{"id":887086,"date":"2022-11-17T19:49:25","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T19:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=135521"},"modified":"2022-11-17T19:49:25","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T19:49:25","slug":"no-more-american-thanksgivings-and-other-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/11\/17\/no-more-american-thanksgivings-and-other-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cNo More American Thanksgivings\u201d and Other Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of the\"\"<\/a> traditional US holidays, Thanksgiving was by far my favorite. I can do without the excessive commercialization of Xmas with its cheesy music that broadcasts for weeks on end. Cancel the forced festiveness of New Year’s and the sloppy drunks it generates; ditto for the militarism of July 4th. \u00a0So, what\u2019s not good about coming together with friends and family and sharing a home cooked feast?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to ruin the party, but before you carve up the turkey, read the opening essay in Glen Ford\u2019s The Black Agenda<\/a>.<\/em> His critique of the holiday is that the mythology surrounding Thanksgiving serves as a justification for our nation\u2019s founding genocide of its native peoples and a validation of white supremacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Thanksgiving story,\u201d Ford explains, \u201cis an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human.\u201d According to the mythos, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims of harsh weather and na\u00efvet\u00e9 rather than the Christian fascists that they were.<\/p>\n

Glen Ford and the making of a black-oriented journalism<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Black Agenda<\/em> book was published posthumously after Ford died on July 28, 2021, at age 71. The New York Times<\/em> described<\/a> Ford as a \u201cconstant scourge of the liberal establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

African American theologian Cornell West elaborated<\/a>: \u201cGlen Ford was the most brilliant, courageous, and consistent writer and journalist in the black radical and independent tradition of his generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

A \u201cred diaper baby,\u201d Ford\u2019s career traced back to reading the news live on the radio at the age of eleven. His surname was shortened from Rutherford to Ford at the insistence of the \u201cGodfather of Soul\u201d James Brown when Ford took a job as a reporter at his radio station in 1970. Later, Ford created the Black World Report,<\/em> a nationally syndicated weekly news magazine on radio.<\/p>\n

Ford went on to television, print, and online media. He reported for the Communist Party USA\u2019s national newspaper and collaborated with the Black Panther Party in Jersey City. In 1977, he launched, produced, and hosted the first nationally syndicated black news interview program on commercial television called America\u2019s Black Forum.<\/em><\/p>\n

After the Black Commentator, <\/em>which he co-founded in 2002, Ford founded the website Black Agenda Report<\/em><\/a> in 2006 with current editor Margaret Kimberly and the late Bruce Dixon<\/a>. The book, The Black Agenda, <\/em>is a collection of Ford\u2019s essays, published by OR Books<\/a>, which describes itself as \u201cthe go-to source for titles that challenge the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a talk at the People\u2019s Forum<\/a> in 2019, Ford explained<\/a> the role of a left, black-oriented journalism and its relationship to the mass movement: \u201cAlthough political journals can\u2019t jump start political movements on their own, they can tie the residue of previous mass movements like our own of the \u201860s and \u201870s together with people who never experienced a mass movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engaged journalists like Ford, according to Margaret Kimberly in the forward to the book, \u201cspeak for the marginalized, who can\u2019t speak for themselves, and they expose the privileged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black misleadership class<\/strong><\/p>\n

Glen Ford was one of the foremost critics of \u201cblack faces in high places,\u201d who sell out the interests of their constituents for petty fame and privileges. These are the folks who have \u201chistorically been far more ashamed over mass black incarceration than outraged.\u201d A case in point is US Senator Corey Booker, whose career has been dogged by Ford from Booker\u2019s first run for mayor of Newark, NJ. Ford called such individuals \u201cthe black misleadership class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford does not pull any punches in his criticism. He described the time of the Obama presidency as the \u201clonely days<\/a>.\u201d When much of liberal America were all gaga about a black man in a white house, Ford was a courageous voice asking us to look beyond skin color to politics. Given the current cheerlessness of the national mood after the Trump and now the Biden presidencies, it is hard to envision a period when excessive hope was a problem. Ford, however, was the anecdote to the hope-maniacs back in those heady days after Mr. Obama moved into the White House.<\/p>\n

Essays in the book include \u201cFirst black presidency has driven many African Americans insane\u201d and \u201cTo hell with Obama and his Van Joneses.\u201d\u00a0 In \u201cWhy Barack Obama is the more effective evil,\u201d Ford explains that Obama \u201chas been more effective in evil-doing than Bush in terms of protecting the citadels of corporate power and advancing the imperial agenda. He has put both Wall Street and US imperial power on new and more aggressive tracks \u2013 just as he hired himself out to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bulk of black voters,\u201d Ford lamented, \u201chave aligned themselves with the right wing of the Democratic Party,\u201d which he accuses of being the \u201croad to black ruin.\u201d Moreover, \u201cboth major US parties are plagues on humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a what would have been an apt description of the recent 2022 US midterm elections, Ford commented: \u201cElection seasons are reality-creation festivals, during which the two corporate parties pretend to put forward different visions of the national and global destiny. When, in fact, they answer to the same master and must pursue the same general strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ukraine War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although it did not get into the book, Ford wrote a prescient article on Ukraine<\/a> in 2014, after the US-engineered coup there. His perceptive essay on the geopolitics of the Ukraine War was titled \u201cUS prepares to gas Russia into submission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford exposed the core imperial issues animating the conflict: US energy interests and economic power. He wrote: \u201cWashington\u2019s strategy is to permanently ratchet up tensions to \u2018new cold war\u2019 levels to justify sanctions against Russian energy exports while exploiting America\u2019s own natural gas \u2018surplus\u2019 as an enhanced weapon of global hegemony.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford foresaw the imposition of a proxy war in Ukraine, designed to sever Europe from the Russian supply of cheap natural gas in favor of a more costly US product from across the Atlantic. But even Ford did not anticipate the ever more aggressive nature of US imperialism, which some analysts believe literally blew up<\/a> the main gas lines from Russia to western Europe.<\/p>\n

The US intent in provoking this \u201cnew cold war,\u201d Ford explained, is \u201cto crush, or at least seriously disrupt, Russia.\u201d Over eight years later, US Secretary of \u201cDefense\u201d Lloyd Austin<\/a> said \u201cwe want to see Russia weakened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anticipating the movement for multilateralism and international independence from Washington, Ford described an emerging geopolitical dynamic with \u201can assertive Russia, increasingly coordinated with China.\u201d<\/p>\n

The current US-dominated world order is predicated on military super spending and economic and financial control. In the same article, Ford predicted that the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc \u201cis the most likely venue for hatching alternatives to dollar hegemony.\u201d Fast forward to 2022 and Lula da Silva is on the campaign trail in his ultimately successful bid to become the next president of Brazil and proposes<\/a> the SUR, a new Latin American currency to end US dollar dependency.<\/p>\n

May Glen Ford rest in power<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGlen Ford is irreplaceable,\u201d his fellow journalist and comrade Margaret Kimberly eulogized in the book\u2019s forward, \u201cnot just because his writing was so sharp and so clear, but also because his politics were so clearly of the left\u2026He was a Marxist, and he brought that ideology to all that he did.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post \u201cNo More American Thanksgivings\u201d and Other Essays<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of the traditional US holidays, Thanksgiving was by far my favorite. I can do without the excessive commercialization of Xmas with its cheesy music that broadcasts for weeks on end. Cancel the forced festiveness of New Year\u2019s and the sloppy drunks it generates; ditto for the militarism of July 4th. \u00a0So, what\u2019s not good about [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post \u201cNo More American Thanksgivings\u201d and Other Essays<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887086"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887086"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887099,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887086\/revisions\/887099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}