Setting Records Straight

Norm Magnusson, I-75 Project

In a country where history is continuously falsified, just a handful of the usual sources can be relied on for desperately needed truths.

Digby brings up Florida's racist history, including the 1923 white rampage in the black town of Rosewood, not far from the Sanford site of Trayvon Martin's murder.

Sanford itself has a notably dubious history. It was founded after the Civil War by Henry Shelton Sanford, a New Englander who had been Lincoln's ambassador to Belgium. Sanford conceived of the town as a staging area for trade with the Belgian-controlled Congo, and his plans included shipping newly freed slaves "back" to Congo.

If Sanford's original vision for the town failed, the racism connected to its founding continued: through the twentieth century and on to recent cases of improper police handling of assaults on blacks, including the 2006 killing of a teenager, shot in the back by a security guard.

Regarding the week's dismal Affordable Care Act proceedings, Charlie Pierce takes off from Dalia Lithwick's remark that "in America's highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility," to add—

This is a fundamental... American heresy. For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all if us. That was present at the very beginning, in the Mayflower Compact, which was not a document through which individuals demanded to be free of their obligations to each other and to society; rather, it was a document through which free people bound themselves together, for their own good into a political commonwealth...

From those origins and through subsequent centuries, we've reached the point where the mainstream narrative comes from this:

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and enobled by the effort. That is what I heard coming back to the oligarchs of Americans for Prosperity at their rally in Washington on Tuesday. The rich people behind the rally feel no obligation to the political commonwealth and, therefore, they argue, neither should the people who cheer them on. Citizenship is not an organic unity that exists between self-governing people in a political commonwealth, with benefits and obligations flowing back and forth between individual citizens and the government which is the expression of their voice. Rather, they argue, citizenship is merely a series of transactions between independently acting individuals, and between those people and Government, which is a foreign entity.

This underlies the entire propaganda project since the '60s, and it is the driving philosophy behind not just denying us universal health care, but destroying hard-won rights, ending Social Security, and the rest of the plan for the 99 percent—

A basic philosophy of selfishness is being inculcated into our politics. It will render us incapable of reacting when our democratic patrimony is swindled out from under us. There are thieves abroad in the land, making off with the blessings of the political commonwealth, and their most basic alibi is that it never existed in the first place. Once we accept that as our true history, the future is pretty much lost.

The history re-write has always been crucial to the oligarchy's aim. And by the end of today, Pierce had posted this, on the week's two big media stories and the role of the right-wing base: to rage at the justified outrage over Trayvon Martin's murder, and to rage gainst "freeloaders" and health care.

Rage directed at those perceived as "expendable people."

Rage that is insatiable, inflamed by a propaganda machine making sure "The universe of who is expendable gets larger by the day."

Department of "If Only"

"If we lived in a sane country," writes Digby, we would have the budget proposed by the Progressive Caucus.

Oh, a "sane country"; merely a never-to-be-overcome catch.

Rutland Fair, Vermont. 1941
Photographer: Jack Delano
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

And if we had a sane country, we wouldn't have the NRA writing the gun laws behind atrocities like the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Southern Beale covers much to be said about the connection between trigger-happy paranoia and the easy availabiity of lethal firepower to any random nut.

Of the historical connection to be made, there's this:

On Sept. 23, 1955, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam fired up stogies and smooched their wives. About an hour earlier, a Mississippi jury had mulled their fates.

The men had stood trial for abducting a 14-year-old black boy. They pounded his face into ground chuck. Shot him in the head. And tossed his broken body — weighted with a large fan used for cleaning raw cotton that they'd hitched with barbed wire around his neck — in the Tallahatchie River.

Emmett Till was dead. And despite damning evidence, Bryant and Milam were acquitted — after the all-white jury deliberated a mere 67 minutes. (Later, they'd cash in by selling Look magazine the blow-by-blow of how they lynched Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman).

Nearly 57 years later, and some 800 miles from the delta town where Emmett Till met his doom, another young black kid's death has revived the suspicion that a black life doesn't have all that much value.

There is the predictably despicable Republican Base reaction.

Charlie Pierce, on our predictable politicians and media—

I am sick to death of people who celebrate "the family" making excuses about why other people's children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. (Barney Frank's line about conservatives's believing that life "begins at conception and ends at birth" was not entirely a joke, although it's always been treated as one.) I am sick to death of opportunistic yahoos who can look at this country's unhealthy attachment to firearms and declare that the actions of George Zimmerman, while unfortunate, were pretty much what the Founders had in mind. I am sick to death of the steady drip-drip-drip of all the topical anesthetics we mix up whenever something like this happens. Had Emmett Till been killed in 2012, there'd be at least three people sitting in the CNN Green Room right now — and probably 15 of them sitting offstage at Fox — waiting to explain how unfortunate it was that the lad so transgressed against local custom that circumstances dictated that he be beaten to a pulp and tossed into the river tied to a cotton-gin fan. I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled.

The only possible positives since this tragedy: the justified outrage sparking protests; a Justice Department investigation; a Florida grand jury to be convened.

Downward Course; Full Speed Ahead

Billboard in transition. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
John Vachon, 1939
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

Thanks to "the party from another planet," the election continues to be about slut-shaming. Because, as Steerpike says—

Medical decisions, including birth control, abortion and sterilization, are deeply personal issues, and should be confidentially decided between a woman, her doctor, her husband, her God, her clergyman, her family, her Facebook friends, her co-workers, her supervisor, her boss’s boss and his wife, the board of directors, shareholders, their clergymen, and of course her insurance company and their shareholders, clergy and various advisors, the Republican Party, knowledgeable pundits, TV commentators and bloggers as well as their readers, viewers, Twitter-followers and their clergy...

But we sure as hell don't want some government bureaucrat interfering!

Once upon a time, this was simply good public health policy—

New Hampshire has required contraceptive coverage in all prescription drug plans since 2000. The law was passed by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Democratic governor. Nobody at the time, it seems, saw the policy as a blow against religious liberty.

Just as in bygone times, fundamentalist Protestants took no stance on abortion, due to an even more bygone stance of staying clear of politics.

During this particular bit of heightened right-wing insanity, came the sudden departure of "the Joseph McCarthy of the digital age."

McCarthyesque he was, in the pleasure he took in destroying the careers of people better than himself, and in celebrating the death of an object of his hatred.

If the careers of his acolytes fail, as TBogg predicts, the backers will have no shortage of new Breitbarts to present to a receptive media.

And time rushes on: this Virginia story (on alicublog, for example), is already a couple of weeks old. And montag's comment on the alicublog thread says it all—

Ah, well, anyone not anticipating that the wingnuts would gin up the culture wars during a general election on behalf of the biggest collection of mental and moral jackdaws ever assembled just wasn't paying attention.

That women would be paying a high price in that war should not be a surprise, either. They've been prime targets of opportunity for the snipers on the right for a long, long time. Unfortunately, what has not yet sunk in for the people not paying attention is that this is just a part of a reactionary extremist desire to take the country back to the 1890s, to undo every goddamned right that ordinary working people shed blood and sweat to achieve and what has been counted by most as "progress," and that effort is being funded by the very same avaricious fatcats that owned the country and its government 120 years ago. Different names now, to be sure, but exactly the same people.

So, if the mainstream media won't call it state-sponsored rape, someone better call it that, because it's not only literally true, it's an apt metaphor for what's going on all around us.