Americans look down their nose at the fraying ends of other cultures, with little reflection on our own.
Some rural back-country Chinese folks eat bats?
Huh. In parts of back-country America people fuck sheep when they’re not diddling their sister and handling rattlesnakes.
You did not know?
I assure you, it’s true.
In America, we hunt and eat every kind of wild and domestic animal, including animals so similar to humans (pigs and cows) they are used as body part replacements (dental implants and heart valves) for living people.
You did not know?
Now you do.
They eat snake in country XYZ?
They eat snake in America too (as well as the giant lizards called alligators).
They eat rat in country XYZ?
We do too.
We even have Muskrat beauty queens, Nutria festivals, and possum fries.
You want to talk strange religions? Fine.
In America, the main religion is based on a talking snake.
Adherents are told they are mud people cursed by a mass-murdering god who sent his “son” to be murdered before he returned as a zombie.
To show their fidelity to this story, practitioners of this faith wear a copy of the murder weapon of their messiah around their neck.
It’s strange stuff, but Americans manage to bridge the gap by never reading.
My father’s job was to explain America to the rest of the world — how a country that said “all men are created equal” could in fact be the same country that built its economy on slavery and institutionalized racism and sexism.
Strange stuff.
How do you explain that the country that tells the world it was “founded on the rule of law” somehow forgot to mention all the stolen lands and broken treaties?
Do people not know that the “rule of law” (and supporting religious texts) made it legal to own slaves and disenfranchise women?
And now we face a new spate of xenophobia because a foreign microbe has been unintentionally spread around the world?
Huh.
There’s a story that the Cherokee, Chippewa, Choctaw, Sioux, Navajo, and Hopi have heard before .... only this time, it seems, no smallpox blankets were involved.
And what is the solution?
Why, it’s not to rush out and provide free health care for all, is it?
No.
Instead the same politicians who only 18 months ago were demonizing Medicare For All as “socialist healthcare,” decided to push through a $7.5 trillion government bailout, mostly to benefit Wall Street and big corporations.
Apparently socialism is needed to save capitalism, but it can’t be used to save *you*.
Think most Americans have thought about any of this?
Nope.
We don’t read much.
We don’t Google.
Instead, we believe in American Exceptionalism, which appears to be one hell of a drug.
Fire up the crack pipe; let’s see what’s on Fox News.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has taken a cue from Will Rogers, who first coined the term “trickle down economics” and did not think much of it.
Back in 1933 Will Rogers (a Cherokee who might have had something to say about our current pandemic) wrote of Herbert Hoover’s economic failures while foreshadowing FDR’s success:
“The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.
“Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot.
“But he didn’t know that *money* trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands.
“They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”
Bingo.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course, did the exact *opposite* of Hoover, and watered things on the bottom.
In his first year in office FDR stabilized farm prices and created the Works Progress Administration to fund the building of roads, schools, bridges and parks.
He created the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined union rights in the workplace even as it outlawed wildcat strikes that could cripple the economy.
FDR created Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Civilian Conservation Corps.
He put in place the Civil Works Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.
The result was that America’s economy roared back to life, just in time to save the world.
Now Joe Biden is set to follow the FDR model with an infrastructure package that will not only fix and expand America’s failing roads, ports, railroads and bridges, but which will also prepare for a future based on electric vehicles and bike paths, lead-free drinking water, better school buildings, a much improved electrical grid, and an internet-connected nation.
The economic and intellectual strength of the plan is such that Fox News has fallen back to attacking Coca Cola and Baseball. I have no doubt they will be attacking “big hot dog” and “foreign apple pies” within the week.
Meanwhile Tucker Carlson, the “face” of the Fox News network, is openly saluting Nazi “replacement” ideology.
And what of the leadership of the Republican party?
They are trying to whistle past pedophilia, human trafficking, insurrection, rape, money laundering, and insider trading charges which are now heaping up like hurricane timber at high tide.
My suggestion: set the whole damn thing on fire. Start again. There is nothing left to the Republican Party or Fox News that is worth saving.
Of course, some will disagree. The Fox News crack pipe is serving up one helluva drug.
No comments:
Post a Comment