There’s a certain austere majesty
To the cruelty of history
As long as it didn’t happen
As long as it didn’t happen to you

One day good old Joe Stalin got it into his
imaginative little head that Shostakovich’s opera,
Lady Macbeth, was somehow subversive. And so
over the next year, he arrested or executed the
great composer’s friends and family, egg-headed
intellectual types such as astronomers,

musicologists, physicists, and even his mother-in-
law. And Shostakovich was officially labeled (wait

for it) an “enemy of the people.” Thankfully, eighty
years later, Russian heads of state aren’t killing
people and nobody would ever use the term
“enemy of the people” here in the USA, would
they?

There’s a certain cartoonish obscenity
To the cruelty of history
As long as it didn’t happen
As long as it didn’t happen to you

When the Cherokee were being forcibly removed
from their lands in the 1800s, they took their case
all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1832
found them to be a sovereign nation. But you
wouldn’t know it from the actions of President

Andrew Jackson, who sent the U.S. Army to
march them off their land anyhow. And while he
probably never actually said “Chief Justice
Marshall has made his decision; now let him
enforce it” well... actions speak louder than
words. How do you like those checks and
balances? And I’m not naming names, but I’ll give
you one guess as to which President has Old
Hickory’s portrait hanging in his office...

There’s a certain childish spite
To the cruelty of history
As long as it didn’t happen
As long as it doesn’t happen to you

I’m sure we all agree that the first-hand
experience of being enslaved was unimaginably
painful and degrading, but let’s turn our attention
to the salt in the wound known as the 3/5ths
compromise in the U.S. Constitution, which meant
that not only would you be tortured and raped and
worked to death, but that your body (or three fifths
of it, at least) would be counted in the census. So,
although you couldn’t vote, your body was used to
give your captors greater political representation.
Boy that must’ve stung. Thankfully, 233 years
later, things are different. Let’s take the case of
some young man in Chicago, busted for
possession of weed. If he’s a person of color, it’s

a fact that he’s likelier to go to prison, and mass
incarceration being what it is, he’s likely to wind
up in a prison out in, say, Greenville, Illinois, or
Jacksonville, Illinois... largely white districts,
where, you guessed it, he’ll be counted in the
census. So, although he can’t vote, his body will
be used to give greater political representation to
his captors! Dizzying, isn’t it? Are you looking for
a sudden pivot into American exceptionalism and
basic human decency? Sorry, you’re in the wrong
song, my friend. Maybe once you’re done
listening to this folksong, get to the voting booth
or better yet out in streets, and bend the moral arc
like your life depends on it.

Oh- one parting thought: Karl Marx said that
history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as
farce. Well... let’s hope so.