Part of Bruce Dixon's Greeting below; whole thing here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/barack-obama-and-langston-hughes-%E2%80%9Cgrumblers%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cmerry-christmas%E2%80%9D
Presidents have been issuing holiday greeting messages from their homes or cozy offices for a long time now, and Obama's will be on line any minute now. Those interested can probably find it at JackandJillPolitics.com, at whitehouse.gov, and any number of other places. But the ironic 1930 Christmas message of Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of Black America sounds, with the most minor edits, like it could have come from the lips any US president of the past hundred years, including Barack Obama.
Sixty-nine years ago Langston Hughes began his holiday poem “Merry Christmas” with these lines
Merry Christmas China
From the gun-boats in the river
Ten inch shells for Christmas gifts
And peace on earth forever
At the moment, the U.S. was hip-deep in the Chinese civil war, bankrolling and advising a string of opium-soaked warlord armies against communists and agitators, and conducting naval operations in Chinese rivers and off its coasts. Today our first black president's Pentagon, headed by the same team that ran George Bush's Pentagon, sits atop some 800 overseas military bases in a hundred countries with more than 2 million uniformed personnel. Our president will spend more on this military machine than the all the rest of the planet combined, fighting and preparing to fight what the National Security Doctrine calls “multiple overlapping wars” to control resources in distant lands in the interest “free trade and free markets.”
Langston's Christmas poem draws our attention to a part of the world much in today's headlines.
Merry Christmas, India
To Gandhi in his cell
From righteous Christian England
Ring out bright Christmas bell
Under our first black president, Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of a vast law-free zone in which daily shellings and air raids go unreported and unremarked except by the families of victims. Assassinations and kidnappings to fill America's world-wide network of secret prisons have replaced the open incarceration of real and suspected political foes. At least we knew Gandhi's name, what he was charged with, where he was locked up, what his sentence was, whether he got a day in court and whether his keepers mistreated him. We can't say that about hundreds or thousands of Obama's prisoners.
Merry Christmas Africa
From Cairo to he Cape
Sing hallelujah, praise the Lord
For murder and for rape
Some things have changed very little indeed. The four part series “The Ravaging of Africa” to which a link appears in our left column, is a comprehensive indictment of US policy in Africa, which has caused the death of some 26 million Africans since the 1960s, including nearly ten million in Congo alone. America's role as conscienceless predator was reaffirmed last week in Copenhagen, when the US categorically rejected the notion that it owed the rest of the world a debt for being the single major contributor to climate change over the last century and a half. Africans can drown or starve due to US -initiated climate change, but there will be no technology sharing, no reparations, nothing in the way of human solidarity between Africa and the West if the son of Africa in the White House has anything to say about it.
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