RIP US Democracy
Let us be clear, and keep it simple.
Most people, when they hear the word “democracy”, understand it to mean “governance by the people”.
In the USA, most people would probably go a bit further, and see democracy as a “one person, one vote” system of government – otherwise known as government through universal suffrage.
Of course, almost no countries are governed by direct democracy. Most of us work for a living, and are too busy to formulate, debate, and vote on every single piece of legislation which will govern, regulate, and otherwise affect our everyday lives.
So we delegate or sub-contract this work to elected representatives.
Such a way of exercising democracy can be called a “parliamentary democracy”, a “presidential democracy”, a “republic”, or some other variation of these.
Some democracies place ultimate authority in their elected representatives, others place ultimate authority in a written “constitution” which their representatives are expected to respect.
Some democracies still split ultimate authority between a constitution and a monarch!
Contrary to some of the dubious arguments put forward by certain fringe groups in the USA, there is no deep, underlying conflict in how we choose to describe the US system of government.
If we want to be pedantic, the USA is in fact a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
This simply means that:
1) The USA is a federation of semi-sovereign states.
2) These semi-sovereign states send elected representatives to a “congress”, or meeting place.
3) The existence of representatives is what makes the federated states a “republic” instead of a direct democracy.
4) These representatives agree to only pass legislation within the bounds of a written constitution, making the federated states a “constitutional republic” instead of a simple republic or direct democracy.
5) All voters in their own semi-sovereign states are allowed to vote for a “president”, i.e., someone expected to “preside” over each session of congress. In the USA, this “president” is given specific powers, separate to the powers of Congress.
Hence, the USA is a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
Just one particular form of democracy, in other words. No need for pedantry or semantics.
*****
Whichever specific system is used, the end purpose is to vest power in “the people”. Democracy.
People in the USA (especially politicians and propagandized voters) are fond of calling the USA “the world’s first and greatest democracy”.
This is not true.
The USA can claim to be the oldest <surviving> nation state with a democratic form of government, but such states have come and gone throughout history – from the Isle of Man, to Athens, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
But if we understand democracy as “rule by an elected government through universal suffrage”, then the USA has only been a nominal “democracy” since 1964 – when the Civil Rights Act of that year finally outlawed the unequal application of voter registration requirements, and gave the federal government power to enforce the constitutional right of all US citizens to vote.
Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788, it has been a slow crawl toward something approaching actual democracy in the USA.
While individual states were allowed to set their own voting requirements in the late 1700s, most chose only to enfranchise white men who owned property – about 6% of the population.
This property requirement had not been revoked by most states until another two or three generations had passed.
It is interesting to note that upon admission to the USA as a new state in 1792, Kentucky was among the earliest states to allow universal male suffrage with no property-holding requirements. This right to vote included free men of color. This is almost certainly due to the fact that many settler/colonizers had arrived on the Appalachian frontier from places like Virginia and North Carolina, where free people of color comprised around 20% of the population.
It would have been very hard to withhold the vote from people of color who were an integral part of the frontier settler community, and had helped to construct and man the blockhouses and forts in hostile Indian lands.
Once the indigenous peoples had been killed, subdued, assimilated, or removed, Kentucky reverted to the norm and disenfranchised the voting rights of free Black men and other men of color.
Men of color would not be universally entitled to vote until after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed. Many states, of course, introduced poll taxes, literacy laws, and other creative means of preventing men of color from exercising their voting rights.
New Zealand introduced truly universal suffrage in 1893. To women. To its indigenous Māori people.
The 19th Amendment would not give US women the right to vote until 1920.
Indigenous Americans were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1924.
Up until the 1940s and 1950s, Black Americans were often lynched – murdered outright – for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, various groups have worked hard to circumvent or undermine the law, in order to prevent universal suffrage from expressing the actual will of the people.
Re-districting (aka gerrymandering) is the most obvious and direct method employed.
The recent infiltration of state election boards by election result denialists is a new and dangerous plot twist…
But of far greater long term importance has been the erosion of a free and impartial press and media. While Ronald Reagan‘s 1987 scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine governing broadcast media is often blamed for the rise of pseudo-news channels such as Fox, the truth is that the Fairness Doctine never applied to cable networks in the first place.
It was a bit as if he had scrapped regulation of vinyl and CD-based record companies just as Napster came online.
Where the end of the Fairness Doctrine probably DID have an impact, is that it allowed mainstream broadcasters to compete with cable “news” networks by dumbing-down to their level in many respects.
The rise of the internet – especially social media, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms – has caused an explosion of largely unregulated dis- and misinformation to become many voters’ “go-to” source for “knowledge”.
The golden age of US journalism and broadcast news is now ancient history.
Americans shop for news now, the way they have “shopped” for their religion since the so-called “Second Great Awakening” of the late 1700s and early 1800s introduced mass hysteria into religion.
Most Americans have never wanted anything approaching objective “Truth” or “Fairness” anyway.
Americans tend to choose whichever religion makes them feel good, or whichever religion condones whatever it is Americans want to believe or do.
Americans also tend to choose whichever political leader or party tells them what they want to hear, whether true or not.
Most of all, many Americans would throw away democracy itself for a cheaper tank of gasoline.
They would throw away democracy itself for a free pass to abuse all of the groups and people they hate.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans is not a universal birthright belonging to every human being.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” are not things to be protected at all costs for EVERYONE.
No, “Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans simply means being allowed to do whatever they damn well please.
Amid all of the post-election soul-searching for the “whys?” and “wherefores?”, we should remember that for most of its history, the majority of Americans were struggling to participate in “democracy”, and a great many Americans were attempting to restrict access to “democracy”.
And it is precisely the ones attempting to restrict democracy who have always shouted the loudest about “protecting democracy”.
In modern times, we call this “gaslighting”.
In the USA, the gaslight is permanently on.
Must be due to the cheap cost of gas from deregulated fracking…
*****
The Enlightenment ideals which informed many of the Founding Fathers of the USA were almost immediately ignored and discarded in favor of the two major strands of ideology which have been at the heart of the American character for over 400 years.
From Plymouth and Jamestown, right to the present day, a huge number of Americans remain true to the goals of their two earliest colonies.
Religious extremism and rampant capitalism.
“You must believe what I believe”, and “Don’t get in the way of me making money”.
The “E pluribus unum” motto of the USA – “Out of many, one” – never really applied to its people.
But it certainly applies to the way Trump‘s America has managed to combine its worst founding ideologies into one.
God and Mammon, baby.
Old Mix Americans, cont’d (or why the mixed-ethnic history of many Americans really matters)
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinMail-in voter registration form [Alabama]
Someone left a comment on my recent post about Old Mix Americans which I found very thought-provoking.
It occurred to me that I should address some of the points raised.
Sorry for the lengthy explication.
Words sometimes seem to spill out in spite of any attempt at brevity.
███████
“White today only means light skinned…people should just stop fueling this shit, we’re in 2024.”
>>>>>>>>>>
If it is true that “white” only means “light-skinned”, why do so many government forms still insist on asking us to self-identify as “white” or “black”?
Questions about our skin color seem to be subliminally reinforcing the idea that “white” is about more than a mere lack of skin pigmentation.
It seems as if a “white” self-description is really trying to act as a proxy for ethnicity.
If “white” is really seen as nothing more than a skin color nowadays, why on earth would the government even need to ask us if we are “light-skinned”?
One can only assume that government agencies are in fact using skin colors as a sort of shorthand for “European-American” or “African-American” – yet even those terms say almost nothing about real ethnicity.
Even if we were to break down “European-American” into historical points of origin – Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Czechia, et al – we would still not be dealing with ethnicities. We would be dealing with NATIONALITIES, which is not the same thing at all. Modern nation-states everywhere encompass a myriad of ethnicities.
And almost no modern nation state has seen the level of inter-ethnic mixing seen in the USA.
Those whose colonizer ancestors arrived in North America earliest (say, pre-American Revolution) are the ones most likely to have ancestors from every continent, including Africa. To be American, especially “Old Mix American“, is to be the antithesis of ethnic “purity”.
Almost the only thing of value which can be gleaned from questions about our skin color is a broad-population-level comparative analysis of things like income, education, crime statistics, home ownership, life expectancy, and health between groups SEEN as “white” and groups SEEN as “black”.
Such an analysis can offer insights into the many ways in which being SEEN as a certain color might affect transgenerational poverty, social mobility and dysfunction, and general trends in life outcomes.
It is an unfortunate fact that 400 years of a color-based caste system has made it virtually impossible for many Americans to even conceive of the idea that there are no biological boundaries between “races”, let alone embrace the concept that “races” simply do not exist.
My work on the Before We Were White blog and podcast is intended precisely to demonstrate that almost all Americans are profoundly mixed and interrelated, and to even attempt to speak of distinct, separate “races” is ludicrous, absurd, profoundly unscientific, and most of all, baseless in the face of real world evidence.
Is there such a thing as “experiencing Blackness”? Damn right there is. But it’s still the result of a human construction.
We could just as easily say that people with red hair and freckles are a separate “race”…
Girls in Afghanistan “experience Islam”, even if that form of Islam is wholly constructed in the minds of men.
My goal here is most certainly NOT to create new divisive micro-ethnicities.
“Old Mix American” is intended as a broad descriptor CROSSING traditional “racial” boundaries.
It is meant to bring people together, not push them farther apart.
███████
“Basing ethnic identity on mutual DNA rather than mutual culture values and tradition is a near exclusive American mentality.”
>>>>>>>>>>
This is the crux of a BIG problem. Throughout human history, all people have tended to be placed into or chosen to self-assemble into groups.
Hunter gatherers are often extended kinship groups.
Urban dwellers often identify mostly with their home cities. Think ancient Athens, medieval Venice, modern New York…
People are segregated or self-segregate according to class or wealth. Think of the British House of Lords versus House of Commons, or gated communities versus ghettos…
People are also defined by or self-identify themselves by their religion or ideology.
People are often described in terms of their citizenship, loyalty, or allegiance to tribal leaders, monarchs, political leaders, or nations.
People have been, and often still are, segregated or self-segregated by appearance, ancestry, ethnicity, or caste.
***
Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?
Which US cultural values and traditions supercede all of the above-named categories of identity?
Justice? In a country with a compromised and partisan court system, where only the people with the money to “lawyer-up” mightily have the slightest chance of justice?
Freedom? How can a country in which 78% of its people live paycheck to paycheck claim to be “the land of the free”? Where is freedom when a single health emergency can bankrupt a family for life?
Opportunity? How can a young person save up to buy a house when they can barely afford rent and groceries? When 1% of the population controls 90% of the wealth?
I ask again. Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?
Celebrity culture? Consumer culture? Military culture? Religious culture? The NFL and NBA? Tacos and cheeseburgers?
This lack of a genuine and deeply shared pan-USA culture, this sense of untetheredness, of “something being no longer quite right”, is exactly what gave rise to the MAGA cult.
MAGA cheerleaders point to a semi-imaginary time during the mid-20th century, in which everything still seemed to make sense to their own community.
Men had good-paying jobs. Mothers stayed at home cooking, cleaning, and minding the kids. People went to church and Sunday School. Fathers took their boys fishing. Girls dreamed of who they might marry one day.
But people were very, very good at not noticing certain things back then.
Factories poisoning rivers. US-backed coups in Iran. Domestic violence against women and children. US-backed dictators in Latin America. Housewives on Valium. Backstreet abortions. Lynchings.
The American hallucination of itself was represented on TV by almost surreal saccharine dross like “Leave it to Beaver“, “The Andy Griffith Show“, “Happy Days“, and “The Love Boat“.
And most of all, the people who were doing all right within the system pretended not to notice that back in this “Golden Age” when America was supposedly “great”, it was only great for white folks.
Mexican fruit pickers and African-American school janitors were just kind of “there”, a sort of human wallpaper, noticed only in passing, somehow barely audible, barely visible.
Unless they were singing. Or God forbid, protesting.
***
Many people in the USA still have a particular historical and ongoing problem in which they conflate “color” or appearance with specific cultural values or behaviors – even ascribing higher levels of innate intelligence or greater capabilities to certain “races”.
Many Americans genuinely believe that people of a certain color have a greater propensity for violence and crime. Not because of 400 years of dehumanization and disadvantage, but because of something IN THEM.
As a writer, I have a particular interest in sharing research which lays bare the multi-ethnic ancestry of those Americans who persist in repeating these racist tropes, using racist dog whistles, or advocating for “white supremacy” and “New Eugenics”.
IT IS OUTRAGEOUS THAT RACISM, BOTH CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, CAN EXIST IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE OF MIXED ANCESTRY – BLACK, WHITE, AND BROWN.
As someone raised mostly in rural and small town America who would have been seen by many as “white trash”, as someone who was bussed into Black schools during the 70s, as someone who joined the army on his 17th birthday and sat in a 5 ton truck parked up in the snow on dark nights in Germany along the Iron Curtain talking to Black soldiers, I am in a position to suggest that social dysfunction is caused by many things, both recent and historical.
But mostly, it is caused by the greed, racism, and bigotry of those in power who sow division among the underclasses.
Old Mix Americans
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinTiffany Trump (the less well-known “other” child), whose ancestry includes “non-white” Locklears of the Lumbee people
An Old Mix American is a person with many of their direct ancestral lines already present in the Americas by the 1600s.
Old Mix Americans are characterised by having multiple ancestral lines derived from non-European population groups – people who would have usually been considered “non-white” or “persons of color” under the British colonial (and later US American) racial caste system.
It is important to note that many of these “persons of color” also arrived from Europe. Many European Romani and Jewish people, for example, were often perceived by the dominant “white” caste as “non-white”.
The majority of Old Mix Americans are now found scattered throughout the USA and often choose to present as “white”, following decades of intermarriage with European-Americans.
Many population groups ancestral to Old Mix Americans still survive in rural places where the European-American influence has been less pronounced, and each community or extended kinship group has its own unique ethnic history.
The largest and most well-known Old Mix American groups include the Lumbee of North Carolina, the Redbones of Louisiana and Texas, and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.
Often described as “tri-racial isolate” communities under American “race” classifications (which traditionally only allowed for “white”, “black”, and “indigenous” categories), the ancestry of these groups can include people from a myriad of backgrounds – indigenous North American, indigenous South American, indigenous Caribbean, North African, sub-Saharan African, Jewish, Malagasi, Sami, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Romani, East Indian, and Asian.
Making America Great Again [“be fruitful and multiply…]
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinBack when America was great [North Carolina, 1933]
“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.”
“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children, and why is this just a normal fact of American life that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?
“These children are the future of this country and yet the parents who have them actually have no advantage in our democratic process,” Vance said. “They have a smaller voice in some ways – in very many cases – than the people who don’t have any children at all. The children who come from these families have no real representative in our democracy.
“Why don’t we change that? Now some people will say this is radical and this is crazy. The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds but let’s do this instead: Let’s give votes to all children in this country but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”
*****
The incoming US administration will refuse point-blank to face up to incipient climate catastrophe caused by first world over-consumption of resources in an overpopulated world.
Instead, the quotes above are the “vision” being put forth by the vice-president elect.
Put bluntly, he and his billionaire technocrat backers are speaking about using legislation and social engineering to force the women of the USA back into a position as “breeders” and stay-at-home mothers.
And what are these electorally empowered “breeders” expected to achieve? Other than a simple increase in GOP votes?
Why, a reversal of the demographic trend toward a “brown” or more ethnically mixed USA.
A “white” evangelical Christian family with 8 children and a stay-at-home mother would have a far greater say in elections than a working couple with one or two children.
As far as this writer is aware, there is no constitutional impediment to the implementation of this frankly insane idea.
Bulletproof
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinIs it because he’s a man?
Is it because he’s rich?
Is it because he’s “white”?
He can’t spew enough racist remarks to be condemned as a racist.
He can’t break enough laws or commit enough crimes to be seen as a criminal.
He can’t leverage public office for personal gain blatantly enough to be seen as grasping and venal.
He can’t make enough stupid claims or remarks to be considered an ill-informed oaf.
Evangelical Christians say he is doing “God’s work”, while he:
screws porn stars,
brags about groping women,
mocks disabled people on live TV, and
robs from charities…
If Barack Obama had done even one of the above, he would have been political toast, crucified, run out of office.
If this isn’t proof that the USA is still a profoundly racist country, that “white” male privilege is real, and that money buys power, we are beyond redemption.
*****
Let’s stop dancing to the tune called by propagandists, gaslighters, apologists, and billionaires.
Let’s call it as we see it.
Anyone who voted for this shrivelled husk of a human is either:
dumb as dishwater,
utterly brainwashed/propagandized,
filled with hate and intolerance,
consumed by self-interest and/or greed,
deeply ignorant/uneducated,
a religious nut-job, or
an out-and-out misogynist/racist/fascist.
There are no other reasons to put this man in a position of power.
None.
Stop pretending that “good people” might have chosen him for “the economy”.
If “the economy” comes before human decency, you cannot be considered “good “.
Period.
Post 2024 Election Musings
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinLibertarian Policy at a Glance
I’ve been going in heavy on the politics for the last two months, because it matters.
Sometimes I feel as if this little project – trying to help tear down the lies and myths of US national identity – has been overtaken by “events”.
It’s like setting-up an information stand on a beach, only to look up and see a seismic wave approaching in the distance.
I suppose most people would scream, run for their lives, or simply collapse in a heap of fear and dread.
But the time I spent in Hawaii during my teens taught me there is another option.
Grit your teeth, and grab a surfboard.
J. D. Vance and his svengali Peter Thiel (and other similarly-aligned billionaires) seek nothing less than complete dominion, turning the USA into a technocratic oligarchy – a system they like to call “Libertarianism” in order to disguise a rapacious “dog eat dog” mentality with a fig leaf of “political philosophy”.
Before you dismiss this as the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, just remember that a failed Austrian art student with a chip on his shoulder was able to burn half the world down a few decades ago…
I’ve thrown some lyrics to a largely forgotten song below.
What is life after all, without art to temper the gravity sometimes?
*****
Last Great American Whale
Lou Reed [1989]
They say he didn’t have an enemy
His was a greatness to behold
He was the last surviving progeny
The last one on this side of the world
He measured a half mile from tip to tail
Silver and black with powerful fins
They say he could split a mountain in two
That’s how we got the Grand Canyon
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Some say they saw him at the Great Lakes
Some say they saw him off of Florida
My mother said she saw him in Chinatown
But you can’t always trust your mother
Off the Carolinas, the sun shines brightly in the day
The lighthouse glows ghostly there at night
The chief of a local tribe had killed a racist mayor’s son
And he’d been on death row since 1958
The mayor’s kid was a rowdy pig
Spit on Indians and lots worse
The old chief buried a hatchet in his head
Life compared to death for him seemed worse
The tribal brothers gathered in the lighthouse to sing
And tried to conjure up a storm or rain
The harbor parted, the great whale sprang full up
And caused a huge tidal wave
The wave crushed the jail and freed the chief
The tribe let out a roar
The whites were drowned, the browns and reds set free
But sadly one thing more
Some local yokel members of the NRA
Kept a bazooka in his living room
And thinking he had the chief in his sights
Blew the whale’s brains out with a lead harpoon
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Well, Americans don’t care for much of anything
Land and water the least
And animal life is low on the totem pole
With human life not worth more than infected yeast
Americans don’t care too much for beauty
They’ll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
They’ll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
Complain if they can’t swim
They say things are done for the majority
Don’t believe the half of what you see and none of what you hear
It’s like what my painter friend Donald said to me
“Stick a fork in their ass and turn ’em over, they’re done”
Power to the [Right] People
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinRIP US Democracy
Let us be clear, and keep it simple.
Most people, when they hear the word “democracy”, understand it to mean “governance by the people”.
In the USA, most people would probably go a bit further, and see democracy as a “one person, one vote” system of government – otherwise known as government through universal suffrage.
Of course, almost no countries are governed by direct democracy. Most of us work for a living, and are too busy to formulate, debate, and vote on every single piece of legislation which will govern, regulate, and otherwise affect our everyday lives.
So we delegate or sub-contract this work to elected representatives.
Such a way of exercising democracy can be called a “parliamentary democracy”, a “presidential democracy”, a “republic”, or some other variation of these.
Some democracies place ultimate authority in their elected representatives, others place ultimate authority in a written “constitution” which their representatives are expected to respect.
Some democracies still split ultimate authority between a constitution and a monarch!
Contrary to some of the dubious arguments put forward by certain fringe groups in the USA, there is no deep, underlying conflict in how we choose to describe the US system of government.
If we want to be pedantic, the USA is in fact a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
This simply means that:
1) The USA is a federation of semi-sovereign states.
2) These semi-sovereign states send elected representatives to a “congress”, or meeting place.
3) The existence of representatives is what makes the federated states a “republic” instead of a direct democracy.
4) These representatives agree to only pass legislation within the bounds of a written constitution, making the federated states a “constitutional republic” instead of a simple republic or direct democracy.
5) All voters in their own semi-sovereign states are allowed to vote for a “president”, i.e., someone expected to “preside” over each session of congress. In the USA, this “president” is given specific powers, separate to the powers of Congress.
Hence, the USA is a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
Just one particular form of democracy, in other words. No need for pedantry or semantics.
*****
Whichever specific system is used, the end purpose is to vest power in “the people”. Democracy.
People in the USA (especially politicians and propagandized voters) are fond of calling the USA “the world’s first and greatest democracy”.
This is not true.
The USA can claim to be the oldest <surviving> nation state with a democratic form of government, but such states have come and gone throughout history – from the Isle of Man, to Athens, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
But if we understand democracy as “rule by an elected government through universal suffrage”, then the USA has only been a nominal “democracy” since 1964 – when the Civil Rights Act of that year finally outlawed the unequal application of voter registration requirements, and gave the federal government power to enforce the constitutional right of all US citizens to vote.
Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788, it has been a slow crawl toward something approaching actual democracy in the USA.
While individual states were allowed to set their own voting requirements in the late 1700s, most chose only to enfranchise white men who owned property – about 6% of the population.
This property requirement had not been revoked by most states until another two or three generations had passed.
It is interesting to note that upon admission to the USA as a new state in 1792, Kentucky was among the earliest states to allow universal male suffrage with no property-holding requirements. This right to vote included free men of color. This is almost certainly due to the fact that many settler/colonizers had arrived on the Appalachian frontier from places like Virginia and North Carolina, where free people of color comprised around 20% of the population.
It would have been very hard to withhold the vote from people of color who were an integral part of the frontier settler community, and had helped to construct and man the blockhouses and forts in hostile Indian lands.
Once the indigenous peoples had been killed, subdued, assimilated, or removed, Kentucky reverted to the norm and disenfranchised the voting rights of free Black men and other men of color.
Men of color would not be universally entitled to vote until after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed. Many states, of course, introduced poll taxes, literacy laws, and other creative means of preventing men of color from exercising their voting rights.
New Zealand introduced truly universal suffrage in 1893. To women. To its indigenous Māori people.
The 19th Amendment would not give US women the right to vote until 1920.
Indigenous Americans were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1924.
Up until the 1940s and 1950s, Black Americans were often lynched – murdered outright – for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, various groups have worked hard to circumvent or undermine the law, in order to prevent universal suffrage from expressing the actual will of the people.
Re-districting (aka gerrymandering) is the most obvious and direct method employed.
The recent infiltration of state election boards by election result denialists is a new and dangerous plot twist…
But of far greater long term importance has been the erosion of a free and impartial press and media. While Ronald Reagan‘s 1987 scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine governing broadcast media is often blamed for the rise of pseudo-news channels such as Fox, the truth is that the Fairness Doctine never applied to cable networks in the first place.
It was a bit as if he had scrapped regulation of vinyl and CD-based record companies just as Napster came online.
Where the end of the Fairness Doctrine probably DID have an impact, is that it allowed mainstream broadcasters to compete with cable “news” networks by dumbing-down to their level in many respects.
The rise of the internet – especially social media, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms – has caused an explosion of largely unregulated dis- and misinformation to become many voters’ “go-to” source for “knowledge”.
The golden age of US journalism and broadcast news is now ancient history.
Americans shop for news now, the way they have “shopped” for their religion since the so-called “Second Great Awakening” of the late 1700s and early 1800s introduced mass hysteria into religion.
Most Americans have never wanted anything approaching objective “Truth” or “Fairness” anyway.
Americans tend to choose whichever religion makes them feel good, or whichever religion condones whatever it is Americans want to believe or do.
Americans also tend to choose whichever political leader or party tells them what they want to hear, whether true or not.
Most of all, many Americans would throw away democracy itself for a cheaper tank of gasoline.
They would throw away democracy itself for a free pass to abuse all of the groups and people they hate.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans is not a universal birthright belonging to every human being.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” are not things to be protected at all costs for EVERYONE.
No, “Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans simply means being allowed to do whatever they damn well please.
Amid all of the post-election soul-searching for the “whys?” and “wherefores?”, we should remember that for most of its history, the majority of Americans were struggling to participate in “democracy”, and a great many Americans were attempting to restrict access to “democracy”.
And it is precisely the ones attempting to restrict democracy who have always shouted the loudest about “protecting democracy”.
In modern times, we call this “gaslighting”.
In the USA, the gaslight is permanently on.
Must be due to the cheap cost of gas from deregulated fracking…
*****
The Enlightenment ideals which informed many of the Founding Fathers of the USA were almost immediately ignored and discarded in favor of the two major strands of ideology which have been at the heart of the American character for over 400 years.
From Plymouth and Jamestown, right to the present day, a huge number of Americans remain true to the goals of their two earliest colonies.
Religious extremism and rampant capitalism.
“You must believe what I believe”, and “Don’t get in the way of me making money”.
The “E pluribus unum” motto of the USA – “Out of many, one” – never really applied to its people.
But it certainly applies to the way Trump‘s America has managed to combine its worst founding ideologies into one.
God and Mammon, baby.
Immigrants, Immigration, and Garbage
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinConvict labor in colonial Virginia
Quote from Friday, October 25, 2024 [Austin, Texas]
“We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want.”
Donald Trump, in an attempt to stir up anti-immigrant hatred, has continued to push a lie – claiming that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the USA.
If fascism wasn’t a matter of life and death, the irony here would be tastier than macadamia nut ice cream.
Of course anyone with two brain cells already knows that the USA is a land of immigrants.
But what many do NOT know, is that in the decades leading up to the American War for Independence [1718-1775], over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia.
This means that transported convicts made up A QUARTER of the British immigrants to colonial America in the 18th century.
If MAGA supporters mean it when they call the USA “the greatest nation in the history of the world”, then they have to accept that “the greatest nation in the history of the world” was built in large part by criminal “white” people who were once seen as unwanted “garbage”…
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Let’s be clear. “Immigrants” and “Immigration” are not interchangeable words.
Voters in the USA are being encouraged to hate immigrants, rather than a broken immigration system.
In a politically polarized country, those on neither the “Left” nor “Right” frame this issue with dispassionate facts and honesty.
Immigration is either extolled as an unarguable “Good Thing”, or described as an unmitigated disaster.
Every single reputable study shows that immigration, both legal and illegal, has a net benefit to the overall economy of the USA.
But this overall benefit does not apply to that part of the economy or workforce largely lacking in higher skills and education.
Unskilled immigrants are the people most likely to take jobs in the agricultural, construction, and services industries, where they compete directly with native-born Americans of similarly low skill or educational attainment.
Many Trump supporters (but by no means all) are blue collar workers without college degrees.
Many are lacking even a basic high school education.
By every metric, these are the people most likely to experience wage suppression caused by the unfettered (legal and illegal) immigration of unskilled workers and their families.
Guess who loves this kind of immigration the most?
Big Business, of course. A large labor pool keeps national wage costs down.
Who hates this kind of immigration the most?
People at the lowest end of the scale in terms of skills and education, of course.
Like every aspiring fascist in history, Trump is mobilizing his base by pointing his finger at the wrong culprits.
He is scapegoating immigrants for the failed policies of successive governments and the corporations who steer government policy.
But what makes his rhetoric truly dispicable is the open racism now being directed at specific immigrant communities – most recently Latinos and Haitians.
We have been here before.
Exactly 100 years ago, US President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 (aka the Johnson–Reed Act) into law.
This blatantly racist piece of legislation included the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, which was the government’s reaction to widespread “white” grievances in the face of increasing non-Anglosphere immigration.
Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and East Indians were seen as a threat to those wanting to keep the USA a land for “white” Protestant northern European descended peoples.
Does the US immigration system need an overhaul, and the humane implementation of a newer, more fair-minded and well-thought-out immigration policy?
Absolutely.
Should the descendants of immigrants (who were often convicts and criminals) be demonizing current immigrants who are being welcomed with open arms by Big Business?
Absolutely not.
Will powerful elites in politics and business ever allow vocational training and third level education to become a right for all US citizens?
A move which would help to elevate many Americans trapped in near poverty?
Are you joking?
An under-educated, angry underclass is far easier to exploit, and far easier to manipulate at election time…
Immigration and Executive Orders
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinThe “Hollywood Protective Association” campaigned to “keep Hollywood white” [1923]
The executive order below was signed by Theodore Roosevelt, and came about through a concerted campaign and intense lobbying by the “Asiatic Exclusion League”. This organization was formed in 1905 by European immigrant labor leaders and so-called “white” Americans up and down the Pacific Coast of the USA, who blamed Asian immigrants (including those from India and China, as well as Japan and Korea) for their own economic difficulties.
Members of the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) were explicit in their determination that the USA should remain “a white man’s country”.
Roosevelt was not the first, nor would he be the last US president, to use executive orders instead of legislation as a form of populist “display”.
Remember Executive Order 13769? From 2017?
There will be more on the way, if things turn out badly this November 5th…
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Executive Order 589 (1907) by President of the United States
Regulating the Entrance of Japanese or Korean Laborers into U.S. Territories
Whereas, by the act entitled ‘‘An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States,’’ approved February 20, 1907, whenever the President is satisfied that passports issued by any foreign government to its citizens to go to any country other than the United States or to any insular possession of the United States or to the Canal Zone, are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein, it is made the duty of the President to refuse to permit such citizens of the country issuing such passports to enter the continental territory of the United States from such country or from such insular possession or from the Canal Zone;
And Whereas, upon sufficient evidence produced before me by the Department of Commerce and Labor, I am satisfied that passports issued by the Government of Japan to citizens of that country or Korea and who are laborers, skilled or unskilled, to go to Mexico, to Canada and to Hawaii, are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders thereof to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein;
I hereby order that such citizens of Japan or Korea, to-wit: Japanese or Korean laborers, skilled and unskilled, who have received passports to go to Mexico, Canada or Hawaii, and come therefrom, be refused permission to enter the continental territory of the United States.
It is further ordered that the Secretary of Commerce and Labor be, and he hereby is, directed to take, thru the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, such measures and to make and enforce such rules and regulations as may be necessary to carry this order into effect.
Theodore Roosevelt
The White House,
March 14, 1907.
Hallowe’en Special: The Wild Hunt in America?
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinImage: “Wild Hunt” by Ksenia Svincova [IrenHorrors] at DeviantArt
Between the Norman (French Viking) invasion of England in 1066 and the time of Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales (from the late 1300s), we have perhaps only one history book written from the viewpoint of the vanquished Anglo-Saxons or “English”.
This would be the Peterborough Chronicle, which is a version (but not an exact copy) of the earlier Anglo-Saxon Chronicles – writings which were preserved and updated during the early Middle Ages by monks working in monasteries scattered throughout what would only later be called “England”.
As ever in the history of conquest and colonization, the invading power slowly installed their own people in various administrative and bureaucratic positions.
In 1127, a Norman named Henry d’Angely was appointed abbot over the monastery at Peterborough.
It can scarcely be considered mere coincidence that the Anglo-Saxon monks began to write about terrible visions and omens shortly after, including this report of a sighting of “The Wild Hunt”:
“Many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge, and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black, with eyes like saucers, and horrible. This was seen in the very deer park of the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods that stretch from that same town to Stamford, and in the night the monks heard them sounding and winding their horns.”
“The Wild Hunt” is a term used by modern folklorists to describe a recurring motif which was part of the ancient pagan belief systems and lore of Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic Europe, in which various heroes and gods were believed to lead periodic otherworldly hunts (on land and in the sky), with the other hunters often seen as restless souls of the dead, along with their ghost dogs or “Hounds of Hell”.
What exactly was being hunted varied by time and region – some Wild Huntsmen (and Huntswomen) sought to run down normal prey, others were seeking the souls of mortals.
In other cases, the leaders of the hunt were not gods or heroes, but simply the condemned souls of sinful mortals, doomed to forever ride the night alongside The Devil, as punishment for their worldly misdeeds.
Much of this folklore might have been lost forever, but for the efforts of two brothers from 19th century Germany named Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
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The US American incarnation of these ancient folk beliefs will probably never be tracked to its source, due to the American propensity for creating “false folklore”.
An Arizona man named Stan Jones wrote a song during his off-hours while working for the National Park Service in California in the 1940s.
Stan Jones worked various jobs in his relatively short life (he died of cancer aged 49) – park ranger, miner, firefighter, rodeo rider, a stint in the navy.
He also ended-up befriending legendary film director John Ford, due to the Hollywood film industry constantly scouting locations for the hugely popular Western film genre.
Stanley Davis Jones would sometimes claim that his most famous and commercially successful song had been inspired by a story told to him by Indigenous American elders in Arizona.
This writer is a little suspicious that our gentleman was adding a bit of spice to the broth.
He was, after all, no fool. Aside from his other occupations, he had also managed to earn a Master’s Degree in zoology from Berkeley.
It is tempting to wonder if Mr. Jones was drawing on something else for his evocative songwriting?
Maybe Welsh traditons of Gwyn ap Nudd – the Welsh version of “The Wild Hunt”?
Jones, after all, is a quintessential Welsh surname.
Maybe he just read The Brothers Grimm at some stage?
Whatever the truth, in 1948 Stan Jones wrote probably the greatest “Western” song of all time in the Country & Western music pantheon.
“Ghost Riders in the Sky”.
Indians on the Run (the other kind of Indians)
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinVirginia Gazette
Williamsburg
April 15 to April 27, 1737
“RAN away…an East-Indian, belonging to Mr. Heylin, Merchant, in Gloucester:
He is a well-made, small young Fellow, wore his own Hair (which he may have cut off in order to disguise himself:)…He went away on a strong well-made Grey Stallion, branded with a Dott, belonging to his Master.
They (a black slave and the East Indian Slave) went from Col. Lewis’s to Gloucester Town, where they robb’d a House, and took a Pair of Pistols, a Horse Whip, and ’tis supposed some other Things.
They were seen on Monday going up King and Queen County.
Whoever secures either of the fore-mentioned Servants, shall receive as a Reward, Two Pistoles; for both of them, Four Pistoles, and for the Grey Stallion Two Pistoles; to be paid by John Lewis, and John Heylyn.”
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How many generations did it take for the children of such people to enjoy a normal childhood?
At what point were these desperate underclasses ready to join “respectable” society?
Is it really any wonder that a country which chose to bury and lie about much of its past is still dysfunctional enough that half of its people will gladly vote for a dictator, as long as he agrees to perpetuate the lies and leave the cold graves of past evil deeds undisturbed…
Tell the truth. How many readers here knew that there were slaves from India in America?
How many Americans know that such people – Hindus, vagabonds, Muslims, outlaws, Gypsies, runaway slaves, Tory Loyalists, Caribbean Jews, Malagasy sailors – were among the earliest settlers and colonizers of the Indigenous lands commonly called “The Appalachian Frontier”?
Lies by omission are still lies. History is not a science. It is an act of analysis followed by collation and curation. A thing left unwritten is often of equal or greater importance than that which is published.
Only in a country built on loud, blustering myth and carefully calculated silences could a political candidate so utterly unable to speak the truth receive the support of half the nation…
Are we witnessing a late reckoning for the sins of the past?