Political-enter at your own risk

A lot of us who write westerns read a fair share of history about our country as it pushed west. I like to look through old journals in used bookstores because they often contain material you don't find in books. Today I was at Half Price and I found a Journal of Popular Culture from 76 that had a number of interesting articles in it. By far the most striking was "Racial Reservations: Indian and Blacks in American Magazines, 1865-1900" by Professor Charles R. Wilson. The piece introduced me to a particularly repellent racial theory I'd never heard of before.

White intellectuals of the highest order found blacks superior to Indians for a simple reason. Here's Nathan Shaler, Dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard:

"We see the essential difference between the African and the Indian in the measure of this faculty (the tendency to imitate whites). The American aborigines are content with their ways, and slow to take on the manners and customs of the whites; they have thus never reconciled themselves with their conquerers. The Negro is contented only when he feels that he has brought himself into accord with his superiors."

There are three pages of quotes like this from various academic publications. I chose the above because it was the easiest to condense.

After I read this I turned on the news and saw the Glen Beck rally in D.C. Wile I'm sure there were some decent and well-meaning people there, I'm assuming that most of them were the dirtbags, KKK wanna bes, mental defectives and white trashers who squelched all serious discussion at town hall meetings. Today they probably went to the bathroom on the street and killed squirrels and kittens for their food.

You know, there's a legitimate argument to make about how Obama has spent our money. Yesterday, the NY Times, the Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post all ran long articles attacking Obama for doing nothing to change Wall Street. The CEOs who should have gone to prison are back to making millions a year and the unlicensed derivates that caused a good deal of the trouble are being sold again. Every piece predicted that we will have an even bigger crash within ten years because Obama let Bernacke, Geithner and Summers sell us out to Wall Street. To me they should be sentenced to prison for life. Paulson would go in first.

But as much as I find it hard to forgive Obama for his cowardice and incompetence with Wall Street, I have no stomach for what I saw on the streets of D.C. today because despite the posturing of "he's spending too much money" just about everybody I saw interviewed said in one way or another "We want our country back." I.e., we don't want no colored guy in the White House. Pure and simple. The placards were offensive as usual--Obama with big lips; Obama as Hitler; and a new one, "Obamacare should be buried along with Kennedy." Nice. Plus a variety of misspellings. I can't spell either but how tough is "nation"?

Do we really want a dirtbag nation? I always quote Mencken: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." That was proved again today in Washington, D.C. I came from the working class. I met very few people of the sort I saw on screen today.

I thought of something today I'd never considered before. If Reagan hadn't fought Gerry Ford in 76 then Ford (Ford had also come to hate his neo-con employees Cheney and Rumsfeld) would have won. We wouldn't have had Carter, to me one of the worst presidents in our history and thus we wouldn't have had Reagan and "acceptable racism" ("welfare queens" anybody?). We would have had a nice moderate GOP president like Ford or somebody and we wouldn't be where we are today.

We're in a hell of a fix when the dems stand by and let their president sell us out to Wall Street and the only opposition can be found in the streets at the behest of a sissy like Glen Beck who, I'm pretty sure, agrees with that Harvard quote I used to introduce this post.