Cain & Thomas, the Gold Dust Twins

No reality of American life is more carefully and constantly left unsaid yet is always widely understood among at least one sector of the populace than is the fact that the main raison d'etre for the Republican Party is to "keep the neegaz down." But once that certainty is faced and acknowledged, then everything about that party suddenly falls into place. And by "neegaz" I refer not only to the descendants of the slaves brought over Africa and commonly but erroneously called "black" instead of the far more precise and charitable term, "Rainbows." Instead it also embraces members of many other groups whose interests and well-being overlap those of Rainbows, and whom I generally lump under the term of the "Have-Nots." But it is for the Rainbows that the sharpest and most numerous, lethally intended spear thrusts of the Republicans are always reserved. And among the longest and most poisonously tipped of those weapons is humiliation.

Right now two middle-aged Rainbow men in particular are standing out as being all too eager to serve as tools of that humiliation, and no wonder, for that activity has paid off handsomely for them, financially speaking, as have the careers of so many people who have chosen the Cruel and Nasty Side as the way to go in this country, which only goes to show that the old maxim that "money is the root of all evil" stands on firm ground, no matter how much lucre and all sorts of material stuff are worshipped, today as in so many past days.. These two men are Clarence Thomas, the longtime fraudulent occupier of one of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court,.and a more recent arrival on the stage of national dishonor, Herman Cain, who has somehow jack-knifed himself into being one of the lead figures in the current run-up to the Republican primaries to determine their nominee to run for President.

Thomas, who gained his post as a result of being the mascot of a Republican Senator from Missouri whose name I am now pleased to be unable to recall, has since then gone a long way toward establishing himself as one of the most backward and inept Supreme Court justices ever -- an automatic vote for the perpetuation and enlargement of the American police state, and guess what is the preferred color of those confined in these ever-multiplying gulags? Those of his own color, naturally. This is a result that was easily foreseen those 20 or however many painful years it has been since Thomas was elevated to that lifetime post, to the eternal disgrace of many Democratic Senators as well as Republicans. The Democrats must've gone along with that blindness so as not to be seen as being racially prejudiced, and there were not a few ignoramus and chauvinistic Rainbow "brothers" who also went along with it, having had their jaws bent badly out of shape when, during the nominating process, Thomas was charged, and convincingly, with having sexually harassed a "sister," Anita Hill -- a thing they thought she not have done even if he was guilty, simply because he was a "brother.".

Now we see this Herman Cain guy taking advantage of a whole gang of inept Republican aspirants to the Presidency to try to vault over their heads into the preeminent spot, using as his pole a long series of notions that sound good to hell-bent conservatives but almost never make any sense in the larger world of common sense. They defend the things he says by calling them "plain-spoken," and it's just the kind of idiocy that they want to hear, though it might not be things they would want to say in good company, for fear of having their sanity seriously questioned.

But Cain serves an even more important service for them: they imagine that their support for him proves beyond any doubt that they are not racist, when, however, just the opposite is true, because it's clear as anything that he works for them only in the role of carrying the Republican's water, as does C. Thomas on the so-called "highest" court.

A good example of Cain's weak and shapeless mentality --_he comes out with these things every day, it seems -- is his recent declaration that if elected President he would separate the U.S. from Mexico with an electrified fence that would kill any Mexican attempting to scale it. Later on, when the towering inhumanity of that idea had been suggested to him, he came out with one of his favorite cover-ups for his various natterings, namely that he had just said that as a joke. But then, just a little later, after having apparently gotten a booster shot or something or another from an Arizona sheriff who has gotten a name for himself by terrorizing the so-called "illegal immigrants" in his state, Cain changed his mind again and said he would stand behind his notion of frying Mexicans on a fence after all. But doesn't that also involve, among other things, a certain number of Americans trying to go the other way as well, because that is the way that things work out? National borders are always crossed in both directions and not just one.

Therefore, for instance, we have it on the very best authority, the 0/11 hijackers, that Mexican women make the best wives, and that has not been forgotten.

And then there is Cain's much-discussed and simple-sounding "9-9-9" tax plan, with which he would replace the entire U.S. tax code. You would think that when he first voiced this idea, he would've realized how easily it could have been characterized as being the famous Satanic number turned upside down. The other Republican candidates, all male except for a shrill woman named M. Bachmann, deferred to her to make that all too obvious charge, though I think it would be even more effectively questioned by being called the "$9.99" plan, referring to the habit of retailers that has become so firmly embedded in the American fabric to put prices on everything ending with nines that are only one digit short of a good, round number, as if to always suggest to the consumer that he or she is getting a big bargain that actually amounts to only one cent -- a kind of commercial jiggery-pokery that I always thought should've been outlawed long ago..

I think of Thomas and Cain as being two shysters who are similar in their approaches to things and in being unapologetic humiliations not only to Rainbows but to the human species as a whole. And more than that, they also bear a certain physical resemblance to each other, with their heads that bring to mind oversized cannonballs, a likeness that is close enough to their being seen as modern-day Gold Dust Twins, harking back to the days when one often saw not only on grocery labels but also quite generously in the movies and on the radio and elsewhere, frequent depictions of Rainbows that were never meant to be complimentary. But when these discomforts are pointed out, there is also never an end to the Cains and the Thomases, whose advice always is, "Get over it."

But humiliation is not so easily dealt with -- or forgiven, or forgotten.