On a steamy autumn evening, a man stands in the center of an intersection near the town of Rosedale, Mississippi. He hopes to hitch a ride, but as the sun sets in the west, so to, do his hopes. Don’t let the sun set on you boy! The full moon begins to illuminate the darkness and for the first time the man notices that there is a hairless dog in the ditch. The dog begins to howl in a crazed and desperate voice. The man hears a different voice; he turns and sees a man sitting on log.
“You are late Robert Johnson.” The man on the log declares.
“Maybe not.” Johnson replies. He feels his legs begin to weaken and he suddenly falls to his knees.
“You want to throw that guitar over to that dog and go play the harp, cause you just another guitar player like all the rest or you want to play it like it never been played before? You want to be the king of the Delta Blues and have all the whiskey and women you want?”
“That’s a lot of whiskey, Devil Man.”
“Its midnight, Robert Johnson, you standing under the full moon and I put this X here. I been waiting on you.” The dog is still howling.
Johnson says, “That dog got the Delta Blues, I want to play like that dog.”
“You take one step toward Rosedale and you will play the blues like nobody ever played them before. Your soul will be in my left hand but your music will possess all who hear it.”
“I’m going to Rosedale, Devil Man.”
“When you get there, you get yourself a plate of hot tamales, you gonna need something on your belly where you’re going.”
In 1936 and 37, Robert Johnson recorded a total of 29 songs and they became some the most influential songs of the 20th century. Many of these songs are thought to refer to his experience at the Crossroads such as this verse from They’re Red Hot:
I got a girl, say she long and tall
Sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall
Hot tamales and they’re red hot
Oh, she got ’em for sale
In August of 1938, Johnson was in a saloon in Greenwood, Mississippi when someone handed him bottle of whiskey. Immediately after taking a pull on the bottle, he became violently ill, went out into the street, fell to his knees and howled like the hairless dog at the moon. He died three days later at the age of 27.
Is Robert Johnson the founding member of the 27 Club? Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all died at the age of 27.
“Going down to Rosedale, got my rider by my side!”
Is Devil Man still exacting his due from his deal with Johnson or did each of these musicians make their own deal? Hard to know since they are gone, but many still say: No Robert Johnson, no rock and roll.
This story has elements of both a parable and a fable and its most obvious metaphor is the crossroads that we all find ourselves mired in from time to time throughout our lives. Some choices are easy, but Devil Man is never far away and some choices are agonizing indeed.
Not only do each of us come to crossroads in our own journey but as E Pluribus Unum our Nation has many times found Devil Man sitting on a log at our crossroads, ever ready to offer us an attractive choice. Have we always chosen correctly? I don’t’ know.
We have done many, maybe even most, things well. As an American, I was taught and always believed that our country, with all its faults, at least was motivated by a sincere and heartfelt desire to advance mankind. BUT!
We chose to enslave fellow creatures of God. We chose to effectively exterminate fellow creatures of God simply because we wanted their land. We chose to declare our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters second-class citizens. We chose to take children from their parents whose crime was trying to enter “our” country illegally.
The United States of America has always contained elements and a just below the surface appearance of a plutocracy. In recent years as more and more money has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands those elements are beginning to bubble more and more to the surface and assert themselves in more aggressive ways.
If plutocracy becomes our accepted method of governing, then our democracy will be, by definition, dead. We may still go through the motions of a free people, by maintaining term limits, actually voting and pretending that the plutocrats will protect those not in their class. But it will be an illusion.
We are about to see the plutocrats affirm their claim in a most vivid and perhaps irreversible manner.
On February 13, 2016 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia passed away. Within an hour of his death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that President Barack Obama would not be allowed to submit any nomination that would be given a hearing prior to the November election that was almost 250 days away.
His easy to sell rationale was that the American people needed to have a say in who the next Justice would be and that the correct and proper thing to do was to wait until after the election. Mr. McConnell well knows that for most Americans the Presidential election is a binary choice: either a Republican or a Democrat would be President. He had a 50-50 chance to get the Justice he wanted as opposed to a zero chance, should he allow President Obama to fulfill his constitutional duty.
The right saw it a brilliant strategy, the left as usurping the balance of powers.
No public outcry ensued and the Republicans understood much, much better than the Democrats that the 2016 election could, and probably would, shape the Supreme Court for generations to come. This is evident in the results. Mitch hits the lottery!
The election of 45, for all its bizarre aspects, will, if nothing else cement Mitch McConnell’s place in history as the Senate leader that turned the process of selecting Supreme Court Justices upside down. It will forever after be known as the McConnell Doctrine and a great and lasting contribution to freedom and to our government respecting the voice of the governed.
I hear you asking how any of this relates to plutocracy or has anything to do with Robert Johnson. I’m not sure it does, but you have to admit the Robert Johnson story is a great one.
The United States Congress is a co-equal branch of government with the Executive branch and the Judicial branch, which means by definition, that Congressional elections are just as important as Presidential elections. Here is where we are about to see plutocracy in action.
Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on June 27, 2018. This is 131 days before the November Congressional elections. The new Congress will be seated in January 2019 and under the McConnell Doctrine we can happily take up the issue of Kennedy’s replacement then. Let the people speak! Here! Here!
When the news of Kennedy’s retirement reached McConnell he took to the Senate floor to reassure the American people by saying:
“We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall…”
Wait a minute, what about our beloved McConnell Doctrine?
When people with money rule, simply by virtue of the fact that they have money, is the definition of plutocracy. We are witnessing it now on full display. It is on display without shame, embarrassment or disguise.
McConnell has put our leaders blatant and unabashed hypocrisy out there for the whole world to see. His, and their, manipulations, schemes, and designs are all intended to protect those that pay the bills, coupled with what we can all now see as their wonton disregard for the voice of the people.
McConnell has now ripped down the veil of our leaders being public servants, fighting to protect government of the people, by the people and for the people. He has at last made obvious, what most Americans have suspected for a while now. Our current crop of National politicians crave power above all else and are willing to sacrifice any pretense of principle, honor or decency in order to maintain their grip on the levers of power. But to what end.
Americans know too well that our government has become impotent. The current Congress has passed no healthcare law, no immigration law or no infrastructure plan. Instead their proudest and most celebrated accomplishment is to pass with an extreme sense of urgency a tax cut for the benefit of the plutocrats.
What is power if those that have it are content with impotence?
If we don’t change what is happening in this country, we better get us some hot tamales because we are going to need something on our bellies when we get where this is taking us.
The man is sitting on the log. The dog is howling. Which road will we take? Right now we are:
“Going down to Rosedale, got my rider by my side!”
Rebuttal to the Section on McConnell issuing statement after Justice Scalia’s passing……Joe Biden proposed the same in 1992 during a Presidential election during the session of the 102nd Congress when Democrats not only had control of the Senate but the House too. Are there different rules for Republicans ??