Tag Archives: Westward Expansion

150 year remembrance of Sand Creek still firmly in grip of master narrative

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DENVER, COLORADO- The Denver Art Museum assembled a panel of Native American artists to build collections of recollections of the Sand Creek Massacre on the occasion of its 150 year anniversary. Question: what do the artists think of resting the onus of remembrance of a crime on its survivors? How convenient for the perpetrators of genocide –by a hair we mightn’t have had to remember it at all, the aim of genocide after all. If Westward Expansion had succeeded in wiping out indigenous peoples entirely, a genocidal program which is ongoing, to repeat the obvious, that the great white tribe wouldn’t have to be bothered to remember Sand Creek at all. Wrestling the narrative from the hands of the white fathers isn’t solved by seeking indigenous voices only, many of those by now have assimilated the colonialist temperment, the burden of remembrance must be taken up by the white supremacist if we are ever expected to atone.

Have Americans overtaken the Nazis as the real benchmark for Godwin’s Rule?

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Funny how Americans think the Nazis are still the ne plus ultra of evildom. Isn’t it about time we stop pretending the cruelty of Hitler’s machine exceeded ours? The US military has of course blown well past the benchmark of “Godwin’s Rule” by any measure of war crime both in quality and quantity, the question is, for how long has this been true? The initiate might think Vietnam marked our trespass into the Ugly American of infamy, our ensuing exploits in Latin America cementing our ignoble national character, but US colonial possessions worldwide know we’ve applied American moxie to a Final Solution stratagem wherever we’ve roamed. Before our westward expansion domestically, we settled with genocidal intent under a crown’s mentorship. America’s plan for its indigenous populations was the model for the Nazi relocation and extermination system, so for the Germans we were the “Nazis”. Odd how that perspective got lost in our history of WWII, our “Good War”.

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.

Gold in them thar hills

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Darfur has undiscovered water! Water you say? In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart discovered that no fortune in gold could buy what he really needed in the desert, water!

Precipitating a gold rush has been a traditional underhanded mechanism to conquer and settle new lands, for America’s westward expansion especially, at the tricky impasse of land already deeded to the Indians.

Facing troops and lawmakers showing a moral reluctance to annihilate his red-skinned foes, George Custer played up claims of gold in the Black Hills and the land grab was on, poor white opportunists scrambling to invade Indian lands without anyone being able, if they wanted, to stop them. The betrayed Sioux were all but goaded into war and were soon displaced.

Now someone’s rallying the carpetbaggers to mine the water of Sudan. True, the circumstances are more complex. It’s not our greed they’re preying upon, but our eagerness to see a humanitarian solution. It’s been all to easy to feel there’s nothing to be done to help the Sudan because Africa’s troubles appear perpetual. But with water of course salvation is at hand, even though it’s a panacea.

The march to drill wells in the Sudan may not seem to be for our immediate gain, but let’s not forget that the real fortunes made in gold discoveries weren’t made by miners, but by those who sold them the pick axes and shovels. The drive to Drill 1,000 Wells For Darfur will reap a lot of pick axes and shovels.

Plus we’ll need to protect those projects, to make sure the new water supplies don’t fall into the schemes of evil warlords, so we’ll be authorizing troops to protect, not the black people, but our wells. And amid the militarized destabilization, the west will be able to wrestle China for Sudan’s proven reserves, oil.

Is there water in Darfur? Of course there is. Is there a subterranean reservoir the size of Lake Erie? Five thousand years ago. Experts are skeptical as to what remains. Professor Farouk El-Baz’s previous water divinations in the 80’s yielded 350 wells drilled in Egypt, but no accounts mention finding a rush of water.

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.