"Cradle of the Best and the Worst" USA

The first two days of this week were so inspiring to me that I'm still in a bit of shock.

Sunday, there was Gail Collins' article in the New York Times about the effort to have a woman's face on the new US twenty-dollar bill to replace Andrew “Indian Fighter” Jackson. She mentions some good possibilities – she herself would like to see Gloria Steinem there – and her readers/commenters suggested many others. Emily Dickinson – my first choice – was mentioned a few times, and Helen Keller. Could you just imagine Emily Dickinson on the twenty-dollar bill? With a line from her poem 788?

      But reduce no Human Spirit

      To Disgrace of Price.

Then there was Monday, and the appearance of Seymour Hersh's article in the March 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, entitled The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter's Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past.

Hersh is the reporter who first disclosed that particular crime on March 16, 1968. This present article in The New Yorker is a sort of review and update forty-six years later.

Hersh relates here how he subsequently gave a speech at a college where Hubert Humphrey was teaching:

After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”

Humphrey's resentment has pretty much epitomized the United States as I have personally known it over the course of my lifetime and as I have come to understand its history. It has committed these almost unimaginable crimes and slowly but surely the awareness of them has increased. The Viet-Nam war was one big My Lai, one big crime, so egregious that only a very few openly now deny it. But there is some level on which perhaps half the country is still repeating Humphrey to those of us who have fought the long fight for this awareness. Facing up to the reality takes a long, long time, particularly for those who have derived so much financial and other self-interested benefit from it.

But here we have the Collins article and people actually suggesting, openly, in the NY Times no less, that someone like Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller should replace the old Indian Fighter on the twenty-dollar bill! Elizabeth Warren? This is possible in the USA, but even if we do not succeed, it has been a priceless privilege to participate, and yes, a joy despite all the horror.

I can not embed the YouTube video of Leonard Cohen singing his "Democracy is Coming to the USA" but here is a link to it.