A Voice in the Wilderness

The caption says "resistance" but his posture says "sitting by the road in one of those blankets EMTs give you after a traumatic car crash." pic.twitter.com/lyYbe5PBqp

— J Burton (@JBurtonXP) December 13, 2016

Life is full of educational surprises.  I was greatly amused by this tweet, which I thought summed up Keith Olbermann's pretensions very neatly, so I shared it on Facebook.

Then this morning I noticed more tweets from J Burton on my Twitter page; apparently I'd clicked on Follow without realizing it.  And those tweets were not remotely as amusing as his swipe at Olbermann, or at least not in the same way.  For example:

Nation of Immigrants™ rhetoric asserts a moral parity between the settlers of America and some Mexican crossing the Rio Grande for Medicaid.

— J Burton (@JBurtonXP) February 9, 2017

At first I agreed with that one, because I agree that there is no moral parity ("equivalence," I believe, is the word normally used nowadays) between a Mexican crossing the Rio Grande to look for work, or a Guatemalan trying to escape death squads, and the religious bigots, convicts, and greedheads who settled the original thirteen British colonies.  But as more of Burton's tweets showed up, I realized that he meant it the other way around:

The idea that America is a "nation of immigrants" is historically illiterate. The original Americans were pilgrims, homesteaders, colonists.

— J Burton (@JBurtonXP) February 9, 2017

And:

.@CalderonHenk "Immigrated" suggests they moved to a foreign country, which they didn't. They arrived at a wilderness and MADE a country.

— J Burton (@JBurtonXP) February 9, 2017

Speaking of historical illiteracy, the "original Americans" crossed the Bering Land Bridge more than 10,000 years ago.  Spaniards and Frenchmen also beat the English colonists to North America by more than a century, though they weren't good guys either -- the point is that the English were not "original" in any sense of the word.

"Pilgrims," first of all, is a misnomer.  According to Merriam-Webster, a pilgrim is "one who journeys in foreign lands," which better describes the French trappers and traders than the English religious separatists who settled in Massachusetts because they had made themselves obnoxious by their fanaticism and bigotry in Britain and the Netherlands.  Nor were they "one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee," the other M-W definition.  "Colonists" and "homesteaders" don't describe all the English intruders either; some came here, as in Virginia, as employees of corporations or as indentured servants (before the latter were replaced by African slaves); some were convicts, transported here as their sentence.  Burton is purveying a hoary quasi-historical origin myth here, not offering historical literacy.

Ditto for "arrived at a wilderness" (!).  North America was not a wilderness, though it contained some.  It was inhabited by millions of people, who had villages, towns, even cities; farms; and complex systems of government and social organization.  The English interlopers (I won't call them "immigrants" either) would have had a harder time displacing the original Americans if the latter hadn't been decimated by diseases brought to the Americas by those who preceded the English.  It's even part of the American origin myth that the "Pilgrims" nearly died off in their first year due to their ignorance and incompetence as homesteaders, but were saved by the generous help of the surviving original Americans.  Much of the land they eventually farmed had been cleared and prepared by those original Americans; as their successors learned, clearing a real wilderness is a lot harder than taking over other people's lands.

Most of the hard work of MAKING a country was done not by those first arrivals but by later generations of (yes) immigrants and slaves, along with the descendants of previous French and Spanish colonists who already lived in the territory and became "Americans" through land purchase or conquest.  Burton overlooks -- or maybe he approves of -- the enduring hostility to each new wave of immigrants, from the Scots and Irish to the Swedes, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, and others, whose labor was desperately needed by business elites who didn't want to pay fair wages to the workers who were already here.  But without those immigrants, the United States as we know it today would not exist.  As I've noticed before, the hostility of today's nativists confuses (partly strategically but mostly through ignorance) "undocumented" and legal immigrants, to say nothing of internal migrants like the Okies and Southern blacks who moved west or north to find jobs and escape Jim Crow.  Even though they were already Americans, they were treated as if they were "illegal" immigrants -- badly, to put it concisely.

I agree with some of Burton's points, mostly when he's trying to skewer liberal hypocrisy.  But then he endorses right-wing hypocrisy, or exemplifies it himself.  He's critical of our corporate overlords, but seems to overlook that Trump is one of them, and has packed his administration with his peers.  He criticizes the corporate media, but mistakes them (along with Democratic elites) for the "left."  And then there's his curious literalizing of a typically ham-handed Wuerker cartoon: "Wow! Didn't realize you can radicalize Muslims with a mean poster or two. Maybe it's wise to not bring large quantities of them into the US."  He's not totally ignorant, since he elsewhere criticizes the craziness of those who "wanted to shoot down Russian jets over Syria," so I have to suppose that he's deliberately forgetting about the US murder of countless people in various Middle Eastern countries, which leftists have been pointing out does more to win recruits for ISIS than "a mean poster or two." Or that Trump didn't try to ban entry by Muslims from countries like Saudi Arabia, whose citizens masterminded the 9/11 attacks.  A well-disciplined memory is as essential for a Trump devotee and apologist as it is for any liberal Democrat.

Ah, there's more.  This is one of the first I saw that made me reconsider my initial impression of where Burton was coming from:

These people look at the Constitution and swear gay marriage is in there but the right to control our borders isn't. No reasoning with that.

— J Burton (@JBurtonXP) February 10, 2017

Well, no, "gay marriage" isn't "in" the Constitution, any more than "interracial marriage" is; but then maybe Loving v. Virginia also occupies a prominent spot in Burton's Wall of Shame.  The Constitutional issue is what limits governments can put on marriage.  By analogy, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints isn't "in" the Constitution either, but it is still covered by the First Amendment.  As for "the right to control our borders," well, "control our borders" isn't "in there" either, and like so many right-wingers Burton is hostile to "activist courts" that invent rights based on Political Correctness.  But I'm fine with the idea, which I'd have thought to be in line with article 8's "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."  Is there anyone who genuinely disagrees?  The Devil's in the details, however, like what constitutes rational control of our borders, what is prudent or necessary to defend the country, whether establishing a garrison state is a good idea, and so on.

Speaking of activist judges, Burton is displeased that some of them dared to obstruct "the majority-supported exercise of a duly-elected President's rightful powers."  Considering that the Framers were extremely wary of majorities, and put numerous brakes on majorities "in there," this complaint is as funny as Obama's very similar (and similarly unfounded) "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."  What part of "checks and balances" doesn't Burton (like Obama) understand?

I could quote more, but this is probably enough.  For now, anyway.  It might be worth noticing that Burton writes well, in grammatically correct, properly spelled English.  That should please liberals, many of whom can't do as well themselves.  He even makes a valid point here and there, but on examination they turn out to be inspired by partisanship and Führerprinzip: he can't see the same errors when they're made by his side, or by himself.  Just like your typical liberal Democrat.

P.S. I just saw, to my horror, that I wrote "their" for "they're" in that penultimate sentence.  Luckily I noticed and fixed it in time.  I blame Putin.

American Active, or American Passive?

I may have made a mistake today: I checked out Marilynne Robinson's new book, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2012), from the library.  Another blogger almost read it, for much the same reason I checked it out: gender parity.  But I have other reasons: one is that, since I saw right away that it's a collection of meditations on the state of America today, I wanted to see what, if anything, Robinson will have to say about her man Barack, whom she supported passionately in 2008.

Reading the book's opening pages on the bus, I noticed right away that she was being careful not to name names.

We have the passive pious, who feel they have proved their moral refinement in declaring the whole enterprise bankrupt, and we have the active pious, who agree with them, with the difference in that they see some hope in a hastily arranged liquidation of cultural assets [2].

Excuse me?  I'm not sure who she means by "the passive pious"; the Christian Right, as Robinson must know, formerly rejected political involvement, but they were hardly "passive" even then: they put pressure on schools not to teach Darwin, they opposed school desegregation (were they in the mobs that harassed and threatened black kids attending "white" schools?), they built a network of segregated Christian schools to get around civil rights legislation.  Are nuns who work with the poor "active" or "passive"?

What if we have ceased to aspire to Democracy, or even democracy?  What if the words "Democracy" and "America" are severed, and no longer imply each other?  It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way.  In the desperation of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety; access to suffrage, equality under law.  It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves, have made its citizens weak and dependent [2].

"Certain among us"?  If it weren't for the second half of the last sentence I quoted, I'd have thought that Robinson was talking about those of us who emerged out of generations of attention to public education to criticize our country and its government for its violence and oppression, not just at home but around the world.  But then she makes it more or less clear that she's talking about those "conservatives" who want to dismantle the social programs that have made better the lives of the mass of citizens.  A better-informed critic would point out that those "enhancements of life" were always controversial and bitterly opposed by powerful interests, often in the name of "Democracy" itself; it's the conflict itself that is our heritage.

Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same [inter-religious] conflicts here.  Now it is seen as un-American in certain quarters to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference.  This is a critically important instance of self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage [3].

"In certain quarters."  This may have been written before the Roman Catholic hierarchy claimed that being required to supply health insurance to their employees was liberal persecution.  This was disingenuous at best, but it has to be disentangled by reason and evidence, not innuendoes.  But Robinson is disingenuous herself, for "our national ancestors" generally came to the New World, not for religious freedom, but for the freedom to persecute others.  As one of them put it, religious tolerance was "Satan's doctrine."  True, the religious wars that ravaged Europe didn't happen here, but that wasn't because of the colonists' enlightened views on difference.

Enough for now; that's just the preface.