RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment

writing for godot

Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest

Print
Written by Don Washington   
Tuesday, 30 June 2015 03:04


Say the Word - Assassination

When Rev. Pinckney was assassinated in his church for having the moral convictions to do the right thing as Sen. Pinckney I was angry but I was not surprised. I was not surprised because Dylan Root simply answered the summons his community had given him. “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Over the years I had heard a great many terrible things uttered about Sen. Pinckney by ordinary people in South Carolina… ordinary folks unlikely to burn a cross on your lawn but perfectly capable of understanding why such a thing had to be done. Ordinary people who themselves would kill no one but understand the rage and the impulse to do so.

As I reflected on some of the things said about him, by these ordinary people, before he was assassinated; his death suddenly had a sad and inevitable feel to it. Still, as I watched the our media friends stumble badly through clumsy attempts to handle a perfect storm of racism, terrorism and access to guns in the most neutral and ineffectual way they could; I knew they would miss the mark. The mark is this; Rev. Clementa Pinckney was assassinated for the work that Sen. Clementa Pinckney dared do. The reverend was assassinated for the principles the senator tried to make real. He was not gunned down, massacred or killed by a racist sociopath. He was assassinated by racist soldier answering the never ending summons to step up and strike down leaders in any community who champion beliefs that challenge the unspoken but very real status quo. It was an assassination.

Yes, I said assassination. I said it not because there was some specific plot to kill the reverend for the senator’s work because there wasn’t. I say it because there is a constant racist, sexist, xenophobic and nataivist back-beat that called for the reverend’s blood in specific and is still demanding the blood of anyone who thinks, speaks, engages and yes… looks like the senator. Two weeks ago Dylan Root answered the same call that Wade Michael Page answered for blood in general at a Sikh temple and Jared Loughner answered for blood in specific when he shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head. Wade struck at a religious community polluting his country. Jared struck at a political figure who was destroying his political security. Dylan struck at both. It was an assassination.

Dylan Root Came from Inside Racist Reality Not from Outside Racist Society

It was no accident of fate that brought Dylan to Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s doorstep or prompted him to ask for the minister. He had come there of his own volition to do what had to be done. He came there to put down a race-hustling traitor; a race-baiting apostate and an illegitimate government official who was an affront to American values. When Sen. Pinckney was alive he was considered all of these things by people he sat with in the State House and by the constituents that sent those people there and by a considerable number of the siting Governor’s constituency.

Dylan Root swam among the people as a fish swims in the sea. His political views, racist beliefs, open discussions of racial and political violence are so mainstream that no one near him thought him outside the boundaries of acceptable savagery. He lived and acted as a political assassin. He said not a word that has not been uttered on FOX News or on the Wall Street Journal editorial page or in fund raising letters from every announced GOP candidate. Some of what brought him to be an assassin has been and is still endorsed by all of these entities and people. Undetectable assassins don’t come from the dark corners of society they come from heart of communities at society’s core. This was an assassination.

Acceptable savagery, there are those not deserving of the milk of human kindness such as it is in the world we find ourselves in right now. Sen. Pinckney was an advocate for public education funding and that made him an irresponsible, ignorant and dangerous socialist. Sen. Pinckney stood up for voting rights in South Carolina and for his trouble he was painted as a race-baiting, un-American member of the Democrat party trying to undermine the political system and let illegals steal the country from “deserving” people… real Americans. In the eyes of a considerable number of people in this country Rev. Pinckney was deserving of some kind of admonishment, rebuke or correction.

Contemplate for just a moment that the only thing that surprised these people was the severity of the “rebuke” (Bullets to the head.) not the rationale for it. Dylan Root was both the expression of acceptable savagery against a collection of ideas he and a sizable number of other Americans find abhorrent. He was like Eric Rudolph who bombed abortion clinics and the Olympics to preserve life because baby killers and race-mixers are not worthy of protection. He was like Scott Roeder, who assassinated Dr. George Tiller. When he was saying “I have to do this, you rape our women, you’re destroying the country. You have to go.” When he assassinated Rev. Pinckney he being savage to those who had lost the right to even basic protections. This was an assassination.

The Reverend was Killed for the Senator's Work

When Rev. Pinckney was alive some of the same people who shake their heads and shed some tears at his death breathed life into and gave comfort and support to the idea that his support for police transformation made him an opponent to the rule of law. Those same voices said aloud that they hoped on one day when he needed help the police would not be there because he was not deserving of the law’s protection. Apparently some wishes come true but to think of it as a wish is to strip their intentions of their power. Those intentions were not wishes but summoning chants to the everyday demons of racism and violence. Dylan Root answered the same summons that sent Bruce Pierce to assassinate Allen Berg. Dylan Root was seeking to do more than terrorize a community or a church… he was answering a summons to still a particular voice at this particular time in the struggle for social justice and the last straw was a telling one… the one that tells you it was an assassination.

The last thing that Sen. Pinckney fought for on the floor of the South Carolina Statehouse and that Rev. Pinckney deployed the full moral authority of his spiritual calling was police accountability. After the police murder of Walter Scott he asked for bodycams to be worn by all police officers. It was the lightest of asks and in right-wing circles it made him the focal point of hatred. Here was a black man on floor of a state house that had once pitched the entire country into a treasonous rebellion for the right to rape beat and exploit his ancestors for profit, forever like animals, demanding some level of accountability from the new overseers… the police. Worse yet he was demanding that a black man had rights that a white man not only had to respect but as a police officer had an obligation to protect not violate. Dylan said it, he had to go.

It was a bridge too far for people who had hated him personally and his values on principle for as long as they had known him. Lessons had to be taught, messages had to be sent, action had to be taken and places had to be minded. The assassin, Dylan Root, was the first to act but certainly not the last to consider how to act or whom to act on. Please note the rash of church burnings and uptick in racialized violence that has followed since his assassination. Dylan Root is no more a lone racist zealot with access to gun than Kurtis Monschke was alone when he earned his red laces by killing a homeless man. He was assassinated because he stood up for principles that far too many people feel are social toxins. He may as well have been advocating for integration in the 50’s or black farmers in the 30’s the only difference here is that Dylan Root wasn’t allowed to lynch him with impunity and the aid of the community. Dylan Root still answered the call of that community and did his duty for it. Rev. Clementa Pinckney was assassinated for who he was, what he believed and what he looked like. Sen. Clementa Pinckney is done being a stain on status quo because he has been assassinated.

We do not live in a vacuum though most of us nearly die in one. The atmosphere of most lives barely touches a few dozen others when they fade from the field or are snatched from it. Political assassinations have one constant. The target, the person the assassin had to kill, spoke for thousands of lives beyond their own and was a voice for ideals higher than just themselves. In the rarest of cases, like this one, they elevated the situation from political fistfight to moral imperative. Dylan Root killed Sen. Pinckney for wanting to hold police accountable, fully funding public schools and protecting the rights of African-Americans and really all Americans to cast a ballot. Dylan Root killed Rev. Pinckney for having the temerity to believe in social and economic justice, fairness and political equity. It was an assassination.

Values Have Consequences

Understand that the same forces that have spent and still spend hundreds of millions of dollars to demonize the ideals of social and economic justice and anyone who believes in such things; make racist death threats so much background noise. Dylan was summoned to do violence, he chose to assassinate an African-American minister and senator that was identified as a leader in a movement that Dylan knew was destroying his people and country. He knew because he had been told and someone had to do something to protect that country and the right people.

The hard reality is that Dylan was not some “lone wolf” acting from a place of isolated racist hatred. Dylan Root is a willing enforcer of a set of values shared by almost everyone in conservative movement. The only questions are the degree to which they hold them and their willingness to act on them. He swam among them like a fish and preyed on his targets like a shark. Dylan Root is the upholder of a tradition at least as old as Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Klan and as new as the GOP’s voter suppression strategy. By physical force or corruption of law, we are talking different means to the same ends. Those ends being.... The containment and cooptation of any movement that challenges the racist and genocidal foundations the country was built on. The maintenance of an ocean of white supremacy, so that it becomes so normal that even the most violent sociopaths are given political legitimacy and an invitation to act on those impulses. The world has been rid of a turbulent priest and if we do not treat this as an assassination we can expect more to follow.

Don Washington is the Front Man for the Informational/Blog/Conspiracy the Mayoraltutorial.com, can be followed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it is not afraid of ninja, cannot be killed by mortal means and wants you to Get Dangerously Informed

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN