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."