Nov 28, 2017

November 27, 2017: Pocahontas, Ever the Demagogue, Ultimate Vandal.



Aurora Borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man
to the fields of green
And the homeland
we've never seen.

 
They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks
and the wagons come
And the night falls
on the setting sun.

 
They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box
at the top of the stairs
With my Indian rug
and a pipe to share.”

                                                                 -----Neil Young “Pocahontas” (1)


All he had to do was get through a simple ceremony observed Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. He couldn't do even that, quickly turning a ceremony honoring the Navajo soldiers into an ugly, gratuitous slap at a political adversary by referring to her as “Pocahontas” in an effort to refer to the historical native American figure disparagingly. In doing so, our very own Caesar Disgustus simultaneously outraged both the Massachusetts senator and our entire native American populations.

The group of surviving Navajo soldiers who, during the Second World War, distinguished themselves by volunteering for service and using their native language in a successful effort to pass commands and signals in a 'code' that the Japanese found impenetrable, were brought to the White House in order to honor their services. Instead the ceremony was converted into yet another effort by this White House to communicate to its white nationalist base.

This morning, Joe Scarborough, on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” held forth that this is not normal, that everything that has transpired in the last year or two has been the result of a 'blip', an abnormality occurring on election day 2016. This is a dangerous interpretation.

I have previously written about this at length. (2) This is not an aberration and the latest outrage by our very own public ass needs to be put in some context. On first blush it looked as if Disgustus had simply once again began to ramble and was soon off the rails. But look again at the video, here stood a group of native Americans underneath a portrait of president Andrew Jackson under whom the nation passed a law expelling the Cherokee, Seminole and other tribes from Georgia, Florida and other areas of the American Southeast forcing a march in the dead of winter which quickly became a 'death march' toward a homeland they'd never seen. (3)

It is no coincidence that the portrait of Jackson gazed down upon the ceremony, for Disgustus idolizes the seventh president of the United States. Jackson is celebrated in liberal circles for his 'populism', his so-called “Jacksonian Democracy” lauded by the likes of Arthur Schlessinger, but he also stands as one of the principle architects and practitioners of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There can be no doubt to which purposes the portrait, what part of the Jacksonian legacy, that Caesar Disgustus was drawing upon during this ceremony; another dog-whistle designed to denigrate those assembled and, by extension, the author of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and agency with which he is currently embroiled in yet another power struggle.

He has been attacking Warren for years, referring to the totally baseless charge that she had declared herself to be 1/32 native American when applying for college. Like many of us, anecdotal histories, passed on by relatives over the generations, led her to understand that she has native American lineage. I have no idea whether she has or not. It doesn't matter. In any case, at no time did she seek nor accept any financial aid, nor did it affect her acceptance or rejection when making application to colleges or universities. But Disgustus, ever the demagogue, has seized upon this urban legend and tagged her 'Pocahontas' as a means of conveying, through yet another dog-whistle, the message that somehow she didn't deserve her education, she doesn't deserve realizing the fruits of her accomplishment. It has become a dog-whistle conveying to his knuckle-dragging political base a larger charge than whites are discriminated against and that any acceptance or admission of a person of color into our larger community is illegitimate. “They” don't deserve to be here, brought into the corridors of power through ill-gotten means by liberals who have tipped the Ouija Board of life against them.

The senator castigated Disgustus saying “he had to throw out a racial slur”. The White House protested that it wasn't a racial slur but it is. To use the honorable figure of a revered member of our Native Americans as a means of denigrating someone. Let me be clear: Caesar Disgustus is the ultimate vandal: he debases everything he touches. Yesterday he accomplished, in a very short few minutes, the besmirching of an American Icon; making of Pocahontas a racial slur.

____________________

  1. August 8, 2017: Roads to Hell, Long and Tortuous Path,
    Reap the Whirlwind
  2. Ehle, John. “Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation” Copyright 1988 Anchor Books, Doubleday Dell Publishing Group New York. 424 pages.



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