Wonkette proves Michele Bachmann was RIGHT about slavery!

[Enrique]

When will you people realize that American Congresslady Michelle Bachmann (R-Gumdroptopia) is always right? The liberal Internets are currently going nuts over this latest gem of a Michele Bachmann moment, in which she discusses her knowledge/philosophy of slavery.

From the Colorado Independent:

“We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,” Bachmann read from founding father John Jay, ending her reading with the statement, “We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

The thing that the hysterical grandmas over at The Politico and Huffington Post, etc., are missing is that Michele Bachmann is correct, as usual.

We all remember the affordable health care brutally imposed upon America’s slaves of African origin back in, whatever, the year 33 A.D., the year our country was born on the cross. Sojourner Truth spoke often and frequently of the evilly cost-effective mammograms she was forced to endure during her many years as a slave. As Truth declared in her famous 1851 speech, Ain’t I A Woman: “I am so glad I am free, because if I were not, someone would try to take my temperature when I had a fever, and also not charge me, this would be against God’s will, obviously.”

Far more recently, Toni Morrison stirred our nation’s memory and, ultimately, its conscience when she wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, “There was imprinted upon her shoulders memories of the greatest burden any woman could bear; the burden of knowing that one day affordable Pap smears would be offered to her great-great granddaughters. Now here I will add something about molestation, because it is my favorite Literary Device and I cannot write a book without it.”

But probably it was Phyllis Wheatley, a slave and America’s first famous poet of African descent, who put it best in her legendary poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my beknighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
‘Their color is a diabolic dye.’
Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain,
Michele Bachmann is an asshole.

Read more at Wonkette: http://wonkette.com/416616/michele-bachmann-is-your-new-emancipation-proclamation#ixzz0tZkxzeo8

[dipsydoodle]

1. Does that mean the entire population

now owns 40 acres and a mule ? Get real.

[patrice]

3. I wish! but, then, I'd like to be able to pick my neighbors too: War mongers and Bigots need

not apply!

[Scurrilous]

2. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Igel]

4. What's weird about this is my idiolect.

I don't assign a race to the word "slave." I've read too much about black slaves in N. Africa, white slaves in N. Africa, Slavs and SE Europeans taken as slaves in Europe and in the Muslim Middle East; too much about Roman slavery and Greek slaves; too much about slavery in the ancient ME and in other parts of the world to think of slaves as being necessarily of any specific race. And when I hear the expression "wage slaves" I don't think that my skin's about to darken.

I mean, let's not forget in all the ruckus over daring to say "gypsy" instead of "Roma" or "to jew" to "haggle" that "slave" is etymologically "Slav." (Why exactly can say "slave, gothic, vandalize" and other such words?)

I think I read about Androcles and his kitty before I ever heard about American slavery. And when I've heard the expression "slave of Christ" (where "slave" translates "doulous") I'm quite sure that I don't think of any particular race. It's KJV, so 1611 or earlier for that one. Black slavery wasn't a fixed idea at the time, at least not for most Europeans (it was a big deal in N. Africa, and a going concern in Iberian- and France-dominated countries). I just read a discussion today about this very expression in Old Church Slavic, so that would put it at about 950 AD (although bozhii rabu and khristovu rabu could be translated as Tyndale translated "doulos," i.e., as "servant").

Sure, if I'm around African-Americans I don't talk about slavery much because I know that many of their ancestors were slaves and you don't mention rope in the house of a man who's been hanged. (Which is, of course, a Cervantes allusion for me because that's where I first heard it, but apparently it dates to before Jamestown; no American lynching allusion there or connection slavery, even though Cervantes was a slave for a while.)

So when I refer to slavery in the American South I really have to call the practice "chattel slavery" to distinguish it from other forms of slavery; or "black slavery" to make clear which group was involved.

Come to think of it, I know a lot of people like me. Ah, there's that nasty language variation, where even dear Noam makes the foolish assumption that there's a homogeneous community of speakers when there are more sociolects in American English than you can shake a stick at. (Fortunately, most people catch on that their sociolect isn't obligatorily everybody else's sociolect.)

I also know a lot of people not like me, people who assume that American slavery is somehow exceptional and slavery was uniquely or mostly a black institution.