He’s fired
The Chief Bully made it his business yesterday, at yet another campaign rally, to attack football players for demonstrating against racism.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired,’ ” Mr. Trump said during an appearance at a political rally in Alabama.
The Times doesn’t say it, but Trump repeated “he’s fired” with heavy emphasis, his face contorted with rage.
As to the substance, this nonsense about “when somebody disrespects our flag”…Here’s a wild idea: the important thing isn’t actually the flag, it’s the substance. The flag is only a symbol. To Trump it’s apparently a symbol of what he calls Our Nayshun – but what is our nation? One thing it is is a state that at its very beginning laid out some inspiring ideals that it repudiated at the same time: on the one hand equality and liberty, on the other hand 3/5ths of a person and slavery. It’s a state that started life clinging to the anachronistic horror of chattel slavery, and has been tainted by racism ever since.
It’s not actually disrespecting the flag to refuse to pay ceremonial homage to it when the state it symbolizes hasn’t yet even come close to repairing the damage done by its long shameful history of the worst kind of racism.
Trump is both white and a noisy shameless racist. It’s not his job to tell black people they can’t protest the flag. It’s certainly not his job to call them “son of a bitch” and snarl at them from a public stage.
Editing to add a tweet that sums it all up.
https://twitter.com/justinjm1/status/911583718179033093
I think the 3/5-of-a-person symbol is fascinating. Because the way we all think about it is that the Founding Fathers were unable to see the humanity of the African slaves, so they decided to count them as less than fully human. But the representatives of the Southern states, which were heavily invested in slavery, wanted slaves to count as full persons. The 3/5 compromise was only about whether slaves should count with respect to calculating congressional representation. If slaves had counted as “full humans,” that would have been worse: the larger slave populations would have given slave states even more representation and greater power in Congress. (Slaves could have ended up counting as fully human, but that would not have translated into any actual rights. This was only about counting heads.) It was the “good guys” who wanted slaves to count as less than human. The whole thing is obscene, regardless. And Trump can go to hell.
The slave states wanted slaves to count as full persons for the purposes of districting – but not of course for the purposes of voting or of rights-having. I wonder if they ever got mixed up when they were sleepy after a long day of constitution-making, and forgot which version they were talking about. Red faces all around!
“Red faces all around!”
Don’t be silly, Ophelia. You know as well as I that there were no Indians in the Continental Congress.
Basically, the 3/5 thing is the same reasoning that still exists in the Electoral College–it’s granting more power to people who own property, even when that property is other people.