David Simon Blogs 12 Years A Slave

David Simon blogs his thoughts about 12 Years a Slave, after his first screening, and, after his second screening, of this film that deals honestly with the condition of the enslaved in the U.S. south for 350 years. It's after the second screening that he addresses the political aspects of this nation that allowed slavery as an institution, and then the accompanying financial engine of the domestic slave trade, to exist at all.

He articulates this way, what is one of the themes of The American Slave Coast:

Anyone who acquires the narrative of 12 Years A Slave and finds it within his shrunken heart to continue any argument for the sanctity and perfection of our Founding Fathers, for the moral wisdom of their compromised document of national ideal that begins the American experience, or for their anachronistic or historically understandable tolerance of slavery — they are arguing from a desolate, amoral corner.

If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history.   Hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitution under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool’s journey to decay and dishonor.

Simon speaks of the good things in our Constitution, particularly as it is amended, but, he says:

.... But for anyone to stand in sight of this film and pretend to the infallibility or perfect intellectual or moral grandeur of a Washington, a Jefferson, or a Madison is to invite ignominy from anyone else sensate.  Slavery was abomination, and we, in our birth of liberty, codified it and nurtured it. 

Moreover, the secessionists insisted they'd corrected the flawed Constitution, the one that allowed the international slave trade until January 1, 1808, that spoke to democracy and consent by voting -- a whole lot of issues.  In the Constitution of the Confederacy slavery as the way of life, the economic institution forever and everywhere, the contraction of who has the right to vote and to hold office, are clearly stated all the way through.  None of this business of majority voting for them.  They also use the words slave and slavery, which our Constitution coyly avoids by speaking of "certain persons," -- the only legal document probably that uses persons for slaves, but it didn't mean it that way, that was clear.

Look at 12 Years a Slave and recall that the horrors and misery up on that screen were deemed by the fire eaters (the term Barnwell Rhett and his cohorts were known by, in south and the north, as they advocated 24/7 hanging, shooting, enslaving abolitionists, secession and going to war) who made secession and the Civil War, to be all most Americans, of any heritage, any tone of skin, were worthy of: America and all her future conquests was to be ruled by a very small, wealthy elite -- to whom the rest of us were to be subservient in one way or another, whether as out-and-out slaves or a feudal underclass. That was the dream dreamed by that elite, and the convinced through a variety of lies and circumlocutions to get the whole south to dive off the suicide cliff with them.

It's particularly difficult to not see contemporary developments in the light of this national past.  Our constant surveillance of everyone state; stop and frisk -- what are these other than the same old militias pre-Independence to keep slaves on the plantation, the paddy rollers doing the same in the antebellum south, the KKK and associated orgs in Reconstruction and Jim Crow to keep everyone in their rightful place.