Selling out your own and knowing what side your bread is buttered on— that’s what it means to be an Uncle Tom. As the globalization movement expands, it seems like there are more and more opportunities all around to sell out your own, since the very concept of “your own” becomes hazier and hazier with each passing international trade agreement, each conglomeration of multinationals into larger companies, and each advance in border— dissolving internet technology.

The Uncle Tom is defined by his identity crisis. He doesn’t know who he is, or feel a strong enough affinity for his own, so he assumes himself to really be that which someone else tells him he is. O.J. Simpson was a classic Tom: “I’m not black,” he once said, “I’m O.J.” After growing up in the ghetto O.J. ran his way straight into a life of hawking cars for white men and playing golf on courses frequented by “good families”— and he never looked back, not once. It’s almost certain that one of the reasons that jurors sympathized with him was because they could feel, as everyone could, that O.J. was genuinely scared by the prospect of spending a lot of time in jail with other blacks— a vibe that Mike Tyson, unfortunately for him, was never able to give off successfully.

The interesting thing is that without the Uncle Toms of the world, the masters cannot really function. The commodore class in the 21st century is, like the plantation owner class of the old south, numerically outnumbered by a large margin. Without the Uncle Tom, the master’s illusion of benevolence and righteousness would vanish instantly. The master cannot live by force alone, he needs cooperation— and the Tom, with his constant, passionate agitation on the master’s behalf, is the part of the apparatus that makes cooperation possible.

We at the eXile have been keeping an informal list of some of the world’s worst Uncle Toms for years now. We’ll return to it from time to time. Here’s an introduction to the eXile Uncle Tom gallery— five great Toms of our time:

IRELAND

When Buster Douglas floored Mike Tyson, Buster didn’t go down on his knees and beg Tyson for forgiveness. Buster didn’t spend the next eighty years sobbing out his regret at having floored the champion. Nor did he help Tyson’s backers to hunt down and assassinate any members of the Douglas family who’d had the bad manners to cheer Buster’s triumph.

This is the principal difference between Ireland and Buster Douglas.

Ireland opened the twentieth century with an upset far more stunning than Buster’s: Ireland, the most abject and despised of all Britain’s sodomised slavelands, defeated the Empire completely, inventing along the way the most powerful political strategy of the century: secular martyrdom followed by urban guerilla warfare. Every Intifada, National Liberation struggle, and piebald Lucha since has followed the two-stage plan Michael Collins laid out: first get all the poets to commit gaudy, highprofile suicide in a national landmark, then, when the people are sufficiently angry and the songs of sacrifice have reached every hovel, send out the serious lads, the quiet inarticulate countryboys, to “put out the eyes of the Empire” by killing the spies, leaving the foreign troops to drive around inviting ambush, pushing the locals even closer to the rebels by their hamhanded reprisals.

And it worked. Not just in Ireland but everywhere the Brits had set up their buggery-outposts. They haven’t stopped running yet.

Not since Prometheus had anyone done so much for the wretched of this world. Now imagine if Prometheus crawled to the offended Gods and offered to chain himself to a rock and gouge out his own liver every day as punishment for his good deed. That’s the story of Ireland in the twentieth century. They did their best not to hear the screams of the Catholics in the North, and when those people finally got sick of being shot and beaten and burnt out and started fighting back, respectable Vichy Dublin was outraged. The thought that Irish people might fight back made them dizzy and sick. It brought back bad memories, of a time when their ancestors walked briefly on their hind legs, inducing the sort of vertigo slaves find horrifying. This terror is the spirit behind every U2 song ever written. Bono sings about Bloody Sunday with horror; not because the Brits killed 14 kids in a few seconds, but because some fellow slave might be provoked to anger. I remember when U2 played San Francisco in the eighties. Someone held up a banner with “SF” on it. Bono pointed to it from the stage and yelled, “That better not stand for Sinn Fein!”

Bono stands on a lot of stages. Very exposed places, stages. He stands there in full view of hundreds of thousands of people. Prove me wrong, Micks. Prove you’re not still begging forgiveness for the one decent moment in your shameful history. Take the bastard out.

V. S. NAIPAUL

When Naipaul was a little boy, he was bullied by the big black boys in Trinidad. He didn’t like it. This was perfectly sensible of him. He didn’t like it when dumb thugs like Michael X became culture heroes to the white girls who went to the West Indies looking for angry black men to abuse them. Naipaul was brown, not black, and small and clever; his anger wasn’t what those lithe girls wanted. And he didn’t like it, walking past those girls coupling on the beach with big dumb Rastas who’d shaken him down in school.

He liked it better in London. The bullies were left behind, and if there were a few moments of rudeness here and there, it was nothing compared to Trinidad. He began doing favors for his British friends. He told the truth about the angry black men: that they were dumb thugs. This was a handy truth, and much appreciated by the Times Literary Supplement. He did the Brits the greatest and least-appreciated favor a corrosive mind can bestow: he never wrote about them. Naipaul only opened his eyes and ears when he was among the enemies of the Empire. Then he took in every lie, ugliness and petty meanness. But not in London; there he kept his evil eye shut.

Nobody else was interested in seeing, let alone telling, the truth about Africa or the Caribbean in those Kennedy days. Naipaul had more untapped tropical wealth than King Leopold, and he exploited it as ruthlessly. Funnily enough, the bitter truths he told actually delighted his backers in London. Maybe he knew why—knew that they enjoyed seeing their ex-colonies founder because then they could convince themselves that the world was better off when two-thirds of it was swathed in the pink of the British Empire. Maybe Naipaul realized what he was doing, salving the consciences of Tory swine. But he could always tell himself that what he was writing was the truth. He was no liar. He was an Uncle Tom only by omission.

It was in his second shame that he lost all dignity, when he started dreaming of the Nobel Prize. He must have writhed, watching it handed out to phonies like Seamus Heaney— a bigger Tom than Naipaul ever was. He started asking people what the problem was. And they told him: you were too mean to those black people. That’s when Naipaul began to crawl. He toured the world listening to every idiot with a hint of melanin, looking sympathetic while mentally counting Swedish votes. He kissed more dusky babies than a Harlem congressman.

And it didn’t work. That’s the most cheering thing about the whole Uncle Tom business: it often fails. The Tories find Naipaul risible, while the Postcolonials will never forgive him his good books. He goes on disgracing himself, this brilliant writer, for nothing. He will die like the most pitiful of Uncle Toms: crying, on his knees, astonished at the world’s ingratitude.

CLARENCE THOMAS

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is, without a doubt, the poster boy [no pun intended] of the Uncle Tom 2001 Dream Team. Thomas, who today would likely be shining shoes and waxing obsequious to his White Massas were it not for desegregation and affirmative action, is today the court’s lead-blocker on every decision rolling back the very court-inspired decisions that got him to his pat, white-bitch-magnet job in the first place.

He first caught white conservatives’ attention when, stumping for Reagan’s welfare-bashing candidacy for president in 1980, he accused his own sister of being dependent on welfare. He was rewarded by Reagan with the chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a bully pulpit which he used to trash affirmative action— the same affirmative action that got him into Yale Law School. A decade later, for his tireless work against his own people, he was given a spot on the Supreme Court, replacing Thurgood Marshall.

One shining example of his Uncle Tomness is the opinion he wrote arguing against preferences for minority contracts: “These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are entitled to preferences.” (Adarand Constructors v. Pena) In another decision, Thomas became the first Supreme Court justice to go on record criticizing Brown vs. The Board of Education, the decision which ended segregation, arguing that to defend desegregation of what were essentially state-supported white schools would be: “...to support the theory that black students suffer an unspecified psychological harm from segregation that retards their mental and educational development. This approach not only relies upon questionable social-science research rather than constitutional principle, but it also rests on an assumption of black inferiority.” (Missouri v. Jenkins) Wade Henderson, former Washington director of the N.A.A.C.P., speculated that “if Thomas had been on the court at the time, he would have opposed the decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” while A. Leon Higginbotham, a retired federal judge, said that Thomas had done more to turn back the racial clock than any African-American public official in modern times.

Oddly, Thomas has used race-baiting as a defense against critics of his decisions and policies, rather than engaging in intellectual debate. In his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, Thomas accused his detractors of staging a “high-tech lynching.” Later, at a speech in Memphis he accused liberal critics of trying to make him an “intellectual slave”.

Most recently, we know that Thomas paid his Massa Bush back for his appointment to the Court by siding with the majority in overturning Florida’s decision to force a recount in the presidential elections, ensuring that his new Massa, George, Jr., coasted into office despite losing the popular vote, and despite the fact that African-Americans voted against Bush in numbers not seen in modern times.

This guy isn’t just an Oreo. He’s a Ding-Dong.

CAMILLE PAGLIA

What Clarence Thomas is to African-Americans, Camille Paglia is to gays, women and academics, making her a triple-whammy Aunt Jemima of the Uncle Tom 2001 Gallery. She serves up delicious buttery waffles of obsequiousness to the very people who despise her, namely, reactionary right wing Republicans, Middle American anti-intellectual males and, most shamefully of all, pop culture icons like Madonna, for whom Paglia would write any tract of quasi-populist garbage to get a backstage pass.

Paglia, who was roundly dissed by the French-theory-worshipping academic elite in the 1980s, wound up in internal academic exile teaching at a third-rate college somewhere in Pennsylvania. While most white male American academics either toed the post-modernist/politically-correct line in order to land hard-to-get jobs and most POCs, gays and womyn advanced the cause through whatever theory stripped white males of power and jobs, Paglia, exiled in Podunk U., realized that the only way to get noticed AND gain revenge would be to go on the attack. She made her early fame by openly and bravely denouncing theory as dumb and oppressive, which sounded sweet to our ears until we read her prose: sort of like People Magazine with a Thesaurus.

After getting her patted on her dyke-head by reactionary academics, Paglia turned her sights on the country as a whole.

Like Thomas, she rode on (or hid behind) the coattails of political correctness and post-modernism to get herself in print, then turned around and spent a career stabbing them in the back in order to gain the approval of straight white middle-American males nationwide. And like Thomas, the strategy paid off handsomely.

Here are some excerpts from her fringey-for-NPR-types columns in salon.com, mixing, in classic bisexual way, reactionary politics with fake homespun populism:

“The energy mess and fascist gays. The liberal elite is demonizing the ‘big oil’ that keeps its cars running. Plus: Gays, get a clue— heterosexuality is nature’s norm.

May 23, 2001 | Yet another masculine symbol of American authority has failed since my last colum — the Federal Bureau of Investigation [...]’Big oil’ is demonized by the Northeastern media partly for cultural reasons. The dramatic development of the rich East Texas oil field in the 1930s fused the persona of the frontier macho man with that of the ruthless oil tycoon [...] For cloistered scribes and armchair leftists, the oilman who drills is nature’s rapist. [...]Screeching gay activists immediately descended on the media to denounce and defame [well-known psychologist] Spitzer as a tool of the far right. This was a good example of the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals who have become as unthinkingly wedded to dogma as any junior member of the Spanish Inquisition.”

Or this: “Today’s genteel ladies would learn a lot more about life if they would cut the crap and get out of their gilded ghettos. A day at a potato farm or crab-picking plant would do a hell of a lot more for them than an evening at Madison Square Garden with Eve Ensler and her pack of giddy celebrity lemmings in hot-pink suits.”

Well yuk-yuk-yuk, Camille. You’re jus’ one-a da guys, ain’tcha?!

Her prose is not only contrived, quasi-angry and utterly treacherous, but it’s just plain DUMB. Still, in the world of American letters, this is what passes for “verve” and a lot of people are buying it. Including Rush Limbaugh, who reported recently that he was seated next to Paglia at a New York function in the hope from organizers of sparking a cat fight, but, to everyone’s surprise, the two got along dandy. Both Limbaugh in his radio program and Paglia spoke highly of each other; Paglia even told Limbaugh that she’s always been a fan of his.

Well whoop-tee-doo!

The worst of all is that Paglia, and many of her Beigeist fans, think that she’s really edgy and daring. Paglia thinks she’s really onto something here. And she seems convinced that Rush Limbaugh does too, which in the end is enough for an Aunt Jemima like Paglia.

Folks, if this is the politics of cutting-edge bisexuality, then we here at the eXile say, KILL THE BI-SEXUALS! KILL THEM ALL NOW, BEFORE THEY BORE US TO DEATH!

The UNION of RIGHT-WING FORCES

In the old American south, blacks always knew where they stood. They were either “good niggers” or “bad niggers.” The good nigger was polite and God-fearing and said “Yes’m” a lot and was always trying to talk the other blacks out of trying any “fool ideas” that might upset the white folks. The bad nigger drank and went to juke joints and wore loud clothes and was always selling cocaine tablets or reefers or was involved in some other kind of business that whitey didn’t get a share of.

The SPS is Russia’s good nigger. The West loves them and everyone in the party because they’re always talking about following “responsible” policies revolving around reduced budget expenditures and market liberalization, while shying away from “damn fool” ideas like social spending, nationalism of any kind (read: foreign policy objectives that differ from the West’s) and tariffs.

And just like the “good niggers” in the old south, the SPS is constantly telling the massa how much the people really love him, even when every sharecropper from Biloxi to Birmingham is really dreaming of burning the plantation down. Assurances to the U.S. from chummy politicians like Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar and Sergei Kiriyenko that Russians deep down are all weak in the knees for Wal-Mart and IKEA and a life out from under the yoke of government subsidies are a major factor in the West’s continuing inability to understand the hostility toward globalization in the country. In this respect the SPS is a lot like classic Uncle Tom Clarence Thomas, constantly asserting that government assistance is “humiliating” and that what Russians really want and need is to be exposed to the so-called “even playing field”, which of course is not even at all.

SPS figures can be Uncle Toms to more than just the West. Sergei Kiriyenko is a classic Uncle Tom right here in Russia. He was the massa’s man under Yeltsin and now he’s the massa’s man under Putin, even though a strong contingent within his party initially opposed Putin and the war in Chechnya. When Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko came out against the Chechen war, Chubais, as any good Tom would, immediately called him a “traitor”. The SPS is largely responsible for the popular argument that one has to “be able to work with” the people in power, no matter how evil those people may be. Politicians like Yavlinsky they label “irresponsible”— damn fools— for continuing to obstruct “dialogue” with the Kremlin.

One more thing. At a recent SPS party conference, there were actually loud cheers in the hall when Margaret Thatcher placed a phone call. One cannot imagine them cheering that way, like excited kids (them niggers is like little kids sometimes, I swear) for a Russian. That’s what is to be a Tom.