America: Our Cherokee Nation

There is a segment of American people who think America exterminated Indians. Well, that's not so. Some Indians, even many, died in the wars of settlement, and some many Indians became us, Americans proud and brave and true. We, too, became Indians, because as they are us, we are them, all Americans. America too is a Cherokee Nation.

One will hope in vain to strip the Indian from our soul. We fought the Indians and we all won, each becoming the other, Americans. We are a Cherokee Nation. We do not bow.

Men in the World

The president just bowed to a Japanese royal. I feel like committing suicide from shame. Obviously our president has no shame. No sense of dignity, no love of our nation, nothing but a mind raised on television and comic books. Obama is a fool. He's nothing more or less. It's not sophisticated, it's not helpful to see him as other than a fool. He shames us.

He shames us. Our nation is not one man, not even our president, but is a nation of free men who do not bow down to those entitled by birth and tradition arbitrarily. Our nation, though it's not so obvious now, is one of farmers and cowboys and miners and loggers and men who struggle against the Earth to make the World. Our home is the open range. Though we live in cities, we are still Americans, still men free and strong, riding the wilds. We cannot bow to any man.
Some don't know, and some have forgotten, and some turn away in disgust at the public travesty of our nation's leaders; but our nation is one of men. We don't bow.

Let us now pose as famous men

Seems that folks get a lot of fun from parodying iconic America. It's an easy laugh. I enjoy it too. That someone came first and created something others play with and ridicule is not the point. The original stands in it's glory for those who appreciate it for what it is; and then we can take a detour to have a bit of fun thanks to the painter's efforts and vision. It's a pity when the philistines don't realize their ironies are pretty shallow and derivative; when they think their parodies are the ultimate creation. We can laugh at Grant Wood's image of Americans.


We could laugh at Walker Evans' characters while we're at it.

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Its inspiration came from a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with a distinctive upper window and a decision to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinster daughter, figures modeled by the artist's dentist and sister. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana and the couple are in the traditional roles of men and women, the man's pitchfork symbolizing hard labor.
[....]

Wood recruited his sister Nan (1900-1990) to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana. The man is modeled on Wood's dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867-1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

[....]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic

America is something of a parody of the country I knew as a boy. Maybe we can all have a bit of fun and an easy laugh on the way out. Turn on some tunes and kick back and let Obama do his thing to our nation.

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar,
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war,

I'm going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis Tennessee
I'm going to Graceland,

Poorboys and Pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland,
My traveling companion is nine years old
He is the child of my first marriage,
But I've reason to believe
We both will be received
In Graceland,

She comes back to tell me she's gone,
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed,
As if I'd never noticed,
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead,
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody sees the wind blow,

I'm going to Graceland,
Memphis Tennessee
I'm going to Graceland,
Poorboys and Pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland,

And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets
I'm looking at ghosts and empties,
But I've reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland,

There is a girl in New York City,
Who calls herself the human trampoline,
And sometimes when I'm falling flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
Whoa so this is what she means,
She means we're bouncing into Graceland,
And I see losing love
Is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody feels the wind blow,

In Graceland Graceland,
I'm going to Graceland,
For reasons I cannot explain
There's some part of me wants to see
Graceland,
And I may be obliged to defend
Every love every ending
Or maybe there's no obligations now,
Maybe I've a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

Whoa in Graceland, Graceland, Graceland
I'm going to Graceland

http://www.sing365.com/music/Lyric.nsf/Graceland-lyrics-Paul-Simon/82494EC0CEE7EE944825698A000F073F

Well, where does one go in a land of ironic parody that most people don't know the origins of and the meaning of therein? Where do we go when the original vision is lost amidst self-indulgence and caricature passing for authenticity, so many not knowing the difference?

Thing change. Who's to say that America shouldn't be run by Bill Ayers, a terrorist? By Jeremiah Wright, a nasty little bigot? By Pinch Schultzberg, a simpering anti-Semitic hippie? Obama and the Chicago goon squad? Sarah Palin is American Gothic. Thing change. It's irony. It's hip.

Let us now praise famous men....

American Liberal: A Friend of the People.

I recall the look on Truepeer's face one evening early on in our meetings of a Thursday when I, in all innocence, proclaimed myself to be a Liberal. I didn't have a cell phone or I might have dialed for an ambulance straight away. After some long explanation I got through to him that 'Liberal' doesn't mean I'm a supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, which he assumed. When he made plain that was his understanding I begged him to call an ambulance.

Liberal is to me, then, if not so much now, one of those from Britain in support of the merchant class, a supporter of industrialism and the marketplace monetary economy as opposed to the agricultural economy based on goods and services outside the money economy, the economy of entitlements, feudal duties, seigneurial rights and noblesse oblige. To me, at that time, Conservative meant, and means to a lesser extent today, a peasant economy, i.e. one based on labour without money, sans Capital. I still find myself, on rare occasions, reaching automatically under my arm for a persuasive counter-argument when I hear "Conservative." But then I remember, ha ha, that this doesn't mean a manorial economy, no latifundista class and smiling, happy peasants in the distance, the starving clad in traditional costumes, waving from afar. So, yes, let us define what we mean when we loosely use such terms as liberal and conservative. Liberal means free markets, money economy, free exchange of goods and labour.

What Peers and others refer to as Conservative I think of in terms of the French Revolution, and frankly, so do most today, whether they know it or not: The Liberals are the Right in that sense, i.e the manufacturing classes, the owners of the means of production, those who employ and utilize manu / labour and machinery that is used to produce further from others with same; and the Left are the latifundista adjuncts, such as disaffected lawyers. The whole fiasco of Left and Right today comes from the National Assembly in 1788ish when the profit group sat on the right side of the building, the lawyers on the left side. It was a seating arrangement then; it is less than that now. The Liberals on the Right sided with the business /profit interests, the Capitalists, the bourgeios. They stood for market freedom, including labour freedom, i.e for workers' freedom to move to better paying jobs and for social mobility. When others speak of conservatives, I don't assume they mean free marketeers.

By the most remarkable co-incidence, the photograph of my smiling face here makes me look almost exactly like a sketch of Jean-Paul Marat, a leader of sorts during the Terror after the initial Revolution of 1789. Marat was so far to the Left that he was more or less on the Right. I see it clearly in Robespierre's lament, as he wrote shortly before shooting himself in the jaw in a failed suicide attempt, "Extremes meet." And so I find it is true in real life.

Marat, to his ever-lasting credit, understood and acted upon the knowledge that one cannot leave the remnants of the reactionary classes intact to restore the status quo ante if one is a revolutionary; one cannot allow the preservation of the classes who would restore the period prior to the Revolution, i.e. the reactionary classes, those reacting negatively to the Revolution. Marat's solution to the problem of the reactionary classes' attempts to restore privilege was to cut off their fucking heads. I, being a kinder, gentler version of Marat, find the solution we require in, for example, the retrograde world of Islam, to be the imposition on the reluctant reactionary world to be School Teachers with Guns. I argue for a Rational Terror as an integral aspect of neo-colonialist "America of the Mind" manifest destiny, all of which is nicely put throughout the past years at No Dhimmitude.

You want "middle-class" values" of Universal Modernity, i.e. universal Human rights, a market economy across a free world of individualist members of free nation states? Not all democrats do. If you do, then you might agree with me that the way to bring about the furtherance of our beautiful revolutions of Modernity-- the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions-- is to invade "places" as free individuals, as filibusters, i.e. privately interested colonialists whose interest is in overthrowing the powers that be, of reducing the populations to order, and of bringing forth a self-colonization of the locals through education and brute force till the force is so overwhelming and terrifying that only the most ardent native will survive it as self-identifiers and promoters. The meek masses, having lived through the destruction of their previous epistemologies, will succumb to power and will obey the revolutionary norm; and in time, with the winnowing by armed philosophers, the colonialist Revolution will produce democrat children as American in the mind as any American in America today.

What? Am I some kind of fascist? A Rightwing religious bigot? A monster without concern for individual life? I'll get back to you on that one. A social engineer? A Platonist Philosopher King? A Leninist party hack? Uh, I'm busy right now but I'll have my secretary look into the files and she'll send you a form letter.

American did not exterminate its feudal classes in the Revolution. You ask me why. You say, "Dag, why didn't America exterminate the feudal classes in the Revolution?"

'Cause we had none! There was no one needing to die. The Muslim world? Let me count the ways. I must borrow briefly your fingers and toes as well. We, only we, we colonial members of democracies in the West, are Revolutionaries alone. No other people are revolutionaries. Even many of our own are reactionaries who wish to restore the world to a neo-feudalism, those, our so-called Left, not a spit of difference between them and the so-called Right. There is no difference between Left and Right. There is no meaningful distinction to be made between liberal and conservative. Meaning is found only in Revolutionary and Reactionary.

Rational debate of this kind of project is fine right up till such time as those who think as I do are organized and armed. Then it's a matter of which side one opts to support. I'm a liberal kind of guy. I stand for freedom and individualism. I take it with me wherever I go.Revolutonary Americanism. It's free, portable, and importable. It grows everywhere it's planted. But it has to be guarded till it's strong enough to flourish alone. I defend it. That's why I'm proud to be a Liberal and a friend of the People.