Tag Archives: Theodore Roosevelt

Gun Control for weapons makers not users, for war mongers not hillbillies

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I’m really not big on this call for gun control, mostly because it means to further restrict individual liberties, and especially because the outcry is a media induced hysteria of disreputable provenance, aimed at America’s violence junkies instead of its dealers. Really? Is Going Postal the result of a citizenry not having laws enough to control itself? US prisons reflect a conflicting diagnosis.

In tragic synchronicity with the Sandy Hook school shooting which prompted US public calls for gun control, a knife-wielding madman in China assailed twenty schoolchildren with no resulting fatalities, giving rise to perhaps the first time the non-Mongol West has ever thought it glimpsed greener pastures over the Great Wall.

My takeaway from Bowling for Columbine was not “Gun Control Now!” but the toxic volatility of America’s culture of fear-of-violence-mongering and its gun-ho idolatry. Michael Moore called for a stepping up to our responsibilities, not a surrender to dumbassedness. I hold our national arrested adolescence to be a character flaw of pioneer, frontier provincialism, an adaptation of the civilian contractor settlers conscripted for the Westward Expansion, shock troops of the Enlightenment which became the onslaught of industrial capitalism.

Americans are hicks –we celebrate it– who define our personal space with armed borders. For us it’s bombs not education, simplistic fraternal evangelism over scientific sibling-hood, our pretended easy camaraderie really armed detente: trust but verify. Because of course, American frontierism, yet unable to see itself as invasive, from Columbus to Manila Bay, has been imperial for as long as “Yankee” has been a pejorative; Americans blissfully, Disneyfically unaware.

America’s gun problem isn’t just domestic, it’s export. For gun control I’d like to see a ban on production, not consumption. Unlike drugs whose source is organic, the manufacture of weapons is a centralized racket, easily constricted and regulated. The “Gun Show Loophole” is a stop gap for small fry; let’s muzzle the beast itself. And if you think reining in the weapons industry is improbably Herculean, why-ever do you think now is the time for Hercules to dispense with his Second Amendment protection?

Just because the Right to Bear Arms has come to exclude bazookas or drones, doesn’t mean its intent was not to protect our democracy from authoritarianism. If anyone had construed the Second Amendment as a mere hunting license, Theodore Roosevelt’s national parks would have been seen as encroachments on our revolution-conferred sovereign’s right to poach.

Are Americans thinking that democracy is lost because we can’t have bazookas — that the Second Amendment is inapplicable because the high courts adjudge the masses incapable of self-governance? The “well regulated militia” has surely gone the way of the Home Guard or Neighborhood Watch Committee, as our civic nature moved from social to anti, but it doesn’t diminish the need to have minute-men insurgents to counter would-be tyrants. Obviously we’re not talking about Minute Men privateers to whom police departments can outsource xenophobic vigilantism. If Occupy Wall Street proved anything, it lifted the fog on America’s militarized police state. Public gun ownership may be the only incentive law enforcement has to knock before entering American households.

Can you doubt it’s going to take armed resistance to overthrow Mammon? The world is teetering on uprising and already we’re seeing a stalemate on the streets, between unarmed protester and paramilitary police, a draw which upholds the power imbalance between cries for justice versus patronizing injustice. Is leading by nonviolent example going to overcome the sociopaths squeezing their underlings for blood? I’m not saying that hopes for a nonviolent transformation are misplaced, but these disciples of revolutionary pacifism espouse the same religious dogma that always shackled, never delivered, common man. Factoring sociopaths into the norm of “human nature” has been forever holding back aspirations for a harmonious social construct.

Going Postal in China is demonstrably less fatal, owing to China’s mentally imbalanced having resource only to knives. How utopian to imagine a disarmed populace, those greener pastures being a hellhole of forced interned labor. As an open air prison environmental death camp, Gaza’s got nothing on China.

The Lakota saw six grandfathers where Mt Rushmore fests expansionist four

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A recurring discussion at the base of Mount Rushmore is whose face next belongs alongside America’s fantastic four. There’s room for more obviously, as the mountain’s Lakota name was the Six Grandfathers. They saw resemblance enough in the rocks without the Denver Mint faces. Visitors can be excused not recognizing Theodore Roosevelt, the only cameo without a coin –he lacks a DC monument too, but Teddy most certainly belongs here. To determine who else might qualify, we have to wonder at what exactly Mt Rushmore means to memorialize.

Mount Rushmore immortalizes above all a New York lawyer who persevered for half a century to assure the not inobscure landmark was named after him. The government approved carve-up was intended to draw visitors to South Dakota. Concurrent tourist spot projects included the cement dinosaurs of Rapid City and Wall Drug. The icon-fashioned mountain became its own icon, casting a Cliff Notes summary of American History into stone. Whatever posterity would have to say about their legacy, these presidents would remain an unscalable height above reproach.

George Washington was father of our country, if not what today we hold as our ideals. Washington wanted to liberate colonial profits from the tiers owed its royal investors. He fought only for the independence of the American propertied class, and faced revolt from the common soldiery who bore the brunt of fighting off the British.

Thomas Jefferson pushed us west and invented the facade of democracy based on an illusory “all men created equal” utopian agrarian society. Jefferson would have known that no farms can operate without farmhands, and that peasant revolts have never sparked revolution. Above all, who was Jefferson to pretend that you can keep everyone down on the farm once they’d seen Paree? A farmer can imbibe education and culture only if he’s got slaves doing the work.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and held the union together. An America divided would have been vulnerable to resorption by the European powers. More important, the engine of our export economy was the South. Cotton and tobacco dwarfed fur.

Theodore Roosevelt championed conservation, like the national parks, but he’s on the mountain because he took America’s Manifest Destiny international. Roosevelt oversaw industry extend its empire-building offshore in search of cheap labor, resources and markets.

When conversation turns to whose face should adorn the pantheon of American expansionists, we are not lacking for capitalist do-gooders. I overheard “Obama”, “Henry Ford” or “Bill Gates,” perfectly in keeping with the theme.

In chronological order after the Rough Rider, to my mind, JP Morgan could be the beginning and the end, as father of the malevolent banking monopoly which has fated the world to Potterville.

Improving Rushmore would naturally be to efface it. How much longer really are the sculpted heads going to look like a “feat of engineering” and not simply a defilement of nature? Already what’s praised as a “work of art” looks more like a bad tattoo. Native American voices oppose the nearby Affirmative Action Crazy Horse Monument because no Indian they say would want his image superimposed on landscape.

If we can’t take it down, I have a suggestion for an additional face that neither perpetuates the enshrinement of our patronizing leadership, nor pretends to reflect a rehabilitated self-awareness. I propose we conduct an essay contest among American school children. From the dead-last, dumbest entry we select a child’s face to represent our nation’s failed intellectual promise, product of poor schooling, propaganda and poisoned spirit. That would be the face to commemorate America’s hard-headed, dumb as a brick, jackboot future.

Our city’s unlikely Republican roots

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To quote the late Herbert Sommers, who wrote about his childhood in turn of the century Colorado Springs, about Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to the city on August 10, 1901. Roosevelt was then Vice President of the country and within less than a month would succeed William McKinley after his assassination.

Theodore Roosevelt’s visit was an enormous bally-hoo and preceded his famous hunt in which he spared what became his namesake teddy bear.

In the 1900 election the Republican party was not popular in Colorado Spings, but Sommers wrote about the aftermath of Rooselvelt’s momentous visit:

If you do not think that this event gave life and character to every boy in Colorado Springs, then you do not know boys. Every boy became a Republican and all became active readers of our daily paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Evening Telegraph was also a Republican paper at that time and it, too, had an increase in reader support.

Black Friday and Paul Bunyan

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A false folk hero
Did you know that the first shopping day after Thanksgiving was known as “Black Friday?” Neither did I!
 
Apparently “Black Friday” is so named because it’s the first day of the year that retailers can recoup enough from their sales to put their balance sheets into the black. As opposed to “in the red” which is bookkeeping jargon for running at a loss, which is what retailers do for the rest of the year, apparently.
 
Boy did this sound like malarkey.

Certainly the term Black Friday sounded familiar, I thought it referred to the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. It turns out that there have been many other Black Fridays through history. But none of them refer to this retailer/accountant/insider lingo. The only early reference to a retail Black Friday had to do with the deluge which the day after Thanksgiving wrought upon the average retail clerk.

This new economic twist looks more like somebody’s Psych Op to revive retail sales.

This bit of Madison Avenue myth-making sure seems to cover the bases. First, if you’re a retailer you shouldn’t worry about having run at a loss (in the red) all year, apparently that’s normal. And if you’re a consumer, it looks like it’s your duty to bring that retailer’s figures up (and into the black!) Never mind that you’ll probably be putting his profit onto your credit card (into the red). For you we can call it red friday.

Paul Bunyan
I’m reminded of good ol’ Paul Bunyan, that American legend who heroically did more than his share to chop away our nation’s wooded overgrowths. Not a very PC hero to be sure, it never occurred to me to doubt his credentials.

One day I was looking through an older children’s book about American folk heroes. There was Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Pecos Bill, everyone was there except our giant friend Paul. Sure he was fictional, but he’s a historic legend, why was he not in the lineup? The book was dated 1920.

It turns out that Paul Bunyan was the creation of a magazine columnist hired in the 30s to create a positive PR figure for the timber industry. This was an industry still smarting from Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation programs.

If the Jolly Green Giant could sell you frozen foods over fresh, tales about a monumental lumberjack and Babe his blue ox could do more. A fictional reverence for a giant of folklore could sell America on admiration for westward expansion, manifest destiny and the obvious imperative of clearing our continent of its trees.