The Empire Always Strikes Back
Slavery is the talk of the town. First, we get news of New York's race campaigner the Rev Al Sharpton's family being owned by the family of old 'Jim Crow' Senator Strom Thurmond. Then we hear that the white half of the not-so-black presidential candidate Barack Obama's family owned slaves too.
Now researchers have discovered that Democratic candidate Senator John Edwards also has skeletons in his closet: two ancestors in Georgia owned one slave each, which, to be frank, is terribly petit bourgeois.
But Senator John McCain in the Republican field hails from a different class altogether: three of his great-great-grandfathers in Mississippi owned slaves in serious numbers, including one with 52 in 1860.
Why the fuss now? America is 'maturing' with its imperial adventures abroad and ripening economic oligarchy at home, and stories like these are a means of shedding its 'innocence'.
My Mayflower Yankee friend feigns shame as he boasts of his ancestor, Captain Mason, who slaughtered Mohicans. The further you go back, the more blood drips from the family tree - which makes America just like the rest of the world.
This is a shock to the citizenry. Steven Grasse, owner of the Gyro Worldwide advertising agency, is so annoyed that he is publishing his 'amateur' history The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World (Chronicle Books).
"Everything America gets blamed for, England started," he says. Global warming? England begat the Industrial Revolution. Iraq and terrorism? Britain mapped the Middle East. Slavery? Sir Francis Drake and his uncle, John Hawkins, shipped them over and founded the Royal Navy to protect their trade routes and markets. Sound familiar? If you want the empire, you deal with the guilt.
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