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You Are Being Used By The Truly Dishonorable, Senator Lott
The Honorable Trent Lott
United States Senate
Dear Senator Lott,
Yesterday you announced that you would resign from leadership of the majority party of the United States Senate, a majority to be convened next month in the new Congressional term. This resignation of yours was apparently the consequence of your Freudian gaffe at the occasion celebrating the centennial year of the corpse representing South Carolina in the Senate. Your comments at worst made plain, or at best left to implication (depending upon whose opinion you seek), that the United States would be a better country if the mixing of the races had not become an active policy of government, let alone merely tolerated in the first place.
In your announcement, you also indicated that you would remain a member of the Senate.
Credible newspaper accounts have reported upon the hasty covert maneuvering by President George W. Bush and his operatives to topple you from your post. These stories have revealed how Bush and his handlers have put forward a candidate for leadership more to their liking—a person whom they probably would have preferred anyway at the start of their administration. Please take note of these credible reports, Senator.
At any rate, all this humiliation upon you follows despite your repeated apologies to blacks in particular and to America at large.
There is no one who can truly question the sincerity of your declarations to admit wrong or ignorance, or both. Nor should anyone feel justified in questioning your pledge and your willingness to promote the causes and agenda of a majority, if not unanimity, of black Americans. Your acknowledgement that the objectives, if not details, of Affirmative Action and educational programs to promote a greater understanding and sensitivity to differences in culture and race is a step forward.
Any questions about your sincerity on this matter would be answered in time, of course. As majority leader of the U.S. Senate, you would certainly be in a position to advance deservedly the special interests of one group or another, while of course seeing that the general interest of all America was still a fulfilled priority. If you failed to live up to promises you made to reform yourself, it would become quickly apparent.
I have no problem at all giving you the benefit of the doubt, Senator. For a person, who allegedly considers black persons so much mud to scrape off the bottom of his shoe, to appear before and to make obeisance to those very black people on the Black Entertainment Television network is rather stunning. If you were, until recently, an unreconstructed bigot and segregationist, then your appearance at BET is either the act of a most cunning, psychopathological liar, or that of an honorable man wanting to make amends and willing to expend all of his energy proving it.
In time, if you proved to be unrepentant and unreformed, the political opposition—it does not matter that it is the Democratic Party—would point to you as an issue in an election year: here is the symbol of the Republican Party, formerly the Party of Lincoln (for dear old Abraham would hardly recognize it today), and see for yourself by whom it is led, they would say.
On the other hand, if you became the champion of the black cause in America in particular, and of all minority causes in general, the only people who could be disappointed with you are the racists of the Republican Party, who would see you as a traitor to your heritage, as a heretic to the party platform.
Of course, your comrades in the party would know that you had no choice in the matter. They would know that you were compromised, forced into your heresy, by your carelessness in maintaining the cover under which the party operated.
As for the rest of the people, your record and history suggesting that you were a segregationist could be overlooked, even wiped clean, completely forgiven. For your defining characteristic as a man would be the honorable things you did in the last days of your service to the public in the Senate. America has a great capacity to forgive and forget, for those who are truly reformed, who have seen the light, and who have lived out their final days pursuing what is honorable and dignified.
Naturally, Senator, your removal from the leadership was not because of what you thought.
It was because of what you thought OUT LOUD, Mr. Lott.
The dirty little secret of the Republican Party agenda was no longer a secret (although still dirty and little). Before your remarks, there was the seeming appearance of racism and bigotry that could be dismissed with responses by those in your party accused of being bigoted and racist for the accusers to show proof, something not really possible. All of a sudden, the cat was out of the bag, and damage control routines had to kick in, which meant you had to be kicked out.
But apparently only kicked out to a degree, Senator Lott.
For your ignominy is apparently enough to make you unworthy of leadership in the United States Senate, the most respected of respected government institutions.
But your shame is not apparently such that you should not have to resign your membership in the Senate altogether!
Senator, do you not find it odd and strangely beneficial to George Bush and to the Republican Party at large that they did not ask also for your principled withdrawal from public office as well?
Do you not think it altogether too coincidental that the United States Senate is precariously balanced toward belonging to the opposition of the Republican Party, and that balance would certainly be tipped that way with your dignified retirement from the Senate? (This is not entirely true, for Vice President Cheney would be there to cast tie votes where votes were along party lines. But then, there is always the possibility that a principled senator, such as the honorable James Jeffords, would see how extreme the Republicans would become, and who would vote against the party and even leave it altogether if given an ultimatum about party loyalty, isn’at there?)
Senator Lott, suppose that the Republican Party were comfortably represented by, say, 69 senators. Your bowing out would leave them with 68 senators, assuming the governor of Mississippi, a member of an opposition party, appointed someone outside your party to serve that part of your term until the next special election. It would still be a comfortable majority of the Republican Party in the Senate. If that were the case, do you think that your colleagues in the leadership of the GOP would stop at urging you to relinquish the leadership role?
Of course not, Senator. Your continued presence in the Senate would be an issue in an election year, and a cost-benefit analysis by the functionaries of the Republican Party would say that it is better to lose an insignificant vote in the Senate than to lose on the issue of brazen bigotry.
The willingness of the leadership of the Republican Party to have you step down as leader in the Senate, but to dissuade you from resigning altogether, is itself a calculation and design of people—no, schemers—who must themselves be truly dishonorable and truly unrespectable. It is hypocritical and morally inconsistent to say that you are no longer worthy of being a distinguished leader of those who are distinguished by membership alone, but that you can retain the distinction of membership yourself. Would it not be like the God of Abraham (not Lincoln, but father of Isaac and Ishmael) punishing Gabriel and Michael, the archangels, for egregious behavior by removing the “arch” from their titles, yet not casting them out of heaven altogether? Does this seem reasonable and morally consistent to you, Senator Lott?
In short, Senator, you are being used.
Being used by a small number of people for their own political purposes and benefit.
You have been humiliated, stripped of rank, dishonorably discharged by your own brethren, the people whom you could have, should have been able to call upon for understanding even when those whom you most offended were willing to see if you were true to your word.
In pronouncing judgment and sentence upon you, Senator, your colleagues use carefully considered phrases like “for the good of the nation” and “for healing of the country.” Never do they dare mention the interests of the party, or rather for the interests of the select few of the party, which is what it is all about, is it not, Senator?
Perhaps they came to you and said:
Trent, you know the rules, and the penalty for violating the rules.You know that the elements of the sacred texts of the party platform can never be revealed to the public at large.
You know that slips of the tongue may obligate you to fall on your own sword.
You know, that above all, whatever penalty you are forced to make or sacrifice you are called on to endure, the final outcome must be for the collective good of the party, for the protection of the high priests of the order.
Trent, your sin is great. Your punishment must be equal to it.
Surely your colleagues in the party, declaring themselves to be principled individuals, having properly held you in disgrace by taking away your role as leader, having stated that the reason for your fall from grace was because your statements considered in reflection of your history and record, need to be instructed by your own wisdom and probity that complete absolution can only logically obtain upon your resignation from the Senate.
You understand the reasons, do you not, Senator?
With your replacement in the leadership role, you are no longer in a position to oversee personally the campaign for reform of law and policy important to promoting diversity in culture and race, a campaign which you promised to undertake as part of your pledge to show that you had reformed. With someone else now leading the Senate, you are not assured that the interests of the new leadership will be anything other than continuing the status quo. Indeed your deposing became necessary because your party colleagues know that you were an honorable gentleman good to his word, who had every intention of upsetting the present regime and agenda.
What can your influence be in the Senate if your friends in the party see you as disgraced, and the opposition sees you with indifference and perhaps contempt so long as you were not willing to fight for what you now newly believed?
Your transition to being the new person you want to be might be better served by a change in scene, by surrounding yourself with those who not only understand and empathize with you, but who share in your new goals and dreams, and who are in a position to help you.
Surely you could serve the cause of promoting racial harmony outside the Senate as much as inside it. Look at former President Jimmy Carter. How much more honorable the man in his service to humanity since having left office than in holding it.
Surrounded by people who would gladly call you “friend” and who would be led by you, you could be a force for great change. You would be honored, and respected. And this does not come from being called “Senator,” but by being true to honorable and respectable intentions.
It could not be characterized as petty and unprincipled except by the petty and unprincipled.
Your statement to the entire Senate assembled, entered into the record, might read something like this:
Dear friends and colleagues,I can think of no more dignified a statement, Senator.I appear before you today a different man, a changed man. I appear before you today a man made aware of his monumental ignorance and shame.
And I appear to you today a man committed to meeting those who may have been offended by my actions, to those who say they are victims of policies I have supported. I want to prove myself worthy of their forgiveness.
I have been chastised and shamed to some extent by my colleagues. They have told me that men of a mindset such as the one I possess are unworthy of holding a position of leadership in this most honorable of institutions.
I will go even further to say that men of a mindset such as the one I possess are unworthy even of holding membership in this most honorable of institutions.
It is for this reason that I hereby resign from membership in the United States Senate, effective at the end of this day.
After much introspection, and after much discussion with family and friends and countless others, it seems I can do much more to fulfill the promises I have made recently, namely to help the disenfranchised, namely to become part of the solution rather than the problem in promoting diversity and in opening doors rather than shutting them, by working full-time in those interests.
I find that I could not balance my time and energy, or be placed to compromise my goals for the sake of some political expediency or the appearance of it, by remaining a member of the Senate and also serving to help those who are victims of injustice solely because of the color of their skin or inoffensive difference in culture.
My dear friends and colleagues, my resignation from membership in this esteemed body is not only necessary for new career goals I have set for myself, but it is also right.
Let this be a clear example to all who wish to apply for position as United States Senator that they must prove themselves worthy of the office. Being a member of this body demands a minimum level of respectability, a respectability that cannot be obtained when one is blinded by bigotry and incapacitated by intolerance.
To my friends and colleagues here, I thank you for the opportunity to have worked with you for the betterment of this country.
To the people of Mississippi, I can never say enough times to you how grateful I am to have represented you before the Senate. The honor you have done me is one which I will never forget.
To the people of America at large, I thank you for your support, your ideas, your thoughts, your prayers. I hope that the most of my efforts have been as much for the good of America as for the good of the people of Mississippi or to any single individual. I know that my service to you all has always been my highest priority.
And to my family, I thank you most of all, for the sacrifice, for enduring the ups and downs that have attended the course of my career as part of your continuing support of it. If I have proved my worth to no other, I can only hope that I have done so to you.
Thank you all, and God bless.
It is gallant, and principled. There is nothing sinister or deceitful about it.
Please do not let yourself be used by those whose interests in this matter are only for themselves, not the good of the country.
Sincerely,
Concerned Citizen
