As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.
African Proverb.
One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.
John Locke
“Liberty is Equally as pre[c]ious to a Black man, as it is to a white one.”
Lemuel Haynes, 18th-century writer and the first
African American minister in the American colonies.
Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
The question of the future is how best to keep these millions [of African American men] from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black …
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Robert F. Kennedy,
His address in Indianapolis, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis
We are only as blind as we want to be.
Maya Angelou
I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you.
Ta-Neshi Coates,
About him and his son the night they heard there was no indictment for the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Between the World and Me.
Several years ago, I stopped meandering. I was doing it for you two. It was an act of love spanning a decade. I worried about how America would greet you and how you would react. The winds of hate ceased, and with its disappearance, my fears for your physical well-being vanished. Only as a white guy could presume the book’s time had passed, and I shoved the manuscript in a file called Notes from Bubba for three years.
On November 6, 2024, I reopened the file.
The nation had the opportunity to elect a bi-racial woman as president. She had been a prosecutor, U.S. Senator, and Vice President. Her message spoke to our better angels. She hoped to guide the nation to a place that shored up the middle-class and poor’s economic, social, and political footing. She saw the promise of America’s heart and mind. She believed in an America that would finally fulfill the promise made 21 score 13 years ago.
Her opponent described a declining nation as too “woke” and unselfish with its citizens and people worldwide. He saw the nation as weak and vulnerable. I didn’t recognize the country he described. He did offer hope. Himself. He, and only he, would fix a troubled nation by instituting tariffs, cutting waste in government spending, employing the Department of Justice to hunt down his political enemies, and eliminating Federal medical programs, as promised in Project 2025, a roadmap developed by the Heritage Foundation to guide a new president.[1] At his rallies, he garbled his messianic message in a torrent of negative, ill-conceived, inaccurate, and deceptive jaunts. He described rivals as very bad people or stupid, as if his speech writer was a third grader. He never explained his solutions for a troubled nation. He was obsessed with himself and the cheers of the crowd.
By the slimmest of margins, Americans rejected her message of hope and elected a former president who set several records. He campaigned at rallies where he spoke in non-sequiturs that created fallacies laced with racist and misogynistic tropes.[2] He was impeached twice. He was a convicted felon. A New York jury said he sexually assaulted a woman. A porn star said he had sex with her while his wife was home recovering from the delivery of his third son. The same man belittled immigrants even though he married two. (There was a difference. His wives’ descendants were from Europe. The immigrants at the U.S. southern border were Hispanic.) The Department of Justice investigated him for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election. He is said to have incited hundreds of people to attack the Capitol to forestall Congressional approval of the state Electoral College tallies for the 2020 Presidential election. His minions bypassed state laws and attempted to install fake electors.
One such accusation, never mind conviction, destroyed the careers of politicians a decade ago. That was an age when hints of integrity remained in politics. Those silent notes of conviction and integrity were overshadowed by the blatant quests for power, prestige, wealth, and the bluster needed to fill an ego larger than any of his buildings (please excuse my hyperbole).
This spasm of self-interest isn’t an American tool. It was invented long ago. For example, the Caesars, Mark Anthony, Cassius, and other citizens and heroes of the Roman Republic jerked the nation in an alternative direction, and their ambition, greed, and myopia destroyed the republic. These creatures of covetousness left us a gift. They proved that such egomaniacal quests destroy nobility and patriotism, leaving only swaths of turmoil and destruction.
Those seeking aggrandized glory obliterate the lessons of history. They must because their souls are disconnected from the spirit of a civic-proud individual. They connect to their fantasies, so they depend on how well they portray their patriotism. More to their usual point, they will make the nation greater. Romans, Nazis, and even Brits and Americans, in their more imperialistic quests, have employed the tactic. They must.
A quest is a search inspired by imagination promising outsized rewards. It’s a fancy of the imagination involving a hero who “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” according to Joseph Campbell, author of A Hero of a Thousand Faces. What happens when there’s no supernatural wonder and no return home “with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”
Beyond the world of fiction, reality shreds wonder, return, and outsized rewards, reducing them to fantasies never realized. The Odysseuses, Frodos, or Luke Skywalkers we seek fade as reality’s stark, bright lights expose fragility. It highlights the ambitions of those posing as heroes. They lack the humility, kindness, and strength of Frodo, for they are driven by a gluttony fed by power and wealth. They arm themselves with a single, hubristic notion, “What’s best for me is best for you.” The last time that notion was uttered aloud was about 70 years ago when an automobile executive told Congress, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”
A genuine quest’s drive comes from mercy for others, but self-interest and greed feed off lenity. They camouflage their vainglory with tissues of solutions for others. Like Don Quixote, they charge at illusions plied from the fantasies of the rank-and-file. The quasi-questers, therefore, create a melodrama ripe for social-political manipulation. It mutates populism into a twisted cousin. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and professor, has baptized it sadopopulism. (The “sado” is from the word sadism, as in sadomasochism, the sadist being an individual who inflicts discomfort or pain on another for pleasure.) Let’s step back. Populism doesn’t mean popular. It’s derived from the term populous, meaning the people. Populism arises when the will of the general populous coheres into an almost social-political single voice, challenging the direction or the rule of an elite group, such as the wealthy. It’s a humanistic attempt to improve the lot of all people. In such times, individuals, leaders, and pretenders materialize. Leaders help people find the best tactics to make their point. The pretenders, faux-populists, and quasi-questers twist, distort, and entangle even righteous thoughts. They coin new phraseology, such as fake news, unwoke, and even the meaning of words such as great and mandate. The pretenders’ rhetoric steers the movement away from the elite towards scapegoats, usually minorities within a society.
To be continued.
[1] When asked about Project 2025 on his campaign, he repeatedly said, I haven’t read it. I doubt he reads anything that does not talk about him.
[2] By the way, his hero is the man who helped Senator Joe McCarthy destroy the lives of hundreds of Americans during his great Communist witch-hunt during the early 1950s. The legal consultant to Mafia dons and others of shady ilk was Roy Cohn, who worked out a deal with the Federal government over Trump’s refusal to lease apartments to African Americans. It was a deal Cohn had to relitigate a few years later when the Trump organization was found not to be complying with the agreement. As Politico reported: “Trump, as has been well-established, learned so much from the truculent, unrepentant Cohn about how to get what he wants, and he pines for Cohn and his notorious capabilities still. Trump, after all, reportedly has said so himself, and it’s now the name of this film: “’Where’s My Roy Cohn?’”
For a Dignity Deserved 