Resistance moon: Children, do you want your freedom?

The city of New Orleans started taking down public monuments to the Confederacy this week. In the night. With the workmen wearing flak jackets and helmets on account of death threats.

Yes—the people who have been strutting about since November, calling the majority of Americans snowflakes, do not see the irony in gloating, “We won, get over it,” while at the same time screaming about the sacrilege of moving on from The Woah. Perhaps they think the statute of limitations for losing bigly—including unconditional surrender—expired after 150 years?

Not for nothing is it called The Lost Cause.

One of the biggest cod-Confederates I’ve seen lately is a politician right here in the Old Dominion, who’s been tweeting up a storm in emulation of his obvious hero, the Kleptocrat, stamping his feet and moaning about how this is desecration of our glorious heritage, etc., etc., etc.

Here’s what you need to know about Corey Stewart: he’s running for governor of Virginia, and he’s from that bastion of the Old South, Duluth. Minnesota. They used to call his kind carpetbaggers.

So my entry for today is not strictly a poem, but it is intertwined with the legacy that Stewart and his ilk are so fixated on honoring and preserving: slavery. (And its modern-day manifestation: racism.) Using the term Jacob’s ladder to refer to the connection between heaven and earth goes back to…Jacob, in the Bible. Jacob dreamt of a ladder that went all the way to heaven, with angels and everything. In Christianity, Jacob’s ladder is a metaphor for Christ, who bridges humanity and the godhead.

The spiritual “Jacob’s Ladder” dates to at least 1825, and was sung by slaves, who for generations could only dream of an escape from bondage. It’s in the form of call and response, which is useful for participation by unlettered congregations, as well as for ad libbing new sentiments. Truly—as the spirit moves you, you bring your brothers and sisters along.

American race-based human chattel slavery began right here in the Old Dominion in 1619. When the Lost Causers these days wave the Confederate flag around and bellow “states’ rights”, keep in mind that the “right” they were concerned about 160 years ago was the one to extend slavery into the new territories and thus maintain political power in Congress. Consider all those rebel armies the 1860s version of lobbyists, if you like. Southerners were afraid that if new states were admitted to the Union as free states, they’d be outvoted in Congress, as indeed they would be. So it was all about power—keeping it, and wielding it over other humans based on skin color.

For nearly 250 years, until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865, slaves sang “Jacob’s Ladder” as an expression of faith and hope, and to draw the kind of strength it takes to persevere for that length of time. It’s served that purpose ever since, through Reconstruction, through the KKK, through the Depression, through the Civil Rights movement… And it still has value now, in the Gauleiter era.

One of my favorite versions is the one by Sweet Honey in the Rock that was used in Ken Burns’ seminal documentary The Civil War more than 25 years ago. 

So no “poet” today; perhaps not even a poem. But, as resistance goes, this is it, baby.