Your Moment of Zinn

We're in a self-congratulatory orgy of sacred cow-tipping these days, measuring our anti-racism by how many Confederate statues we can protest, remove, or even topple over in the dead of night.

 It's gotten so intense that chief White House economic adviser Gary Cohn had even drafted a resignation letter over Boss Trump's Charlottesville remarks praising white supremacy. But then, of course, Cohn's financial patriotism got the better of him, and he tore it up. The mega-banker's dream of one day chairing the Federal Reserve tipped the delicate moral scales in favor of continuing to serve in Trump's administration. At least Cohn won't have to face the onerous task of removing any confederate icons from United States currency. For now, anyway, George Washington is safe, despite that mouthful of teeth extracted from his own slaves. 

Unlike Trump, this was a president who knew when to keep his trap shut.

Meanwhile,  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has gone the anti-confederacy brigade one better and boldly suggested doing away with the statue of Christopher Columbus. This promptly brought out the crowds of protesters to Columbus Circle over the weekend. The anti-Columbus movement had been brewing for quite a while anyway. After several centuries, word has finally gotten out that Chris was part of an invasion of looting, rape, torture and slaughter of Arawaks in the Caribbean. So he didn't really discover America. Plus, America was not really America until some imperialists decided to name it after an adventurer named Amerigo Vespucci.

In June, the New Paltz, NY (my hometown) Board of Education passed a unanimous resolution which banishes Columbus Day outright. Instead, the second Monday in October will hereby be known as Indigenous People's Day, and the curriculum will be revised between then and Thanksgiving to include history from the perspective of the aboriginal people.

More and more thoughtful people seem to be getting their Zinn on. That would be the late Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. He tipped over any number of sacred American cows, beginning aptly enough with Christopher Columbus's orgy of brutalism, and continuing with the extermination of the natives, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, and the non-stop wars which have always made this country so exceptional. Absent any prosecution of Wall Street criminals and war criminals, at least we're finally getting a small measure of truth and reconciliation after Charlottesville opened up so many eyes.

Howard Zinn

  If Donald Trump serves any positive purpose at all, it is in yanking the mask right off all kinds of institutional ugliness and watching the refined perpetrators of the institutional ugliness squirm helplessly in the glare of his sputtering spotlight.

  People are actually starting to notice that the great American military machine is every bit as racist as Trump himself. One of the main gates of the United States Military Academy in New York is named after star cadet and later superintendant, General Robert E. Lee, as is one of the post's main thoroughfares.  General George Armstrong Custer, another grad and exterminator of native Americans, is buried on its hallowed grounds, as is General Winfield Scott, who oversaw the deadly expulsion of the Cherokees before going on to invade Mexico in another one of our nearly forgotten wars of bloody aggression. Thus far, nobody is suggesting we exhume their bodies and drive stakes through their hearts, although there is some movement toward symbolically removing all symbolic traces of Lee from the premises. He, after all, was a traitor, and the others are still considered patriots. Anyway, there is some doubt that the body buried at West Point is even Custer's.


The American military loves to put on a show of equal opportunity and multicultural propaganda these days. Since there is no more draft, recruits must be gleaned from the ranks of historically oppressed people, including from among the Amerindian descendants of Christopher Columbus's victims. 

But while the draft was still on and memories of protesters burning flags and draft cards in defiance of the Vietnam War were still fresh, the Academy saw fit in 1975 to invite Ayn Rand, queen of the extreme right, to their hallowed West Point grounds. She was there to give a philosophical pep talk talk to a very enthusiastic corps of cadets. The audience may well have included such future disgraced Iraq/Afghanistan war generals as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal (Class of 1976). Their classmate, the future National Security Director and unindicted perjurer Keith Alexander, is today credited with being the mastermind of America's unconstitutional global spying enterprise. He might have listened to Ayn Rand too. There were also a goodly number of budding CEOs in likely attendance, such as Procter and Gamble's Bob McDonald ('75) who would later become Barack Obama's Veterans Affairs director and infamously insist that wait times for VA medical appointments are not important. We don't exactly know who attended, because Ayn Rand's toxic talk is another historical fact that they'd just as soon the public forgot all about.

As a matter of fact, the full transcript and recording of her schmooze-fest with the military-industrial complex aspirants wouldn't surface until 40 years, and several wars and invasions, later. And for good reason: she told them that the military genocide of native Americans had been necessary and right, because they were "savages." And then they applauded her.

In the question-and-answer session, one unidentified cadet told Rand that he was about to ask her a liberal question from a point of view outside the norm of acceptable military discourse:

At the risk of stating an unpopular view, when you were speaking of America, I couldn’t help but think of the cultural genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black men in this country, and the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. How do you account for all of this in your view of America?

After blaming slavery, racism and internment camps on liberals, Rand went on:

If you are born in a magnificent country which you don’t know what to do with, you believe that it is a property right; it is not. And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled, society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.

It would be wrong to attack any country which does respect—or try, for that matter, to respect—individual rights, because if they do, you are an aggressor and you are morally wrong to attack them. But if a country does not protect rights—if a given tribe is the slave of its own tribal chief—why should you respect the rights they do not have?

And therein lies the exceptional American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which eventually morphed into the Bush Doctrine of preemptive aggression justified by the target country's disrespect of human rights - as selectively defined by Ayn Rand, that is.

Her nasty speech was greeted with "thunderous applause" from the once and future military/corporate American elite, a group which, for all intents and purposes, now runs the White House for useful idiot and military high school bad boy Donald J. Trump. Under their orders, he has "reluctantly" ordered several thousand more troops to the Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan. He has gladly gone along to get along and is thereby rapidly achieving parity with his predecessors' global body counts and war crimes, which include the dropping of white phosphorus bombs on civilians in Syria.

Trump might be a national embarrassment for his unfettered tongue, but he is certainly no anomaly. This summer's fad of the confederate statue "debate" is just one more smokescreen to protect ingrained and ongoing All-American racist policies as well as the identities of both perpetrators and complicit enablers.