The New Bourbons
The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Stephen Biko
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.” So the saying goes.
But is it necessarily true?
What if all the streams, lakes and rivers where this man sought to fish were on private property? What if they were so polluted that few fish could survive in them, and the ones that did were unfit for human consumption? What if these waterways were diverted (i.e. outsourced) to locations this man could not access? Clearly, under such scenarios, having knowledge about fishing would be useless.
What if this man lived in a valley that contained ninety percent of his country’s population, but only ten percent of its fishable waters? What if the rest of the fishable waters were in parts of the country owned and occupied by the remaining ten percent of the population? Surely economic necessity would inspire our fisherman, and many of his neighbors, to migrate to this sparsely populated, resource rich region of his country.
But there’s a problem. The “ten percenters” also control virtually all the media outlets in the country, and for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—on television, on the radio and in the newspaper—they “warn” the valley people about the dangers of migration. “This sparsely populated region,” they claim, “is not better, but worse, fraught with unseen perils that only those who have historically resided here can ever hope to survive.”
So the valley people believe these media lies, and thus spend the rest of their lives constantly fighting amongst themselves over the few edible fish they catch, while living in constant fear that even those fish, and the waters they live in, might someday be taken away.
Meanwhile the “ten percenters” lounge in their mansions, eat extravagant meals, and laugh at the valley people’s gullibility.
Imagine this no more, because it is the reality of today’s America.
Why, one may ask, can’t the valley people recognize the injustice of their situation and rebel against it? The answer is simple: the demagogy and deceptiveness of the Bourbons.
Throughout American history, and to the present day, the Bourbons have possessed the ability to divide the poor and middle-classes into categories of race, gender, age, income and/or geographic location. Once they are divided, it is relatively easy for the Bourbons to turn each category against the others.
The Bourbons have historically created these schisms through an arsenal of fascist political tactics: Placing the blame for social problems on innocent scapegoats; manipulating fears, prejudices and superstitions; censoring critics through threats and intimidation; repetitiously disseminating “great lies” until they become accepted as truth; and appealing to emotion over reason. When correctly employed these tactics—as America’s recent debate over health care reform has glaringly illustrated—can easily incite a mob mentality, which the Bourbons can then exploit for their own economic interests.
Although the term “Bourbons” was originally used to describe die-hard royalists in Europe, in the United States this word is often used to describe America’s version of “royalty”—those who acquire fame or riches through nepotism or cronyism, and who aren’t about to share them with anybody.
The first of these Bourbons were wealthy landowners in the American South. Prior to the civil war, these landowners profited immensely from the institution of slavery and wanted it preserved at any cost.
Yet slavery had a negative economic impact on many poor, white Southerners. After all, why should the Bourbons pay wages for hired hands when slaves could be forced to work on the plantations for free? Why should the Bourbons use the services of the local blacksmith, cobbler or carpenter when slaves could be trained to perform such tasks?
Naturally the Bourbons were concerned that the poor whites would eventually figure out that slavery only benefited the rich. To quash this potentiality, they trumpeted the doctrine of “State’s Rights” and “white supremacy,” doing it so effectively that many of these poor, Southern whites lost their lives during the American civil war defending the “right” of the Bourbons to own slaves.
Although the Northern victory in this war subsequently resulted in the abolition of slavery, it did not diminish the influence of the Bourbons. Shortly after Reconstruction ended and the Northern troops went home, these Bourbons mandated that all Southern institutions would be segregated by race. The injustices these “Jim Crow” laws ultimately produced caused cartoonist Thomas Nast to condemn them as being “worse than slavery.”
Yet, since the Bourbons deceptively hid these injustices behind the mantra of “separate but equal,” the United States Supreme Court, which had decreed just a few years earlier that African-Americans had no rights that a white person was bound to respect, ruled that these racist laws were constitutional.
