By Bill Bonner
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This week, we are talking about the perishable nature of gods.
The city fathers of our hometown of Baltimore have let it be known that it was time to toss out the old deities. Reports the Associated Press:
After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend in response to the city’s plan to remove a Robert E. Lee statue from a park there, Mayor Catherine Pugh has renewed efforts to remove similar Confederate imagery from Baltimore. [… ]
On Monday, Pugh released a statement saying that it is her intention to remove all of Baltimore’s Confederate-era monuments – Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway, the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place, and the Robert E. Lee and Thomas. J. “Stonewall” Jackson Monument in the Wyman Park Dell.
The statues came down this week.
All across the country, the old gods become devils. New, gluten-free gods take their places. The statue of Taney (pronounced Tawney) will be particularly missed.
Roger Taney, like your correspondent, comes from the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
Like your correspondent, he grew up among the tobacco leaves. Like your correspondent, his teachers advised his parents that he was someone whose future lay beyond the green fields. And like your correspondent, he left the rich farms and oyster beds, went to college, and studied law.
This is where the similarity ends.
Taney had a brilliant career; he took the high road to the top of the nation’s highest court. We never even took the bar exam…
The statue was less than a one-minute stroll from our office. Artfully done, it shows the Supreme Court jurist in his robes, bent forward in gloomy reflection.
The poor man had a lot to think about. Upon his shoulders fell the weight of contradictions over slavery.
America was supposed to be a free country. As chief justice of the Supreme Court, his main duty was to protect the freedom of its citizens against the power of the government. And yet a large part of the population was kept in chains, condoned and abetted by that very same government.
On a personal level, where he bent to his own bricks and tilled his own plants, he knew what to do. He freed his slaves and gave pensions to the older ones.
Taney said of slavery that it was “a blot on our national character.”
But the gods and myths misled him. In his chambers… wrestling with a complex legal issue by candlelight, the shadows confused him.
Before him was the plaintiff, Mr. Dred Scott, slave and lifelong resident of the United States of America, asking the highest court in the land to affirm that he had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… without being forced into a win-lose deal by his former slave master.
But instead of boring down to the bedrock of the issue, Taney let himself get distracted by the surface …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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