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9 de Octubre, 2007
A Remembering
Categorized under El Malestar Pálido , Historia , Indígena | Tags: Christopher Columbus, historia, indigenous, Language, The Haunted Land
I OFTEN WRITE OF "THE HAUNTED LAND," referring to a reckoning that has never happened, referring to the exploitation and abuse that paved the way for all our American lives today, referring to the myriad wounds and unhealed injury and wrongs not redressed in our constant retelling of history, referring specifically to the lessons that go unlearned due to the propagandistic nature of a society that has risen from so many graves and killing fields and doesn't have the courage yet or moral sense to face it but in the most fleeting and false of ways.
Here is one of the most concise summations of that idea I've found since I began writing on it:
We are molded as much by the histories we stifle as by the myths we create to exalt ourselves. Those who ignore the truth about their past are condemned to replicate, over and over, their crimes. The devastation in Iraq is the legacy of lessons unlearned, from the genocide of Native Americans, to slavery, to the Mexican war, to the invasion of Cuba and the Philippines, to Vietnam.
America's brutal cycle of imperial invasion and occupation is as enduring as the cultivated illusion of its goodness. And the first step toward breaking this cycle and exposing this illusion is facing our history and ourselves.
—The Great Forgetting, Eunice Wong
I am encouraged, anytime I read these actions and histories being connected, the larger scale. Because I find it deeply distressing to see the same wrongs perpetrated over and over. It fills me with a sense of futility and despair to think that we cannot do better as a species. It makes me furious to see how much work we do on so many levels—not entirely conscious of it—to keep the veil in place.
When we know what our represented, sometimes-elected leaders are doing and we know it is terribly wrong, why do we keep getting pulled along in distracting arguments, in doublespeak, in their tired and thin justifications for what is quite obvious to so many? It is hard to admit the devastating truth. It implicates us. It is horrific.
Sometimes in my more cynical moments, I think maybe it's not that at all. Maybe that is too generous a view. Maybe USAmericans are to War, what that carnivore that has tasted human blood but has not been put down is to a warm, human body. We have crossed a line, and cannot go back. Bound to lust after a forbidden and horrible thing. Addicted to mass-conquest and the hot rush of so many deaths under our sights, the crimson waves of text rolling across the pages of our proud history books, the "Mission Accomplished" banner on our TV screen. If we don't do it every few years we begin fading away, meaning nothing. I think that perhaps we ARE war. It's at the heart and the bottom of our national identity. As American as Baseball, Apple Pie, and An Unstoppable Tide of Dominance and Death!...spreading conquest from one side of a massive land piece to the other...like sickness spreading over the land. Come the morning after the wrenching gut pains ebb and the fever lowers we want to forget everything that came before. It's too painful to linger, let go. Like the stories about being bitten by a vampire. Once the human part dies off, you feel fantastic as a creature of the night!
Like I said, my "more cynical moments"...
Either way, warmakers and those who claim to represent the People pull off these tricks. Repeatedly. Despite what the People want. To those, we don't really matter at all, aside from either a source of power, or if we are a threat to their power. When they want what we do not, it becomes a matter of Selling the People. And that is something USAmericans know about: the marketplace. Buying. Selling. Being sold.
While these politicians (on both sides) so often talk of the American People (with that weird thumb-pointing-fisty gesture, no less), they ally themselves with themselves and their kind and their corporate bedfellows and their hierarchy of power. They play us. They insist on neglecting far too much historical context from their comments upon current events. Even recent history. They habituate us to insincerity—so a little is the same as a lot. They insist on certain language and contrive it to reinforce the chosen format. They lie about the past (Happy Columbus Day!) and teach a distorted path from the past to the present, instilling superiority and a sense of invincibility and grandiosity in us as children instead of perhaps a reflex for reflection, sorrow, humility and a great, shared, debt—and so we grow to be misinformed and arrogant and ready to take guns into other lands at the whim of our government.
Having learned nothing important from the experience. Having absorbed glorious justifications, so that the next time a Glorious Justification is given, the sound is comforting. Familiar. "Hey...he said 'Ruthless Dictator'! She said 'Mushroom Cloud'! I know this feeling! We're entering a Grand Time in History! (Pp 305 - 442)"
To watch this play out around you. As if in slow motion. Tearing the world—and people much closer than across the world—apart. To hear people back it up still, supposedly sentient human beings on the TV shrieking about remaining in the home we firebombed so we can maintain control of the aftermath...and loot.
Sometimes I don't know what to do aside from rage at it. I'm afraid if I don't do that, I'll just look away and never turn back. It's almost too much to bear as it is. It actually is too much to bear at times. And I know if you are like me, you probably look and then turn away. And then look again.
And we speak, and write. Sometimes it is but shouting into a storm. And feels better than waiting for gray clouds to descend. Sometimes we document the atrocities because to not document them means to leave nothing but false and dangerous history for the next person. (And we back up our blogs on a regular basis for otherwise is to trust the Great Server in the Sky far too much.) Which is why, in our telling, we must cut no corners, hide no truth from our record-keeping. We know the results of this.
A quote by President Andrew Jackson in 1829 is featured prominently [at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian] in large black letters on the glass face of the treaties display:Your Father [the term denoting the U.S. president] has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.Jackson, although this remains unmentioned, was one of the most vigorous advocates for the extermination of the indigenous people. One year after he promised that the land “will be yours forever,” he pushed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through Congress. This bill forcibly uprooted 70,000 people of more than 60 tribes, including Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Choctaws, Creeks, Shawnees, Senecas and Delawares, from their homes east of the Mississippi, resulting in as many as 30,000 deaths. Twenty-five million acres of land were stolen from Native Americans for white settlers and their black slaves.
—The Great Forgetting, Eunice Wong
And on the future of life in a Haunted Land overpopulated with both outright lies and historical half-truths, I like what a commenter (TAO Walker) on the article quoted above says:
No People can go on living so divorced from the Song ‘n’ Dance of LifeHerownself.
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Comentarios (6)
Theriomorph dijo:
Yes.
Want to read this book. I remember reading Ronald Takaki's "A Different Mirror" and feeling sane while reading an American history for the first time. Eunice Wong is doing a similar service in her editorial.
So are you, here.
And maybe on MTV, corrupting youth with truth, mwaa ha ha ha ha
Palabras por Theriomorph spat forth on el 10 de Octubre, 2007 at 09:40 PM
leesee dijo:
After reading your fine heartfelt essay I wonder how depraved morons like Medved can write shit like this.
"Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery" found at
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/MichaelMedved/2007/09/26/six_inconvenient_truths_about_the_us_and_slavery
If you can stomach this pendejo he also writes about the non-genocide of the Native-Americans, what astounds me is that he has a legitimate forum to spew this garbage. We blogged on it and caused a controversy.
http://hastalosgatosquierenzapatos.blogspot.com/2007/10/there-is-simply-no-limit-to-bullshit.html
We really appreciate your continuing visits and comments. I appreciate your upfront support of those of us who blog for the same cause.
You rock.
Palabras por leesee spat forth on el 11 de Octubre, 2007 at 09:41 PM
Malicia dijo:
it's almost unbearably sad to think what has happened to Native Americans and the slaves brought over and many many other groups in the past here in the US.
And hearing about immigrant families split up where those who aren't citizens are deported, I hear a new story like that every day it seems, and Jena, Louisiana, and many other situations show that there is still a far way to go before we treat everyone with fairness and compassion in this country.
However this talk of the Turkey/Armenian genocide resolution that was just brought forth has brought up so much in my mind. Despite whether you think the resolution should've been brought forth or not, and whether it was worth it in terms of international relations, think about what happened to those Armenians and a country that refuses to discuss their past despite how much it would mean to so many Armenians who lost family members then. I think of my own Greek side of the family, my great-grandfather came here to the US as a teen to escape Turkish occupation, the Armenians weren't the only people affected in that time, and the US isn't the only country with blood on it's hands and a sordid history.
Some people came to this country to escape atrocities much worse than what's going on in the USA today, throwing what they did love of their past life away because they had faith in a better future here. My mom talks of her grandparents and I know their love and hope passed on to her is still in me. I think it honors them to keep fighting for a better America that actually lives up to it's grand ideals.
If you go to counseling they tell you to not beat yourself up about your past, some of your issues aren't your fault. Eventually you have to learn to deal with them as an adult, take responsibility for yourself and find constructive ways to deal with your problems. But the first step is accepting yourself as OK and not beating yourself up about it, it can make you crazy. Maybe that applies to countries, too? We are all here where we are now, whatever horrible stuff has happened in the past has also led to us being here now, so there is an upside in that we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the past being just the way it was. So I agree with everything you said I just want to inject some hope alongside with it because it was kinda a post of despair.
Palabras por Malicia spat forth on el 12 de Octubre, 2007 at 07:37 AM
nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez
dijo:
perhaps it is a despairing post. i do despair for the state of humankind in this nation. i do despair for our past. mostly because of how i see it carry forth into the present. it is not as if i am digging up what Daddy did at the happy family picnic where everyone is laughing now. in fact, i see the aversion to looking at these things as a great part of why we allow and continue colonial type ventures into other lands, why we occupy these lands and murder many people with the same flimsy arguments for this nation has used for so long. you say that if it weren't for the horrible past, we wouldn't be here now...but where are we now? just because your family and mine is relatively free from the violence perhaps they fled once (and my family has come here fleeing worse conditions on both sides of my immigrant ancestry), but so what? "where we are now" is in iraq, breaking up countless families and we have brought much death to those who do not deserve it.
despair without hope is dangerous, i agree. but hope injected for the sake of making myself more comfortable, when perhaps a feeling sane person would be very uncomfortable is perhaps even more dangerous...
but i do welcome your thoughts, when you agree and when you do not. :)
Palabras por nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez
spat forth on el 12 de Octubre, 2007 at 07:45 AM
Malicia dijo:
thanks :) I wish we would get out of Iraq, too. Part of what I mean about fighting for an America that lives up to its ideals includes getting out of Iraq.
But there are a lot of people that aren't at the stage we are at in terms of understanding the connections that you talk about. I think you are aware of this and by communicating with people that read this blog you do assume your audience. But living in North Florida bible belt I see a lot of people who aren't at that level and there still needs to be a ladder for them to climb up. A ladder up to greater and greater levels of compassion. To them, even caring for America is something higer than themselves - better than nothing -even though the goal should be the whole world.
I know you are speaking to a lot of intelligent people on this blog. But what approach do I take with the people I interact with on a daily basis? People in this town that raised me? People who voted for Bush, are ignorant, but not necesarily bad people, some people can't help the way they were raised and their trandformation is slow. You can't blame this just on America, go to any coutnry and you'll find a wide variety of ignorant and nice people. I just think people respond to hope, and I also see not giving in to despair as part of taking care of yourself, like going to the doctor. I don't see how I will bring anyone I run into higher up the ladder of compassion if I can't keep the hope alive.
Palabras por Malicia spat forth on el 12 de Octubre, 2007 at 04:13 PM
nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez
dijo:
a good reason to start a blog. there, you speak the way that feels right to you. you think? you sound ready to me!
Palabras por nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez
spat forth on el 12 de Octubre, 2007 at 04:15 PM