it might be useful to note that Trump was a draft-dodger during a war he supported and very few of the media assholes who are moving this ever served anything other than themselves.

The hypocrisy of the American Nazis isn't any great shock, it is something embedded as deep in the country as Jefferson's writing of the Declaration of Independence while denying equality and personhood the the people he held as slaves and raped as slaves.   The hypocrisy isn't a shock, Americans have been habituated to that ever since the reality of the slave-holding, slavery-enabling founders were made secular gods and lied about,  calling it what it is might be.

Anyone who isn't an ignorant idiot, who knows anything about that song and the author of the lyrics, Francis Scott Key, would know that the song, itself, drips with hypocrisy.  No, it doesn't drip, it is soaked like a dirty sponge full of that it and spreading it wherever it is wiped.   Key was a product of an old Maryland slaveholding aristocratic family.  A firm racist and believer in white supremacy, when he managed to become the District Attorney of Washington DC under the particularly vile system of spoils under the equally racist and white supremacist, Andrew Jackson, he sought to suppress the free speech of abolitionists, favoring the "property rights" of slave holders to enslave people, denying them every freedom in life over that of the right of speech for abolitionists.   In one of the most spectacular cases of his time, based on what was clearly an illegal search of Dr. Ruben Crandall's home by two thuggish marshalls who moonlighted as slave catchers.  They found he had abolitionist literature.   The author of the Star Spangled Banner, the "land of the free and the home of the brave, sought to have Dr. Crandall hanged for sedition for merely possessing abolitionist pamphlets.  Thankfully he lost the case but not before trying to sway the jury with, what for the scion of the slaveholding, not infrequently slave-raping aristocracy must have been one of the chief hypocrisies, the accusation that abolitionists wanted to have sex with black women,

Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?

It was the same accusation that Stephen Douglas made in debating Abraham Lincoln, a truncated version of Lincolns response is sometimes used to minimize the radical justice in Lincoln's answer:

Now, you’ve heard the Judge make illusion to those who advocate voting and eating and marrying and sleeping with negroes. Whether he meant me specifically I do not know.  If he did, I can only say that just because I do not want a colored woman for a slave, I do not necessarily want her for a wife. I do not need to have her for either.  I can just leave her alone. In some respects, she is certainly not my equal, any more than I am the Judge’s equal in some respects*. But in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of somebody else, she is my equal and the equal of all others.

Which, for my money,  is worth more than every single word in the Bill of Rights put together.  The same Bill of Rights under which slavery existed, Jim Crow existed, lynch law reigned and the rise of American Nazism has taken place even at the absolute height of the First Amendment cult.  The difference between a Francis Scott Key and an Abraham Lincoln wasn't primarily based on the Bill of Rights, it was on equality and economic justice, something which the aristocratic founders managed to leave out of the Constitution and which, ever since, reformers and abolitionists and suffragists have had to struggle, ever since.

Since the beginning of the United States there has been a struggle between those two views, what continues in Donald Trump and FOX's race-baiting over the football players protesting the killing of black people by police and the like of armed thugs such as George Zimmerman, the habit of jurors acquitting the murderers of Black people and racism, in general.   It is what this struggle is really based in, not on "free speech" though the hypocrisy of Trump and FOX and American Nazism have certainly found their version of the "first amendment" useful when they wanted it.  It is no coincidence, at all, that the same people who do this are the ones who want to take away the health care of tens of millions of Americans so they can give huge tax breaks to billionaires who, also, fund their political careers.  It's the First Amendment as defined by Republicans and such pseud-liberal groups as the ACLU who have set up that latest hypocrisy, using "freedom" as a tool of the aristocratic class so as to thwart equality and economic justice out of "principle".  The whole thing is rotten and will be until the source of the rot is gotten rid of, once and for all.   And among the things that have to be overcome is the founders fetish, the current orthodoxy of the "First Amendment" cult, and the continuing presence of the very same slave-power that Lincoln was up against, that Dr. Crandall was up against, the white supremacy and aristocratic entitlement embedded in the Constitution that Black People and other people of color have been up against since the start and which is no less operative, today.

The "land of the free" as imagined by the aristocratic Key might have extended, in principle, to non-aristocratic white men.  I would argue that the subsequent history of the United States, both official legal history and the long struggle for economic justice shows that any freedom they're likely to grasp from the aristocrats is far better secured by equality among the non-aristocrats than it is likely to be gotten from the aristocrats as a matter of self-interest of some daffy notion of partial permission.  We, like Lincoln's Black Woman who he held up as his equal, won't ever get that from something that favors a slave-holding aristocracy or one consisting of Wall Street and Tech company billionaires. They've got the ACLU, the Supreme Court and the media in their corner.  We only have ourselves.

*  That phrase, in which he notes that he, probably the greatest of all the people who would become president up to his time, was not Stephen Douglas's equal, "in some respects" was an astonishingly radical thing for a white man to say at that time.  He was asserting the equality of a Black Woman to him in his inequality, "in some respects"  to a man who was certainly his inferior, both in intellect and in character.  I have been thinking for the past several hours and can't recall anything of such radical content said about any of the "founders" or any of the other icons of American idolatry.  You can find its like all over the abolitionist and suffragist literature,  but to have Abraham Lincoln say it is why he, not the "founders" deserves credit as the founder of any United States worth keeping.