flower-hibiscus.jpgAh, the Magna Carta. Holy document and fount of liberty and democracy and justice over eight centuries! Now the prized possession of (*gag*) the Carlyle Group! Surely such a wondrous thing must have sprung from the clean hands of utterly upright people, no?

Actually, the reality is that the Magna Carta was a cobbled-together mishmash that owed more to down-and-dirty feudal politics than to upright impulses. Simply put, England’s King at the time, a fellow named John, managed to tick off too many members of the Anglo-Norman nobility, and they fought back by forcing him to sign a document that reined in his estate-grabbing tendencies. They certainly didn’t intend for this piece of parchment to give any meaningful rights to the teeming mass of peasants that made up the bulk of England’s population at the time (it mentions "freemen", yet only around fifteen percent of persons in England were freemen, clergy or nobility; the majority of persons in England at the time were most decidedly not free, especially in the agricultural south where estates used cheap labor for farming). Yet just as flowers grow from cow manure, the Magna Carta, through its many amendments and reissuances, led to the foundation of the concept of universal human rights as we understand it today.

That story resonates with me because it shows that politics, dirty, smelly, agenda-ridden politics, has always been with us, and that positive change can come from the most unlikely sources – and sometimes out of plain dumb luck.

Let’s jump forward eight and a half centuries and look at the civil rights movement. When the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced in the House, Howard W. Smith of Virginia — a Dixiecrat who hated civil rights and wanted to sabotage the bill — expanded its scope to cover women as well as the other protected classes of people mentioned therein. This addition brought laughter from the (almost exclusively) male members of Congress when it was first read on the House floor. But the bill passed — and, as Lyndon Baines Johnson had sorrowfully predicted, the Democrats lost the South for a generation (actually, it’s been three generations so far: to this day have not gained it back, so strong is the race hatred), which in turn led to four decades of Republican dominance of the White House and Congress, a dominance that only now is finally cracking.

Fast-forward ten years: Ironically enough, Sam Ervin, one of the few Dixiecrats who didn’t jump to the Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Voting Right Acts, would wind up becoming a hero when he took his encyclopedic knowledge of the Constitution and of Congressional rules — things he had before used for the evil of upholding segregation and white supremacy — and used them this time for good, in presiding over the impeachment hearings of Richard M. Nixon.

Progress has never been strictly linear. Most of the time, it’s incremental — or it’s happening in one area while our attention is focused on another, and then takes us by surprise when it seems to flower all of a sudden when in fact it’s been building up to that point for some time.

By the way:  One of the key people in making sure we found out about Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal (where we sold arms to the Iranians to finance the bloodthirsty right-wing Contras in Nicaragua) is a guy named Robert Parry.  He worked for Newsweek at the time.  His reward?  Being ostracized by Big Media and cast into the outer darkness, where he’s been producing his Consortium News website for over a decade now.  Go help him out — he needs and deserves it.

(Photo by DiAichner3.)