By David Rutter
The likely ascendancy of Roland Burris to the Senate seat once held by people who had earned it is being blamed mostly on Rod Blagojevich’s stupendous cupidity.
Makes sense.
In this scenario, Blago is the unrelenting villain, while Burris plays the more-or-less semi-sentient but honest bystander. He’s playing Ethel Mertz to Blago’s Lucy.
When the people of Illinois eventually get to hear the unfiltered voice of the governor on wiretaps, they will make whatever decision they wish on his role in the current messification.
But why does Burris get a free pass, even if his worst crime is being a political cuckold? Has he no dignity?
And why do the black officeholders of Illinois, not to mention the nation, not see Blago’s clever manipulation as a newfangled version of Reconstruction carpetbaggery?
The same process that will allow Burris to take his job tainted the first two black senators in U.S. history.
Before Massachusetts elected Edward Brooke in 1966, the only two black Americans sent to the Senate were Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche K. Bruce. They got the job essentially the same way Burris will get the job, as he mostly surely will because there is no sound legal argument against it.
Someone will hand it to him. Here. It’s yours. Try not to drag it through the mud.
It’s a door prize for him because he’s black, but not among any of the black candidates who might have been worthy of it. Illinois has shown that its citizens will elect a black person of either gender to the U.S. Senate. But none of those candidates would have been Burris.
His path to the job is a snide, cynical punishment for everyone who has crossed Blago, and one that damages all black leaders.
Sham is an old ploy in this game. Both Mississippians were sham candidates meant mostly to punish Mississippi in particular and the South in general for cultural hubris in the Civil War. Northern opportunists took control of southern state legislatures as part of the Reconstruction and gripped them tightly until 1875.
In fact, Revels was the supreme punishment for Mississippi. He was a onetime Illinois minister who was appointed for a year to fill Jefferson Davis’ old seat. There are not many more defined “up yours'” moments in American history.
It was a delicious retribution inflicted on the old South, sort of like an evil step cousin being named the executor of your will.
And when Brooke was elected, he was hardly building on the inglorious history of Mississippi’s role in racial reconciliation. He was trying to run from it, or at least make it irrelevant.
Until the 17th Amendment in 1913, all senators were selected by their state’s legislatures. So, some case can be made that the U.S. Senate has always been tainted by political shenanigans.
Now we have Burris, whose vacant, vacuous smiling face confronts us at every turn on television. He thinks there’s honor in the job. He thinks he deserves it.
But Even Ethel Mertz wouldn’t stand for this.
Posted on January 7, 2009