The Al Green Generation
Old Age and Treachery
Stephen Colbert, on the forcible removal of 77-year-old Representative Al Green from the President-for-Life’s address last night:
“Some people questioned why so much muscle was needed to remove an old man with a cane. But it turns out it was for a serious reason. When security searched him, they found that he smuggled in a spine."
I’m seeing that much of the real belligerence against the kleptocracy these days is being expressed by people from the old Left, those for whom the horror of the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation were topics lived or studied in sixth-grade civics classes. We were shown films of formerly thriving Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reduced to poisonous smoldering wastelands. We were shown how to hide in hallways and cower under our desks. We were shown films of bodies stacked like cordwood in neat pyramids in the center of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, gaunt survivors gazing uncomprehendingly at their soldier liberators, expecting perhaps, some fresh hell . . . we learned that in the end, there is no place to hide.
As we came of age, we saw that lesson play out again in our pointless political war against Vietnam, where 58,000 young patriots went to die, mostly poor and people of color, those who couldn’t afford a college deferment or a doctor to diagnose bone spurs. Fifty-eight thousand is a fraction of the number of Southeast Asians killed in that conflict – too many to count, but over a million, easily.
We protested the Vietnam war, loudly and at length, and for all that sturm and drang, all we got was a “war on drugs,” which is now and always has been a war on Blacks and non-conformists. We have our first openly criminal president to thank for that. As recently as last night, the current crime boss claimed to be clamping down on the allies at our borders, decrying their failure to stop our citizens from consuming fentanyl – today’s red state drug of choice, brought to you by cartels armed by U.S. manufacturers and funded by U.S. dollars. Who the fuck do they think they’re kidding?
They think they’re kidding us, and for those under the age of 50, they may have a point. For all their hours at the gym and healthy lifestyle, gun waving and macho posturing, an astonishingly large number of people in this country are weak in the worst possible way: they are weak-minded and ignorant, they are co-opted cowards who have sold their souls for promises that will never be kept. They don’t know or understand what it means to stand up for a principle – their idea of courage is to scream spittle-flecked obscenities to the liberals who dare attend their school board meetings.
As for the rest of us, it is likewise astonishing that anyone of a certain age is still in the game. We’ve spent all our lives trying to gain some foothold, to bring some equity to bear between the haves and have-nots, to accept early on and to insist later that race and gender, sexual preference and ancestry are not valid scales on which to judge. We have been dragged nearly against our will to accept that this country is deeply racist, misogynistic/paternalistic, and spoiled by greed. We understand now that the war against DEI is just a rehash of Jim Crow and the war against the truth. We have persevered, somehow, to have it all washed away in the last moment by quislings and sycophants.
And so, speaking as a member of Al Green’s generation, you will learn the lesson at your peril. You may come for us, now, but we will not go willingly. We never have. We are not afraid of being made destitute, or of being detained, or of being punished for the crime of speaking the truth. Been there, done that. And just as we have no place to hide, we have no need to hide.
Being MAGA, on the other hand, may not work out so well. Surprisingly enough, it probably isn’t the progressives and Leftists in this country that you must worry about. Your own leaders, whose empty promises and idle threats are your life-blood – those are the guys to watch. You (and they) are about to find out that abandoning your friends and getting into bed with fellow psychopaths is not a smart move. As with the oligarch takeover during the so-called Gilded Age, expect significant financial reversals, probably a depression. That in turn will lead to loss of essential services, utilities, hospitals, fire and public safety. Long term – war, possibly nuclear, maybe global climate collapse, mass starvation, riots. With any luck, I’ll miss that part.
You don’t have to take my word for this. Greater minds than mine are saying the same thing. See, that’s what being old gets you: a sense of history. Or is it irony?
It has become clear to me that our generation was the beneficiary of the lessons learned in WWII. We watched those concentration camp filmstrips in civics class. (Do we even teach civics anymore?) We endured many of our male teachers lecture about the dangers of fascism - because they were WWII or Korean vets. I remember them saying - you don’t think this can’t happen here? It can, unless you think for yourself, speak up and don’t just follow the herd.
These teachers hated bullies. They took their job of being a good male role model very seriously. They were coaches or they taught Shop. I am sure they prevented a whole lot of future Donald Trumps.
They say that societies tend to forget the lessons of the past when the last of the generation that lived through a terrible situation have all passed away and no one is left with the lived experience of that.
I know for sure that my elementary school was a designated bomb shelter; my jr. high and high school may have been as well. As for learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, I saw the pictures of the camp liberations when I was about 10 or 11 through the photographer’s lenses of the Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post war correspondents who traveled with the liberating armies. Every time we went to a movie, there was always a newsreel of world and national news that kept viewers apprised of the news that the local newspapers couldn’t cover. We had all sorts of age appropriate periodicals in our classrooms and libraries. North Carolina schools had the Weekly Reader in class. Since we didn’t have the internet we were taught how to use the library. If there were any banned books, we never heard about them but we spent a certain amount of time in our library every week so we learned about a number of world events.
When Viet Nam rolled around, the president of my high school senior class, a college graduate, was a helicopter pilot and he was shot down and killed. That war was personal so yes, my generation raised hell all over to try to help end that war. It was my generation that fought for and finally won rights that either have been stripped from us or are now threatened.
And lord knows Al Green and Black people of his generation have been fighting and protesting far, far longer just for the right to live so there would be no lying, tin pot president that was going to keep him down or quiet. He showed the rest of the Democrats how to make some good trouble last night. It’s too bad others didn’t follow him throughout that god-awful diatribe.