Let My People Blow - The Eric Holder Distinction

Posted By CotoBlogzz 03-06-2011

Rancho Santa Margarita, CA - In the book  published in  Germany under the title Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus (The Mosaic Distinction or The Price of Monotheism) Egyptologist Jan Assmann restates the thesis he advanced in his 1997 book Moses the Egyptian, that  sin entered into the world not with Adam and Eve, but with Steve,,,,err....Moses.

The Mosaic distinction did not exist in the world of polytheistic religions.  Once the distinction is made, however, a new type of religion comes into existence, something that must be called a “’counter-religion’ because it rejects and repudiates tradition and everything that went before and what is outside itself as ‘paganism.’  The tradition against which it was directed was polytheistic, and since polytheistic religion, in Assmann’s definition, is really “cosmotheistic,” overcoming primitive ethnocentrism and tribal religions, “by distinguishing several deities by name, shape and function,” ancient polytheisms could be “translated” from one culture, one society to another, and the polytheistic “cosmotheism” “rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible.”  The anti-religion after the Mosaic Distinction  no longer functions as a means of intercultural translation, on the contrary, it functions as a means of intercultural estrangement.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder testifying last week at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing made an analogous argument. Rep. John Culberson stated: “There’s clearly overwhelming evidence that your Department of Justice refuses to protect the rights of anybody other than African-Americans to vote.”  The Attorney General’s response:  “When you compare what people endured in the South in the ’60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, to compare what people subjected to that with what happened in Philadelphia… I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people.” “ My people” appears to be what Mr. Holder identifies with first and foremost – an African-American, not an American.

In December, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a scathing report on the Justice Department’s handling of the New Black Panthers case. Civil Rights Commission Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds wrote, “Because the Department withheld relevant documents and relevant officials’ and supervisors’ witness testimony, the Commission was limited in its ability to complete a final report.” “Based upon the incomplete, incorrect and changing explanations offered by the Department for its actions, the Commission decided to examine whether the U.S. Department of Justice enforced voting rights in a race-neutral manner when it reversed course in the New Black Panther Party case,” Reynolds wrote in an introductory letter for the report.

The US Attorney General is appointed to look after the interests of all Americans, not just Hyphen-Americans.  A US Attorney General of Japanese descent is not appointed simply to look after the welfare of Japanese-Americans, for instance.  Worse, AG Holder, an attorney uses a two-wrongs make a right argument.

The US post-racial administration, including the Holder Distinction, continue to increase the American Cultural Divide.  What if we simply abolish all Hyphen-American celebrations and instead focus on celebrating Americans?