I'm up at 5am getting ready for my trip east. I was dreaming that at a dinner with my new boss, the fellow he was making fun of in absentia was actually me. I'm going to confront him about it. Since that disturbance jarred me awake I decided to stay up and acclimate myself to Eastern Standard Time. I fly tomorrow.
My subscriptions on Google Reader once again show 100+ and so I have a lot of reading to do. Sometimes I don't know why I bother, but still I found my way once again to Michael Yon whose descriptions of life on the war path under CSM Mellinger will go down in history. He was describing his ride to Mosul with the 2-7 Cav, and so I looked them up. I wound up learning quite a lot on the tangent. I recovered the words and name of that Irish tune we all know but don't know the words or name. I discovered a very thorough page in Wikipedia on the Comanche. One degree of separation further I once again recalled the Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, Paiute and Arapahoe.
I was most intrigued by the Comanche and read into their demise a tale of woe. It brought to mind my claim that I represent a people who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. As I checked the populations of the various bands and tribes of Natives, I found myself very aware of the reasonableness of chiefs who presided over the larger groups. Whereas the Comanche's 12 bands would join for raids and then split afterwards, others might confederate and decide to be a less mobile and warrior people. The Comanche had no use for such arrangements. They were masters of the war horse and could kidnap and resell anything on two or four legs. In this manner nothing could stop them, and though the US government promised they would, none of their battles stopped the Comanche raids. It was only the extermination of the buffalo, the basis of the Comanche culture, that weakened them sufficiently so that the US Army could finally defeat them. But their organization itself was too wily.
Like other Natives, the Comanche lived off of the land. They traded well and stole well and spoke well. They dressed well and they knew how to live on the road. They reminded me of Genghis Khan's horsemen, a distributed swarm. Much of course has been said about the nature of asymmetrical warfare and the difficulty of defeating cellular organizations by hierarchical organizations. I suspect the challenge was even greater during the years of the wild West. And yet the US prevailed.
The conventional wisdom calls this genocide. I've heard it said dozens of times that the white settlers were fueled by hatred and contempt for the red man and that Manifest Destiny was nothing more than an excuse for the ultimate final solution: racial extermination. It cannot be that simple. As I looked at the various territories assigned to the Comanche I noticed that the worst deal they ever got was 160 acres, but no mule. I figure Comanches being Comanches, they could get their own mules.
The Negro got no reservation. We got cities instead. The arrangement wasn't formal but that is what happened. Unlike the Natives, we Africans were all in the white man's business. We were inseparable from it, even trafficking in ourselves. And by hook or crook, the black man survived where the red man did not.
I think of the contention that 'African-American' was created in defiance of our European ancestry and heritage. Being all up in the white man's business was an integration of choice as well as necessity. Were we not ferocious in battle as Buffalo and Revolutionary soldiers? Mammies that we were, we didn't hold our charges hostage, nor raid and kidnap and ransom our way to independence. We developed a manner of trickeration that made us appear to be living on our knees when we were in fact conniving from full height. We gamed American civilization, and continue to do so to this very day. We gamed it by knowing it, living it, consuming it whole and twisting it slightly to our own advantage. And despite all of these recent claims that we Africans ought to be close to our distant tribal cousins on the western countries of Africa, we were decidedly not. If we were dependent on the culture of the yam in the Gambia as the Irish were on the potato in their homeland, we would have starved as Gambia and Ireland have starved by comparison to America. That which destroyed the Comanche had no effect on the black man's survival. We were once tribal, and that is the African in African American, but we have been beyond tribalism for a very long time here in this land.
I'm not familiar enough with the years between Reconstruction and the Depression to tell you all of the things that went on in African American life. But we all know that people who were once slaves took advantage of their freedom and changed America to its liking. I look at marvelous paintings of Souix warriors and Comanche chiefs in their tribal glory, and I don't see a multicultural marvel. I see human fossils. I see more importantly a clash of economies, of a people inescapably wed to a resource incapable of being renewed. I'm very Jared Diamond in that regard. One can say very specific things of the Comanche and the 2-7 Cav, whose crest is a sword with the words Garry Owen, have immortalized their spirit of unstoppable raids and living on the war path. But the 2-7 Cav is not leveraged on the economy of buffalo. They have more formidable and flexible resources. Even today's treacherous congresscritters with their non-binding resolutions fear defunding them. So too, African Americans are immortalized, in themselves and their great host of cultural iconography and deep influence in this country. When you look at the painting of a black manservant in Alabama, you see a face whose descendants persist. There is a greatness to that.
Through all America's wars, through all the economic disasters, through all the plagues and floods, through all the deviltry and injustice, through all the confusion and dissent, strife and turmoil, grief, loss, and pain, those Africans have persisted. We have persisted in the marrow of America, inseparable from all its business, its religion, its culture, its essential being. More than any other tribe, this land is our land. At least, that's what I was taught. I have no reason to doubt that it's true, which is why, perhaps, so many of us like to pretend that it's not true. It's a luxury that trickeration has afforded us. In that regard, dual-consciousness is neither a blessing nor a curse, but a dimension of back-talk of the sort America has always needed and often heeded. It is, in a very real way, part of America's humility, and a reflection of how it lives with itself.
I'm going to Philadelphia. When time permits, I'm going to recall David Brooks' book on Bobos and walk the Main Line. I've already read the minutes of the Bala Cynwyd Neighborhood Club, and I've already recalled that Will Smith's production company is called Overbrook Entertainment. As you might well imagine, I am keen to know what we blackfolks do when handed the flag, and am always watching the crusty actions of the upper crust. I'll be staying downtown in a business class hotel doing what we do in the business class which is providing expertise to the proprietors of America. (I'll let you know if these guys are for real, wink wink, but I'll eat steak on the expense account one way or another.) This time, unlike during my entrepreneurial days, I'll be suited up. You'll find me perhaps reading the Wall Street Journal in my trenchcoat on Market Street, anonymous and unremarkable.
Thanks again, to my grandparents.
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