“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.”
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.
____________________
- August 8, 2017: Roads to Hell, Long and Tortuous Path,Reap the Whirlwind
- 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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