The French had the right idea in 1789. That statement alone ought to royally piss off those right wing hypocrites who concocted “freedom fries” so they could keep up the fat content in their couch potato asses. People like to forget that the French helped us drive off the Brutish Empire (and gave us many kinds of cheese), but just because they decided not to send the flower of their your into George Bush’s Iraq Cuisinart they are now “not with us,” hence, in Bushian simplicities “agin us.” They have also given us some fascinating history and some Enlightenment philosophers who have enlightened our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We had our war of independence and our Civil War but because we never quite got to the aristocracy like the French did, we did not have a revolution that was like the French Revolution. I, for one, have always been proud of the fact that we Americans never went on a killing purge of he royalists after our revolution (of course, like the French in WWII, there were a lot of people who claimed to be in le resistance).
But maybe we have reached that stage in our own history when it is time for a bit of “royalist” house cleaning. All the essential elements of the French Revolution are present in America today. One, we have Bastilles all over the place. Prisons are one of our biggest industries, building and operating prisons that are filled mostly with people who were caught carrying a few ounces of “controlled substances,” our contemporary equivalent of some poor sap who stole a loaf of bread back in 18th Century France and got to become another Jean Valjean. We also have Guantanamo.
So stage one is to have a Bastille Day where we let a lot of screwed, angry people out of prisons, making room for a lot people who need to replace them—(not necessarily in any order of deservedness) people like Dick Cheney and his neo-con pals, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove . . . well, there’s quite a few in that administration, then on to the Wall Street crowd, after all we can’t let poor Bernie Madoff die of loneliness. Madoff would have been the perfect contemporary Marat, sitting in a Jacuzzi in one of his several homes faking stock transactions, and some Charlotte Corday who has seen her life savings disappear in less time than it takes to say “Ponzi scheme” shows up with a kitchen knife and eviscerates the bastard. Marat had a skin disorder that kept him in the tub; Madoff had a skin disorder that kept him skinning his victims.
Remember the sans-culottes? The term, meaning knee-breeches, came to be a reference for the poor and the working classes. Well, we have our contemporary equivalent in the sans-401Ks, those people who thought they would have some of their hard-earned money around to see them through their retirement years, but which the Wall Streeters played fiddled with theirsans-knowing, or unscrupulous lenders sold them sub prime mortgages when they had sans-income to cover the adjustables and balloon payments. The sans-401Ks need to hit the streets and haul these con men out of their offices and beat the bejeeezus out of them until they sign over their commissions and bonuses.
It would also be a good time to haul out the old Guillotine, put a good edge on the blade, and engage is some decapitation—or would that be de-capitalist-ization? A little divertisement for the jobless and homeless. There could be dozens, not just one, Mesdames deFarges, maybe single mothers who don’t have health care for their children, knitting and calling for more heads as the charrettes, the tumbrils that used to haul both the guilty and the innocent clatter through the streets of Washington and Wall Street to the Guillotine. Bush W as Louis XVI (but not accepting is fate with as much dignity)—off with his head! Condi Rice is the place of Marie Antiionette, and throw in handmaidens Dana Perino, Karen Hughes, and Harriet Miers, and for good measure, Coulter and Malkin—off with their empty heads! Instead of Danton we can have the head of Rumsfeld, still mouthing “stuff happens,” as the blade whistles down, and the contemporary Robespierre, none other than “le Dick” Cheney, now there is a rolling head that will indeed bring a roar from the slavering crowd. Cheer on the sanguinary entertainments ye Iraq war amputees and PTSDs. Off with their heads! Let the charrettes role through bloody puddles into the place, carrying Delay, Lott, McConnell, Boehner, Scalia, Thomas, and the rest of the Republican rogues.
But any revolution worthy of the term must go broad and deep. There are those others who abetted the titled aristocracy—the ministers. Also rolled into our American Place del Concorde to face their comeuppance must be the likes of Fed reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, still trying to get one more interest rate reduction in place before he is strapped down to receive the blade. He would be followed by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who would be uttering, “I regret that have but one seventy billion-dollar bailout to give without any restrictions to my friends at Goldman Sachs.” Let the cobbles of Wall Street be cleansed with their blood!
While we are at it, let the angry mobs of retribution haul to the blade those hypocrites who gave their pious blessings to the ancien regime: the Dobsons and Warrens and Robertsons, and their secular counterparts, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity and their enabler, the graspy Mr. Murdoch.
Finally, Mr. Bush must be called to account. Some will protest, as his tumbril, “Charrette One” rolls through the streets, that he was just a simpleton marionette who dangled at the strings of the sinister “Monsieur le Dick.” But no, this time there will be no escaping responsibility as his did for his business failures and his “so-called” military service. It is time for George to pay up. So as he is strapped down before the dripping blade, a banner announcing La Mission Fait Accompli fluttering overhead, we might hopefully hear these fateful words, a la Sidney Carton, “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.”
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© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.26.2009)