On Your Marx, Get set, ZO !!

New York Post smears city's new Mayor.

Today’s front page from the New York Post takes me back to 1968/69 when my college dormmates took a group of us to a movie in downtown Spokane, Washington that portrayed Dr. Martin Luther King as a communist agent. It was sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the John Birch Society; if memory serves me. Yes, arguably the same good folks who rebranded themselves MAGA and now goose-step to the tune of the NPD poster-psycho in the White House.

The only good thing about the movie is that we were taken there in response to a cordial and open debate that we carried on with our political opposites. They came to our anti-war meetings, debated, and we went to their anti-commie meetings … and debated. It was cordial and friendly … at least within the confines of the college community. Out in society, it could be another matter. People were beaten, arrested, and they died; including Martin Luther King.

From this historian’s point of view, nothing ever really changes here in the USA. We just re-brand the same forces that have struggled for dominance from the earliest days of colonization.

J.D. Vance - or whatever his name is this week - wants us all to take pride in the godly Christian founders who brought civilization and compassion to the filthy, blood-soaked, and benighted savages. But Vance’s account of the national fantasy-narrative omits (among others):

Extermination and enslavement of the First Nations peoples and the theft of their homelands.

The witch trials and lynching of Quakers.

The purchase, breeding, enslavement, and speculation on the bodies of black Africans.

The theft of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California Utah, and much of Oregon and Wyoming from Mexico.

Ditto with the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain. By the way, Spain also renounced all claim to Cuba, and the U.S. established a protectorate over the island; that worked out well.

“‘There’s a battle outside and it’s raging
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls”

That battle has raged in this land from day one without cessation. When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, perhaps 17% of WHITE males could vote. Universal WHITE male suffrage wasn’t obtained in the USA until about 1842. Women didn’t get the vote until 1922. Blacks and black women could vote with relatively less fear of being lynched perhaps sometime after 1965 - within the lifetimes of many of us. Universal free public education came closest to existence just subsequent to that time … and then started crashing. Consider this question: has the USA been in a reactionary cycle ever since? Public education has been systematically whittled away at, de-funded, and dismantled since 1970. Approximately 54% of American adults today read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level; the same people who think they understand their history well enough to re-write it … and to self-govern.

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