The Cult of Trump
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people
have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered,
infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who
appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult
leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and
individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult
leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more
they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established
society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those
who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will
save them.
Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party
into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the
cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader's prejudices, worldview, personal
style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge
segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were
conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to
rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the
New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when
we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as
cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must
resist.
It was 40 years ago next month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jones
convinced or forced more than 900 of his followers, including roughly 280
children, to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink. Trump's refusal to
acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive
mismanagement of the economy by kleptocrats, his bellicosity, his threats
against Iran and China and the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties, along
with his demonization of all who oppose him, ensure our cultural and, if
left unchecked, physical extinction. Cult leaders are driven, at their core,
by the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than
nurture and create. Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as
well as other cult leaders including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu
Nettles, the founders of the Heaven's Gate cult; the Rev. Sun Myung Moon,
who led the Unification Church; Credonia Mwerinde, who led the Movement for
the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda; Li Hongzhi, the
founder of Falun Gong; and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in
Waco, Texas. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning
and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield
absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure,
a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral
and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as
objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often
sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of
evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
"A cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader," Margaret Thaler
Singer wrote in "Cults in Our Midst." "He has no restraints on him. He can
make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around
him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world
really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of
a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play
world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few
minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding.
They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is
all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables
and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I
think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created
world much as a child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or
her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual
humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from
inside his own head."
George Orwell understood that cult leaders manipulate followers primarily
through language, not force. This linguistic manipulation is a gradual
process. It is rooted in continual mental chaos and verbal confusion. Lies,
conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements that defy
reality and fact soon paralyze the opposition. The opposition, with every
attempt to counter this absurdism with the rational-such as the decision by
Barack Obama to make his birth certificate public or by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren to release the results of her DNA test to prove she has Native
American ancestry-plays to the cult leader. The cult leader does not take
his or her statements seriously and often denies ever making them, even when
they are documented. Lies and truth do not matter. The language of the cult
leader is designed exclusively to appeal to the emotional needs of those in
the cult.
"Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic
upheaval," Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology
of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing." "They never knew what this
unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because
he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with
logic, while illogic cannot-it confuses those who think straight. The Big
Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold
war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a
reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault
him with another."
The cult leader grooms followers to speak in the language of hate and
violence. The cult leader constantly paints a picture of an existential
threat, often invented, that puts the cult followers in danger. Trump is
doing this by demonizing the caravan of some 4,000 immigrants, most from
Honduras, moving through southern Mexico. Caravans of immigrants, are, in
fact, nothing new. The beleaguered and impoverished asylum seekers,
including many families with children, are 1,000 miles from the Texas
border. But Trump, aided by nearly nonstop coverage by Fox News and
Christian broadcasting, is using the caravan to terrify his followers, just
as he, along with these media outlets, portrayed the protesters who flooded
the U.S. capital to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as unruly mobs.
Trump claims the Democrats want to open the border to these "criminals" and
to "unknown Middle Easterners" who are, he suggests, radical jihadists.
Christian broadcasting operations, such as Pat Robertson's The 700 Club,
splice pictures of marching jihadists in black uniforms cradling automatic
weapons into the video shots of the caravan.
The fear mongering and rhetoric of hate and violence, as I saw in the former
Yugoslavia, eventually lead to widespread acts of violence against those the
cult leader defines as the enemy. The 13 explosive devices sent last week to
Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and
CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc, an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter
who was living out of his van, herald more violence. Trump, tossing gasoline
on the flames, used this assault against much of the leadership of the
Democratic Party to again attack the press, or, as he calls it, "the enemy
of the people." "A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is
caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream
Media that I refer to as Fake News," he tweeted. "It has gotten so bad and
hateful that is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its acts,
FAST!"
It should come as no surprise that on Saturday another enraged American
white male, his fury and despair seemingly stoked by the diatribes and
conspiracy theories of the far right, entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and
massacred eight men and three women as he shouted anti-Semitic abuse. Shot
by police and arrested at the scene was Robert Bowers, who believes that
Jewish groups are aiding the caravan of immigrants in southern Mexico. He
was armed with a military-style AR-15 assault rifle, plus three handguns.
The proliferation of easily accessible high-caliber weapons, coupled with
the division of the country into the blessed and the damned by Trump and his
fellow cultists, threatens to turn the landscape of the United States into
one that resembles Mexico, where at least 145 people in politics, including
48 candidates and pre-candidates, along with party leaders and campaign
workers, have been assassinated over the last 12 months, according to
Etellekt, a risk analysis firm in Mexico. There have been 627 incidents of
violence against politicians, 206 threats and acts of intimidation, 57
firearm assaults and 52 attacks on family members that resulted in 50
fatalities. Trump's response to the mass shooting at the synagogue was to
say places of worship should have armed guards, a call for further
proliferation of firearms. Look south if you want a vision of our future.
Domestic terrorism and nihilistic violence are the natural outcomes of the
economic, social and political stagnation, the total seizure of power by a
corporate cabal and oligarchic elite, and the contamination of civil
discourse by cult leaders. The weaponization of language is proliferating,
as seen in the vile rhetoric that characterizes many political campaigns for
the midterm elections, including the racist robocall sent out against Andrew
Gillum, an African-American candidate for the governorship of Florida.
"Well, hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I'll be askin' you to
make me governor of this here state of Florida," a man speaking in a
caricature of a black dialect accompanied by jungle noises said in the
robocall. Cults externalize evil. Evil is embodied in the demonized other,
whether desperate immigrants, black political candidates and voters, or the
Democratic Party. The only way to purge this evil and restore America to
greatness is to eradicate these human contaminants.
The cult leader, unlike a traditional politician, makes no effort to reach
out to his opponents. The cult leader seeks to widen the divisions. The
leader brands those outside the cult as irredeemable. The leader seeks the
omnipotence to crush those who do not kneel in adoration. The followers,
yearning to be protected and empowered by the cult leader, seek to give the
cult leader omnipotence. Democratic norms, an impediment to the leader's
omnipotence, are attacked and abolished. Those in the cult seek to be
surrounded by the cult leader's magical aura. Reality is sacrificed for
fantasy. Those who challenge the fantasy are not considered human. They are
Satanic.
Meerloo wrote:
"
The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees
no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have
received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends
justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every
tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing
device for his own conscience, he cannot live. His attitude toward other
people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of
his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal
contradictions, or man's inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological
fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error,
through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit
himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never
become a mature person. . It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit
unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the
same internal contradictions of his fellow man. He must purge and purge,
terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He
must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison
everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.
Behavior that ensures the destruction of a public figure's career does not
affect a cult leader. It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are
meticulously documented by The New York Times or The Washington Post. It
does not matter that Trump's personal financial interests, as we see in his
relationship with the Saudis, take precedence over the rule of law,
diplomatic protocols and national security. It does not matter that he is
credibly charged by numerous women with being a sexual predator, a common
characteristic of cult leaders. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy
and ignorant. The establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed
because of its complicity in empowering the ruling oligarchy and the
corporate state, might as well be blowing soap bubbles at Trump. Their
vitriol, to his followers, only justifies the hatred radiating from the
cult.
The cult leader responds to only one emotion-fear. The cult leader, usually
a coward, will react when he thinks he is in danger. The cult leader will
bargain and compromise when afraid. The cult leader will give the appearance
of being flexible and reasonable. But as soon as the cult leader is no
longer afraid, the old patterns of behavior return, with a special venom
directed at those who were able to momentarily impinge upon his power.
The removal of Trump from power would not remove the yearning of tens of
millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult
leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult
followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking,
attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based
science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social
decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode
in another financial crisis.
The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and
The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in
him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump
only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced
journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic
and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a
refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed
democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters
the press and Trump's mainstream critics.
Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that
vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative
bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are
no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage
in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. By turning
our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse.
We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as
undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals,
feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a Democratic
Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot
be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we
fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult
leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Monday, October 8, 2018
Re: [acb-chat] Great News!
Good Monday Morning to All Believers in Democracy and the American Way
of Life.
Mostly we think of language as the means of conveying knowledge and
information. We tend to forget that language also can be a tool to
stir up emotions and to spread gossip and rumors. Language can be
twisted to paint untruths about those whom we oppose. It can be
precise and clear, or it can be deliberately vague and confusing.
Language can be used to direct our attention to certain trigger words
that elicit the reaction that is wanted.
Advertisers have become skilled in the spin they put on language in
order to attract us to their wares. They are targeting certain
people. But politicians have a very different problem with language.
Politicians must appeal to a majority of voters. The broader the area
the politician is campaigning in, the greater the language problem.
How does a candidate show his/her support to the majority of the
voters? First and foremost, he/she uses double talk. Double Talk
gives the impression of agreement, without really agreeing to
anything. Also, an Overload of language can leave the voting public
believing the candidate is on their side. Lies can be used by
supporters of candidates, if they are properly used as rumors.
Which brings us to the confirmation hearing just completed. Like
every public hearing, or every public exposure of our elected
officials, it is an opportunity to campaign.
Public Hearings do not bring new information to light. They do not
unify either the politicians or the public. Public Hearings could
better be named, "Let's Pretend!" We will pretend to investigate and
grill and expose the negative parts of people's lives. But the fact
is that the votes were already lining up to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.
And it was upon this public stage that Language stepped into the
Limelight. Language became the tool to disrupt any efforts to bring
unity to this nation. Language was hurled at committee members as
they went to and from the hearing room. In moments of anger, the
politicians spat back, using language that others pointed to as
evidence of the contempt being shown the American People.
All in all it was a masterful use of Language...for the Ruling Class.
Now the gloves are off. Protesters who saw themselves as the "loyal
opposition", were labeled, "Rabble Rousers", and worse. Protesters
were beaten and arrested for shouting out their feelings.
But in all of this disruptive turmoil, we forget that this is our
American History. We cry out that our American Way of Life is under
attack. But name a decade that was free of turmoil. In my dad's day,
it was the protesting of unions, mother's demanding an end to child
labor, the fight for an eight hour day and a five day work week. The
Thirties brought fights over FDR's establishment of Social Security
and Public Works Programs and of course, his efforts to increase the
number of Judges on the Supreme Court. Even the War Years of the
Forties saw labor revolts and protests against our participation in
the War. The Fifties and the anti Korean protests, as well as the
beginnings of anti discrimination protests. The Sixties and the
growing attention on the conditions among our Black Citizens, the
murders of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The
Seventies and the Women's Liberation began to draw crowds. The anti
Vietnam protests. The Eighties and the Ronald Reagan opposition to
Labor Unions. The Nineties and the emergence of the ADA, after many
long demonstrations, along with growing protests over our foreign
involvement in Iraq and Central America. And on and on into the
Twenty First Century. Still demonstrating and still at each others
throats, and still claiming that we used to be a nation of Laws,
peaceful and kinder and gentler.
We want things to be peaceful, as long as they go our way. But
democracy is not quiet. Democracy is noisy and often unruly. It does
allow for people to gather and speak...or shout...their beliefs. In
the end, however, we are all expected to come together and support the
"Will of the Majority". So the trick is to manipulate just who the
"majority" is. Gerrymandering, purging voter's registrations,
tampering with ballots, closing of certain polling places,
intimidation, all are tactics used by the warring sides.
And are we any less Independent today than we were 100 years ago when
President Wilson declared those who protested our involvement in World
War One, to be committing acts of Treason?
Sometimes we Americans act as if we've had a stroke, and are only able
to live in the "here and now". Even a quick peek at our history shows
us that we have always behaved as we are behaving today. If the day
ever comes when we wake up and hear not a single protest, we will
understand what the word, Dictator means.
If you've not read it, try down loading Howard Zinn's book,
"A People's History of the United States."
Cordially,
Carl Jarvis
(the opinions above are those of Carl Jarvis, and not those of the ACB
Chat List.)
On 10/7/18, Karen Rose via acb-chat <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
> Truly I do not understand why Twitter has not simply taking away his
> account. He violates their rules all of the time. They take away accounts of
> others who tweet out hate speech. Take his account away
>
>> On Oct 7, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Bob Hachey via acb-chat
>> <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi karen,
>> The following just now occurred to me. Many on the right are now carping
>> and complaining about all of the anger and vitriole now coming from the
>> left. Yes, there is a lot of that now and some of it is indeed way over
>> the top. But if any of those now complaining are the same folks who have
>> decided to obediently line up behind Trump, then I won't take their
>> complaints very seriously. That's because they have continually chosen to
>> look the other way at all of the hatred, meanness and vitriole that spews
>> forth from trumps filthy mouth and his grubby little twitter fingers.
>> Bob Hachey
>>
>> From: Karen Rose via acb-chat [mailto:acb-chat@acblists.org]
>> Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2018 10:35 PM
>> To: General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide range
>> of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or whatever comes
>> to mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion list.
>> Cc: Karen Rose
>> Subject: Re: [acb-chat] Great News!
>>
>> And he was appointed by the great abuser in chief.
>>
>> On Oct 6, 2018, at 4:10 PM, Andy Baracco via acb-chat
>> <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>>
>> Great news!
>> Kavanaugh was confirmed as an associate justice on the u. S. Supreme
>> Court.
>> The Dems attempt to highjack the confirmation process failed!
>>
>> Andy
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
of Life.
Mostly we think of language as the means of conveying knowledge and
information. We tend to forget that language also can be a tool to
stir up emotions and to spread gossip and rumors. Language can be
twisted to paint untruths about those whom we oppose. It can be
precise and clear, or it can be deliberately vague and confusing.
Language can be used to direct our attention to certain trigger words
that elicit the reaction that is wanted.
Advertisers have become skilled in the spin they put on language in
order to attract us to their wares. They are targeting certain
people. But politicians have a very different problem with language.
Politicians must appeal to a majority of voters. The broader the area
the politician is campaigning in, the greater the language problem.
How does a candidate show his/her support to the majority of the
voters? First and foremost, he/she uses double talk. Double Talk
gives the impression of agreement, without really agreeing to
anything. Also, an Overload of language can leave the voting public
believing the candidate is on their side. Lies can be used by
supporters of candidates, if they are properly used as rumors.
Which brings us to the confirmation hearing just completed. Like
every public hearing, or every public exposure of our elected
officials, it is an opportunity to campaign.
Public Hearings do not bring new information to light. They do not
unify either the politicians or the public. Public Hearings could
better be named, "Let's Pretend!" We will pretend to investigate and
grill and expose the negative parts of people's lives. But the fact
is that the votes were already lining up to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.
And it was upon this public stage that Language stepped into the
Limelight. Language became the tool to disrupt any efforts to bring
unity to this nation. Language was hurled at committee members as
they went to and from the hearing room. In moments of anger, the
politicians spat back, using language that others pointed to as
evidence of the contempt being shown the American People.
All in all it was a masterful use of Language...for the Ruling Class.
Now the gloves are off. Protesters who saw themselves as the "loyal
opposition", were labeled, "Rabble Rousers", and worse. Protesters
were beaten and arrested for shouting out their feelings.
But in all of this disruptive turmoil, we forget that this is our
American History. We cry out that our American Way of Life is under
attack. But name a decade that was free of turmoil. In my dad's day,
it was the protesting of unions, mother's demanding an end to child
labor, the fight for an eight hour day and a five day work week. The
Thirties brought fights over FDR's establishment of Social Security
and Public Works Programs and of course, his efforts to increase the
number of Judges on the Supreme Court. Even the War Years of the
Forties saw labor revolts and protests against our participation in
the War. The Fifties and the anti Korean protests, as well as the
beginnings of anti discrimination protests. The Sixties and the
growing attention on the conditions among our Black Citizens, the
murders of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The
Seventies and the Women's Liberation began to draw crowds. The anti
Vietnam protests. The Eighties and the Ronald Reagan opposition to
Labor Unions. The Nineties and the emergence of the ADA, after many
long demonstrations, along with growing protests over our foreign
involvement in Iraq and Central America. And on and on into the
Twenty First Century. Still demonstrating and still at each others
throats, and still claiming that we used to be a nation of Laws,
peaceful and kinder and gentler.
We want things to be peaceful, as long as they go our way. But
democracy is not quiet. Democracy is noisy and often unruly. It does
allow for people to gather and speak...or shout...their beliefs. In
the end, however, we are all expected to come together and support the
"Will of the Majority". So the trick is to manipulate just who the
"majority" is. Gerrymandering, purging voter's registrations,
tampering with ballots, closing of certain polling places,
intimidation, all are tactics used by the warring sides.
And are we any less Independent today than we were 100 years ago when
President Wilson declared those who protested our involvement in World
War One, to be committing acts of Treason?
Sometimes we Americans act as if we've had a stroke, and are only able
to live in the "here and now". Even a quick peek at our history shows
us that we have always behaved as we are behaving today. If the day
ever comes when we wake up and hear not a single protest, we will
understand what the word, Dictator means.
If you've not read it, try down loading Howard Zinn's book,
"A People's History of the United States."
Cordially,
Carl Jarvis
(the opinions above are those of Carl Jarvis, and not those of the ACB
Chat List.)
On 10/7/18, Karen Rose via acb-chat <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
> Truly I do not understand why Twitter has not simply taking away his
> account. He violates their rules all of the time. They take away accounts of
> others who tweet out hate speech. Take his account away
>
>> On Oct 7, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Bob Hachey via acb-chat
>> <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi karen,
>> The following just now occurred to me. Many on the right are now carping
>> and complaining about all of the anger and vitriole now coming from the
>> left. Yes, there is a lot of that now and some of it is indeed way over
>> the top. But if any of those now complaining are the same folks who have
>> decided to obediently line up behind Trump, then I won't take their
>> complaints very seriously. That's because they have continually chosen to
>> look the other way at all of the hatred, meanness and vitriole that spews
>> forth from trumps filthy mouth and his grubby little twitter fingers.
>> Bob Hachey
>>
>> From: Karen Rose via acb-chat [mailto:acb-chat@acblists.org]
>> Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2018 10:35 PM
>> To: General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide range
>> of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or whatever comes
>> to mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion list.
>> Cc: Karen Rose
>> Subject: Re: [acb-chat] Great News!
>>
>> And he was appointed by the great abuser in chief.
>>
>> On Oct 6, 2018, at 4:10 PM, Andy Baracco via acb-chat
>> <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>>
>> Great news!
>> Kavanaugh was confirmed as an associate justice on the u. S. Supreme
>> Court.
>> The Dems attempt to highjack the confirmation process failed!
>>
>> Andy
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Re: Update
Hi Harry and Page,
Great minds...I was thinking about you this morning as I read
responses to Lou Oma's notice regarding Order of Selection. Several
WCB members have replied to my original post, which I can't seem to
find, and mostly they are asking, "What can we do?"
I've included my response to one person. Other than that, we are
doing fine. We still have no idea where we will be concerning Cathy's
mom. We still trade off with Cathy's sister, Marlene, making sure one
of the daughters visit each day. But we do have more time for such
activities, since we dropped Kitsap County, and since our budget was
cut 25%. We did a presentation yesterday in Port Townsend. Heaven
Gregg, with I&A, heads a group of social service providers. About 15
or so listened to our presentation, and exchanged information. Great
community outreach.
Still trying to get a long weekend to see our daughter and
son-in-law's new home in Ellensburg. They moved in on Christmas Day,
and we've not made it over to "oo and ahh".
We did spend the week of Sept. 17-21 on a short cruise with our
friends, Ken and Mary Hopkins. Mary is failing fast, but still felt
well enough to enjoy our time together. It was a bitter/sweet time.
Good friends are hard to watch suffer.
Anyway, hope you guys are going great guns, and looking out for each
other. Here's the note I posted on WCB List, to Heather:
Well Heather, it seems to me that you have answered your own question
regarding "what do we do?" Your testimony is a great beginning. Hang
onto it and use it every time you have the opportunity. Let your two
state representatives read it, and your state senator, and the
governor. Tell it to anyone who will stop and listen. When you have
time, find groups looking for speakers, and take your testimony to
them.
Talk with your Chapter members and see if you can draft letters from
the Chapter, sending them to those state and federal elected
officials. At state convention of the WCB, draft a resolution calling
for strong action by WCB, and present it to the Resolutions Committee
to be worked up into a final draft.
And don't forget to write a letter or an email to the Department of
Services for the Blind, telling them your concerns, and thanking them
for their great assistance in your life and in the lives of others
that you know.
We don't have the dollars to hire people to keep our concerns before
congress or the legislature, so we have to do it as a volunteer army.
We are a small slice of the total population, and so often are
overlooked...the hidden minority, so we need to seek support from
other organizations with greater influence than ours.
Cathy and I spoke to a group of service providers from a wide variety
of social service agencies and organizations, yesterday. We blind
people are not alone. Social Service Providers are being squeezed
financially, across our county. So I can only believe that the same
is going on in your county. And it's happening across our state and
nation. We, the Blind, could add a new twist to that old adage, The
Blind Leading The Blind. We could become, "The Blind Leading The
American People".
I have always felt that the WCB List could become a place where we
could exchange ideas and opinions, as well as sharing information that
would help us understand why Social Services are so often neglected by
the very government put in place to serve "the people".
But I think that even before we can do that, we need to learn to talk
to one another. Too often strong opinions lead to people behaving
like Kindergartners. Our organization's leaders become concerned that
such discussions will lead to division, rather than bringing us
together. So instead of working toward a set of rules that unites us
in conversation, we avoid discussing the very subjects that are
critical to our future. And to the future of those people who will
become blind in the future.
It's interesting to me. The very need for open discussion is avoided
through fear that it will have a negative impact, even though doing
nothing will also have a negative impact. Teaching ourselves how to
get control over our future will not be an easy task, but if we are
going to build a brighter future for the Blind, it is a task we will
need to tackle.
Carl Jarvis
*******
Here's Heather's note to me:
Hello Carl,
Thank you so much for your heartfelt words of wisdom. I too am very
concerned about our future. As a current client of DSB I can honestly
say I would never
have been able to accomplish the things I have in the last year
without them. And although I am not directly affected by this decision
today, this still
is of great concern to me. If I would have been put on a waiting list
when I truly needed these services a year ago, my entire life would be
on hold. I
would not have known how to learn the skills to survive independently
as a newly blind, single person in a brand new environment with no
connections, no
job and a lifetime of career skills that were no longer usable to me.
Instead I am now able to be extremely independent I own and live alone
in my own
home, I cook for myself , clean, pay my bills, have learned Braille
and white cane skills, take care of my pet dog, and have an active
social life in a
new community. I have learned computer and iphone skills and am soon
going to be training these same skills for people who are blind or
visually impaired.
The fact that people who need these services will now be on a waiting
list for an unknown amount of time when time is quite frankly very
crucial in many
situations like my own, is a travesty. So my real question to Carl and
all of our WCB family is what do we do next? How do we continue the
work that was
done by those who have started it before us, how do we make them proud
and know they really did make a difference? Where do we begin? Hoping
to hear more
discussion on this issue !
Heather Meares
*******
I did find my original post in response to Lou Oma's messages:
> Dear Friends,
> Below I have pasted the release from Director Lou Oma Durand,
> informing us of the Department's implementation of Order of Selection.
> Order of Selection, to a blind adult seeking the training and
> assistance to become employed, is called Hope Deferred.
> As I read the message, I felt a great weight on my heart. The thought
> of all the years of labor, the commitment of blind men and women
> giving of their time, their energy and their money in order to secure
> a strong state agency that would always be there for future
> generations of blind people, being brought to its knees. What have we
> come to? A waiting list...take a number and get in line! Is this
> what we dreamed of? Our president cries out across the Land that we
> are in "Good times", and that the recession is behind us. If so, how
> is it that we are now experiencing austerity in those most critical
> programs under girding the hopes and the dreams and the very lives of
> our state's blind citizens?
> The hard truth is that we, the blind, have dropped the ball.
> Back in the 70's we built a strong blind movement demanding an agency
> that would meet the needs of the blind. We said that a separate
> agency would give us, the consumers, a strong say in the activities of
> that agency. When other states were seeing their blind services being
> shoved under Umbrella Agencies, and some were going into Order of
> Selection, we were building a strong movement, winning our
> independence, our separate state agency.
> And now, are we really going to sit quietly by and tell future blind
> people that we couldn't stand strong for them? Bad enough that we are
> letting down all those who fought so long and hard. Fortunately, many
> of those who fought on the front lines are no longer living. They
> will never know that their hard efforts are being eroded. Ed Foscue
> and Phyllis Foscue, Sue Ammeter, Wes Osborne and so many, many others
> who died believing that they had been a part of something grand,
> something that was of lasting value.
> My friends, we all know that our fate is in our own hands. We are in
> hard times, regardless of what we are told. But it is not hard times
> financially. Our nation has plenty of money to pay for the world's
> largest and deadliest military machine in history. The issue facing
> us is our government's priorities.
> We can quibble over why our government is sending us the signal that
> we are not of any great value, but we can certainly notice that we are
> not the ones living in posh estates.
> It's time again for us to mount a strong movement and call together
> our brightest members and advisors. It's time we show one another
> that we do believe in ourselves.
> Carl Jarvis
>
On 10/4/18, Harry Whiting <harrywhiting@comcast.net> wrote:
> Have not heard from you for a while. Hope all is well.
>
> Harry and Page
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
Great minds...I was thinking about you this morning as I read
responses to Lou Oma's notice regarding Order of Selection. Several
WCB members have replied to my original post, which I can't seem to
find, and mostly they are asking, "What can we do?"
I've included my response to one person. Other than that, we are
doing fine. We still have no idea where we will be concerning Cathy's
mom. We still trade off with Cathy's sister, Marlene, making sure one
of the daughters visit each day. But we do have more time for such
activities, since we dropped Kitsap County, and since our budget was
cut 25%. We did a presentation yesterday in Port Townsend. Heaven
Gregg, with I&A, heads a group of social service providers. About 15
or so listened to our presentation, and exchanged information. Great
community outreach.
Still trying to get a long weekend to see our daughter and
son-in-law's new home in Ellensburg. They moved in on Christmas Day,
and we've not made it over to "oo and ahh".
We did spend the week of Sept. 17-21 on a short cruise with our
friends, Ken and Mary Hopkins. Mary is failing fast, but still felt
well enough to enjoy our time together. It was a bitter/sweet time.
Good friends are hard to watch suffer.
Anyway, hope you guys are going great guns, and looking out for each
other. Here's the note I posted on WCB List, to Heather:
Well Heather, it seems to me that you have answered your own question
regarding "what do we do?" Your testimony is a great beginning. Hang
onto it and use it every time you have the opportunity. Let your two
state representatives read it, and your state senator, and the
governor. Tell it to anyone who will stop and listen. When you have
time, find groups looking for speakers, and take your testimony to
them.
Talk with your Chapter members and see if you can draft letters from
the Chapter, sending them to those state and federal elected
officials. At state convention of the WCB, draft a resolution calling
for strong action by WCB, and present it to the Resolutions Committee
to be worked up into a final draft.
And don't forget to write a letter or an email to the Department of
Services for the Blind, telling them your concerns, and thanking them
for their great assistance in your life and in the lives of others
that you know.
We don't have the dollars to hire people to keep our concerns before
congress or the legislature, so we have to do it as a volunteer army.
We are a small slice of the total population, and so often are
overlooked...the hidden minority, so we need to seek support from
other organizations with greater influence than ours.
Cathy and I spoke to a group of service providers from a wide variety
of social service agencies and organizations, yesterday. We blind
people are not alone. Social Service Providers are being squeezed
financially, across our county. So I can only believe that the same
is going on in your county. And it's happening across our state and
nation. We, the Blind, could add a new twist to that old adage, The
Blind Leading The Blind. We could become, "The Blind Leading The
American People".
I have always felt that the WCB List could become a place where we
could exchange ideas and opinions, as well as sharing information that
would help us understand why Social Services are so often neglected by
the very government put in place to serve "the people".
But I think that even before we can do that, we need to learn to talk
to one another. Too often strong opinions lead to people behaving
like Kindergartners. Our organization's leaders become concerned that
such discussions will lead to division, rather than bringing us
together. So instead of working toward a set of rules that unites us
in conversation, we avoid discussing the very subjects that are
critical to our future. And to the future of those people who will
become blind in the future.
It's interesting to me. The very need for open discussion is avoided
through fear that it will have a negative impact, even though doing
nothing will also have a negative impact. Teaching ourselves how to
get control over our future will not be an easy task, but if we are
going to build a brighter future for the Blind, it is a task we will
need to tackle.
Carl Jarvis
*******
Here's Heather's note to me:
Hello Carl,
Thank you so much for your heartfelt words of wisdom. I too am very
concerned about our future. As a current client of DSB I can honestly
say I would never
have been able to accomplish the things I have in the last year
without them. And although I am not directly affected by this decision
today, this still
is of great concern to me. If I would have been put on a waiting list
when I truly needed these services a year ago, my entire life would be
on hold. I
would not have known how to learn the skills to survive independently
as a newly blind, single person in a brand new environment with no
connections, no
job and a lifetime of career skills that were no longer usable to me.
Instead I am now able to be extremely independent I own and live alone
in my own
home, I cook for myself , clean, pay my bills, have learned Braille
and white cane skills, take care of my pet dog, and have an active
social life in a
new community. I have learned computer and iphone skills and am soon
going to be training these same skills for people who are blind or
visually impaired.
The fact that people who need these services will now be on a waiting
list for an unknown amount of time when time is quite frankly very
crucial in many
situations like my own, is a travesty. So my real question to Carl and
all of our WCB family is what do we do next? How do we continue the
work that was
done by those who have started it before us, how do we make them proud
and know they really did make a difference? Where do we begin? Hoping
to hear more
discussion on this issue !
Heather Meares
*******
I did find my original post in response to Lou Oma's messages:
> Dear Friends,
> Below I have pasted the release from Director Lou Oma Durand,
> informing us of the Department's implementation of Order of Selection.
> Order of Selection, to a blind adult seeking the training and
> assistance to become employed, is called Hope Deferred.
> As I read the message, I felt a great weight on my heart. The thought
> of all the years of labor, the commitment of blind men and women
> giving of their time, their energy and their money in order to secure
> a strong state agency that would always be there for future
> generations of blind people, being brought to its knees. What have we
> come to? A waiting list...take a number and get in line! Is this
> what we dreamed of? Our president cries out across the Land that we
> are in "Good times", and that the recession is behind us. If so, how
> is it that we are now experiencing austerity in those most critical
> programs under girding the hopes and the dreams and the very lives of
> our state's blind citizens?
> The hard truth is that we, the blind, have dropped the ball.
> Back in the 70's we built a strong blind movement demanding an agency
> that would meet the needs of the blind. We said that a separate
> agency would give us, the consumers, a strong say in the activities of
> that agency. When other states were seeing their blind services being
> shoved under Umbrella Agencies, and some were going into Order of
> Selection, we were building a strong movement, winning our
> independence, our separate state agency.
> And now, are we really going to sit quietly by and tell future blind
> people that we couldn't stand strong for them? Bad enough that we are
> letting down all those who fought so long and hard. Fortunately, many
> of those who fought on the front lines are no longer living. They
> will never know that their hard efforts are being eroded. Ed Foscue
> and Phyllis Foscue, Sue Ammeter, Wes Osborne and so many, many others
> who died believing that they had been a part of something grand,
> something that was of lasting value.
> My friends, we all know that our fate is in our own hands. We are in
> hard times, regardless of what we are told. But it is not hard times
> financially. Our nation has plenty of money to pay for the world's
> largest and deadliest military machine in history. The issue facing
> us is our government's priorities.
> We can quibble over why our government is sending us the signal that
> we are not of any great value, but we can certainly notice that we are
> not the ones living in posh estates.
> It's time again for us to mount a strong movement and call together
> our brightest members and advisors. It's time we show one another
> that we do believe in ourselves.
> Carl Jarvis
>
On 10/4/18, Harry Whiting <harrywhiting@comcast.net> wrote:
> Have not heard from you for a while. Hope all is well.
>
> Harry and Page
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Chris Hedges: confronting the past
https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Identity-Crisis-850x681.jpg
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
JONESBORO, Ga.—I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the
train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil
War. The building
now houses the
Road to Tara Museum.
It has displays of "
Gone With the Wind
" movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by
Hattie McDaniel,
and the pantalettes and green hat worn by
Vivien Leigh,
who played Scarlett O'Hara.
Rick, the bus driver, switched on the audio track, written and
narrated by a local historian, Peter Bonner. We listened to the
familiar story of the noble
South and its "Lost Cause." We heard about the courage of the
Confederate soldiers in Jonesboro who fought gallantly on Aug. 31 and
Sept. 1, 1864, in a
failed effort to block the Union Army from entering Atlanta. We were
told of the gentility and charm of the Southern belles. We learned
that the war was
fought not to protect the institution of slavery but the sanctity of
states' rights. Finally, we were assured that the faithful slaves, the
"mammies,"
"aunties" and "uncles," loved their white owners, were loved in return
and did not welcome emancipation.
That this myth persists and perhaps has grown as the country
polarizes, often along racial lines, means that whole segments of the
American population
can no longer communicate. Once myth replaces history there is no way
to have a rational discussion rooted in verifiable fact. Myth allows
people to deny
who they are and the crimes they committed and continue to commit. It
is only by confronting the past that we can end the perpetuation of
these crimes
in other forms.
When loyalty to the tribe is more important that truth, fact or
justice—a tribalism on display in the hearings for Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh—an
open society is extinguished. Reparations for African-Americans are
not only just, they are the only way we as a nation, as with Germany's
reparations
to the Jews, can build a shared history based on truth, atone for the
crimes of the nation and reverse the legacies of white supremacy. The
Southern cause,
as Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his laconic memoirs, was "one of the
worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the
least excuse."
David Blight in "
Race and Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory" documents that in the decades after
the war whites in the South and the North furiously rewrote the
history of the conflict.
"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a
politics of Civil War memory," Blight notes. The root cause of the
war, the need to emancipate
4 million people held in slavery, was erased, he said, and replaced
with the "denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of
emancipation from
the national narrative of what the war was about." As
W.E.B. Du Bois
lamented in his book "Black Reconstruction," which looked at the
brief postwar period, from 1865 to 1877, when African-Americans were
given some political
space in the South to resurrect their lives, "little effort [was] made
to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, action, work and
wages, homes
and families. Nearly all of this has gone down beneath a mass of
ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement."
The Civil War, as portrayed in novels and films such as "Gone With the
Wind," histories such as "The Civil War" by
Shelby Foote
and television programs such as Ken Burns' documentary series on the
conflict, is usually reduced to stories about the heroic
self-sacrifice and courage
exhibited by the soldiers from the North and the South who fought as
brother against brother. The gruesome suffering, widespread looting
and rape and senseless
slaughter are romanticized. (For every three soldiers who died on a
battlefield, five more died of disease, and, overall, 620,000
Americans, 2 percent
of the country's population, perished in the war.) Meanwhile, the far
more important struggle, the struggle of black people to rise from
bondage to be
free, is effectively eclipsed in these narratives of white self-pity
and self-exaltation.
"Gone With the Wind," the 1936 novel by
Margaret Mitchell,
has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and, according to one survey, is the
second favorite book
among Americans, after the Bible. The 1939 film version of the book
is the highest-grossing movie ever, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The
book and film
are unapologetic celebrations of historical myth, historical erasure
and white supremacy.
The Lost Cause romance and veneration of Confederate military leaders
have a powerful hold on white imaginations, especially among those for
whom economic
and political marginalization is becoming more pronounced. The myth of
the Confederacy resembles the retreat into a fictional past I saw in
Yugoslavia
during the
Bosnian War,
an ethnic conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. That retreat gave
Yugoslavs—whether Serb, Muslim or Croat—who had been cast aside by
economic collapse
and a failed political system manufactured identities that were rooted
in a mythologized past of glory, moral superiority and nobility. It
allowed them
to worship their own supposedly unique and innate virtues. These
fantasies of an idealized past were accompanied by the demonization of
opposing ethnicities,
a demonization used by demagogues to fuel the hatred and violence that
led to a savage war.
"He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which
150 years ago was more important than country," White House chief of
staff and former
Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly said last year of the Confederate
military commander, Robert E. Lee, a slave owner. "It was always
loyalty to state first
back in those days. Now it's different today." Kelly blamed the Civil
War on "the lack of an ability to compromise," adding that "men and
women of good
faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them
make their stand."
During my bus ride in Georgia, a woman on the audio guide impersonated
Scarlett O'Hara as music from the 1939 movie played in the background:
"Now y'all
sit back and enjoy this journey back into a time of cavaliers, ladies
fair, and cotton fields—called the Old South."
The theme of the tour could be summed up as " 'Gone With the Wind'
accurately portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War."
Over and over,
incidents and characters in the novel and film were related to actual
events and people. Nowhere was this more pernicious than in the
portrayals of black
men and women who were enslaved.
"I learned that a black servant 144 years ago so loved her 'masters'
that she requested to be buried in their family plot. … And when I
learned that her
masters willingly allowed such a burial request, I had to conclude
that there must have been a greater bond, perhaps a loving bond of
slave for master,
and master for slave," Bonner writes in his thin book "Lost in
Yesterday," which is sold in the Road to Tara Museum. "The unique and
often misunderstood
relationship has been presented throughout fiction and the
entertainment media, in my opinion, in a multitude of unfair
portrayals."
Bonner goes on to argue that the slaves in the book and the
film—Mammy, Pork, Prissy and Big Sam—all supporters of the Confederacy
and loyal to the O'Hara
family, represent a true picture of many, maybe most, blacks in the
antebellum
South. He cites the small headstone at the feet of Philip and Eleanor
Fitzgerald in the local cemetery that reads "Grace, Negro servant of
the Fitzgeralds"
and insists "that Grace was honored as a family member."
That Grace was given no last name on the stone and was buried, like a
pet, at the feet of those who owned her seems to escape Bonner. Did
Grace have a
family? A mother? A father? Brothers? Sisters? Grandparents? Aunts?
Uncles? Cousins? A husband? Children of her own? Or had they been sold
by her beloved
owners?
We stopped outside the 1839
Stately Oaks plantation house,
which originally sat on 404 acres before being moved into the city. It
is now part of the Margaret Mitchell Memorial Park. The mansion hosts
white re-enactors
in period costumes, including Confederate uniforms, the equivalent of
re-enactors dressed in SS uniforms giving cheery tours of
Auschwitz.
In squalid, overcrowded shacks outside Stately Oaks, children were
born, lived and died enslaved. They spent a lifetime engaged in hard
labor, misery and
poverty. They watched in agony as mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers were sold off, never to be seen again. They lived in constant
fear and humiliation.
They were beaten, chained, whipped, castrated and sometimes shot or
hanged. The male slave masters routinely raped black girls and women,
sometimes in
front of their families, and often sold their mixed-race children.
"Like the patriarchs of old,"
Mary Chesnut,
a white South Carolinian, confided in her diary in March 1861, "our
men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the
mulattoes one sees
in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready
to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in
everybody's household
but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."
The Southern tradition, as
James Baldwin
pointed out, "is not a tradition at all." It is "a legend which
contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply
than it should be,
is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means
of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro."
The ability to disregard the horror of slavery, to physically erase
its reality, and to build in its place a white fantasy of goodness,
courage and virtue
speaks to the deep sickness within American society. Most Confederate
monuments were erected under the leadership of the
Daughters of the Confederacy
from 1890 to 1920, a time when the terror of lynching by the Ku Klux
Klan was at its peak. These statues were designed to romanticize white
supremacy
and divide blacks into good and bad "negros." There are no statues to
Reconstruction governors and senators or black political leaders, not
to mention
the leaders of slave revolts such as Nat Turner or
Denmark Vesey.
The few Confederate generals, such as James Longstreet, who supported
black rights after the war are not memorialized, nor are the 186,000
black soldiers—134,111
conscripted from slave states—who served in the Union Army. The
historian James Loewen calls the South "a landscape of denial."
"Public monuments," the historian Eric Foner writes, "are built by
those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are
worth commemorating
and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."
One of the most outrageous public celebrations of white supremacy is
Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Carved in the gray stone are
massive figures of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the generals Robert E. Lee
and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The Confederate leaders, all mounted
on horses, hold
their hats over their hearts. The carving covers more than 1.5 acres
of rock face and rises 400 feet. It is the largest
bas-relief
in the world. It is also the most visited site in Georgia.
William Faulkner published "Absalom, Absalom," his searing
condemnation of slavery and the Old South the same year Mitchell
published "Gone With the Wind."
The hate-filled slave owner and Confederate veteran Thomas Sutpen in
Faulkner's novel, unlike the characters in "Gone With the Wind," is
"demonic evil."
Sutpen, who engages in miscegenation, buys his slaves "with the same
care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses
and mules and
cattle." Faulkner understood "the past is never dead. It's not even
past," that it is subject to constant revision by those seeking to
justify and hide
their crimes. He warned that the lies we tell ourselves about
ourselves lead to moral squalor and self-destruction.
The tour bus stopped at
Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery,
which holds the remains of some 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died in
the Battle of Jonesboro. Most are unidentified. The walkway is laid
out in the shape
of a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag flies at the entrance.
"In 1872, the state of Georgia pays Stephen Cars, a local
cabinetmaker, to rebury the Southern soldiers' remains and place them
in the Patrick Cleburne
Memorial Cemetery here," the audio recording said. "Mr. Cars did not
bury over a thousand soldiers by himself. Mr. Cars had a slave named
Tom who left
with a Yankee captain after the Battle of Jonesboro. When the war was
over, Tom returned to Mr. Cars' house asking for his job back. It was
in 1872 that
Tom and Mr. Stephen Cars reburied the Confederate soldiers in this
cemetery. I told this story to the state of Georgia building authority
years ago, they
oversee the cemetery, and they remarked that Tom was very similar to
the O'Hara slave Big Sam."
The bus paused in front of a 10-room green house built in 1880 that
once belonged to the president of Middle Georgia College.
"Under Reconstruction, five Southerners were not allowed to meet
together without a federal marshal present," Bonner said on the audio
guide. "In 'Gone
With the Wind,' meetings were held in secret. In Jonesboro, there were
those secret meetings that dealt with the issues the town had to deal
with, including
the violence in shantytown. Shantytown was a real location in
Jonesboro and many other cities that had a large population of former
slaves who are without
a job or a home. When this house was being restored in 1995, it was
found to have a secret room in the attic, believed to have been used
for those secret
meetings. There was also a ladder in the wall leading to the cellar.
In the cellar, people believed they had found a tunnel. However, upon
further research,
they found out it was not a tunnel but a bomb shelter where the city
fathers planned to store the county records if and when they got back
to war" (meaning
if and when they resumed the fight against the Union).
It is a safe bet that this house was also a meeting place for the
heavily armed goons of the Ku Klux Klan, who rode four abreast at
night through the Jonesboro
streets to terrorize the blacks in "shantytown." Over 4,000 people
were lynched between the end of the Civil War and World War II in the
United States.
Georgia had the second highest number of lynchings, with 589. Only
Mississippi, with 654 murders, had more.
Lynching was a popular public spectacle in Georgia that could last for
hours and included sadistic torture and mutilation. Children were let
out of school
and workers were given the day off to witness the events. When Sam
Hose, who had thrown his ax at a white man and killed him after the
man pulled a gun
on him, was lynched on April 23, 1899, near Newman, Ga., 1,000 people
attended. Many arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Hose
was stripped
and chained to a tree. His executioners stacked kerosene-soaked logs
around him. They cut off Hose's ears, fingers and genitals. They
flayed his face.
Members of the crowd thrust knives into him. The logs were lit.
"The only sounds that came from the victim's lips, even as his blood
sizzled in the fire, were 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,' " writes Leon
Litwack in "Trouble
in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow." "Before Hose's
body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into
several pieces and
his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over
these souvenirs, and the 'more fortunate possessors' made some
handsome profits on the
sales. (Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents, a piece of liver
'crisply cooked' sold for 10 cents.) Shortly after the lynching, one
of the participants
reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver to the
governor of Georgia a slice of Sam Hose's heart."
On the trunk of a tree near the lynching, a placard read: "We Must
Protect Our Southern Women."
In May of 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, publicly denounced
the lynching of her husband, Hazel "Hayes" Turner, who had been
murdered the day
before. She threatened to take those who lynched him to court. A mob
of several hundred in Valdosta, Ga., hunted her down. They tied the
pregnant woman's
ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her
clothes with gasoline and set her on fire. Someone used a
hog-butchering knife to
rip open her womb. Her baby fell the ground and cried briefly. A
member of the mob crushed the infant's head under the heel of his
boot. Hundreds of rounds
were shot into her body. The Associated Press reported that Mary
Turner had made "unwise remarks" about the lynching of her husband
"and the people, in
their indignation, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude."
In commenting in 1894 on lynchings, the crusading editor and activist
Ida B. Wells said, "[O]ur American Christians are too busy saving the
souls of white
Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones
from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians."
James Baldwin, in the second half of the 20th century, repeatedly
warned white Americans that their relentless refusal to honestly
confront their past,
and themselves, would lead to grotesque distortions of the sort that
decades later we see embodied in Donald Trump. There is a severe cost,
he wrote, for
a life lived as a lie.
"People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have
allowed themselves to become," Baldwin wrote. "And they pay for it
very simply by the
lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these
individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the
generality, as social
and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are
probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any
color, to be found
in the world today."
The first recorded lynching in Georgia took place near Jonesboro in
1880. We have only the name of the victim, Milly Thompson. No one
knows if Thompson
was male or female. There is no record of Thompson committing a crime.
But I suspect that, as in the cases of most lynching victims, the
crime Thompson
committed was the crime of freedom. If you were black, in this land of
gallant cavaliers and Southern belles, and you objected to being human
chattel and
to enforced deference and submission to whites, they killed you.
Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
JONESBORO, Ga.—I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the
train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil
War. The building
now houses the
Road to Tara Museum.
It has displays of "
Gone With the Wind
" movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by
Hattie McDaniel,
and the pantalettes and green hat worn by
Vivien Leigh,
who played Scarlett O'Hara.
Rick, the bus driver, switched on the audio track, written and
narrated by a local historian, Peter Bonner. We listened to the
familiar story of the noble
South and its "Lost Cause." We heard about the courage of the
Confederate soldiers in Jonesboro who fought gallantly on Aug. 31 and
Sept. 1, 1864, in a
failed effort to block the Union Army from entering Atlanta. We were
told of the gentility and charm of the Southern belles. We learned
that the war was
fought not to protect the institution of slavery but the sanctity of
states' rights. Finally, we were assured that the faithful slaves, the
"mammies,"
"aunties" and "uncles," loved their white owners, were loved in return
and did not welcome emancipation.
That this myth persists and perhaps has grown as the country
polarizes, often along racial lines, means that whole segments of the
American population
can no longer communicate. Once myth replaces history there is no way
to have a rational discussion rooted in verifiable fact. Myth allows
people to deny
who they are and the crimes they committed and continue to commit. It
is only by confronting the past that we can end the perpetuation of
these crimes
in other forms.
When loyalty to the tribe is more important that truth, fact or
justice—a tribalism on display in the hearings for Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh—an
open society is extinguished. Reparations for African-Americans are
not only just, they are the only way we as a nation, as with Germany's
reparations
to the Jews, can build a shared history based on truth, atone for the
crimes of the nation and reverse the legacies of white supremacy. The
Southern cause,
as Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his laconic memoirs, was "one of the
worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the
least excuse."
David Blight in "
Race and Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory" documents that in the decades after
the war whites in the South and the North furiously rewrote the
history of the conflict.
"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a
politics of Civil War memory," Blight notes. The root cause of the
war, the need to emancipate
4 million people held in slavery, was erased, he said, and replaced
with the "denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of
emancipation from
the national narrative of what the war was about." As
W.E.B. Du Bois
lamented in his book "Black Reconstruction," which looked at the
brief postwar period, from 1865 to 1877, when African-Americans were
given some political
space in the South to resurrect their lives, "little effort [was] made
to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, action, work and
wages, homes
and families. Nearly all of this has gone down beneath a mass of
ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement."
The Civil War, as portrayed in novels and films such as "Gone With the
Wind," histories such as "The Civil War" by
Shelby Foote
and television programs such as Ken Burns' documentary series on the
conflict, is usually reduced to stories about the heroic
self-sacrifice and courage
exhibited by the soldiers from the North and the South who fought as
brother against brother. The gruesome suffering, widespread looting
and rape and senseless
slaughter are romanticized. (For every three soldiers who died on a
battlefield, five more died of disease, and, overall, 620,000
Americans, 2 percent
of the country's population, perished in the war.) Meanwhile, the far
more important struggle, the struggle of black people to rise from
bondage to be
free, is effectively eclipsed in these narratives of white self-pity
and self-exaltation.
"Gone With the Wind," the 1936 novel by
Margaret Mitchell,
has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and, according to one survey, is the
second favorite book
among Americans, after the Bible. The 1939 film version of the book
is the highest-grossing movie ever, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The
book and film
are unapologetic celebrations of historical myth, historical erasure
and white supremacy.
The Lost Cause romance and veneration of Confederate military leaders
have a powerful hold on white imaginations, especially among those for
whom economic
and political marginalization is becoming more pronounced. The myth of
the Confederacy resembles the retreat into a fictional past I saw in
Yugoslavia
during the
Bosnian War,
an ethnic conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. That retreat gave
Yugoslavs—whether Serb, Muslim or Croat—who had been cast aside by
economic collapse
and a failed political system manufactured identities that were rooted
in a mythologized past of glory, moral superiority and nobility. It
allowed them
to worship their own supposedly unique and innate virtues. These
fantasies of an idealized past were accompanied by the demonization of
opposing ethnicities,
a demonization used by demagogues to fuel the hatred and violence that
led to a savage war.
"He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which
150 years ago was more important than country," White House chief of
staff and former
Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly said last year of the Confederate
military commander, Robert E. Lee, a slave owner. "It was always
loyalty to state first
back in those days. Now it's different today." Kelly blamed the Civil
War on "the lack of an ability to compromise," adding that "men and
women of good
faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them
make their stand."
During my bus ride in Georgia, a woman on the audio guide impersonated
Scarlett O'Hara as music from the 1939 movie played in the background:
"Now y'all
sit back and enjoy this journey back into a time of cavaliers, ladies
fair, and cotton fields—called the Old South."
The theme of the tour could be summed up as " 'Gone With the Wind'
accurately portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War."
Over and over,
incidents and characters in the novel and film were related to actual
events and people. Nowhere was this more pernicious than in the
portrayals of black
men and women who were enslaved.
"I learned that a black servant 144 years ago so loved her 'masters'
that she requested to be buried in their family plot. … And when I
learned that her
masters willingly allowed such a burial request, I had to conclude
that there must have been a greater bond, perhaps a loving bond of
slave for master,
and master for slave," Bonner writes in his thin book "Lost in
Yesterday," which is sold in the Road to Tara Museum. "The unique and
often misunderstood
relationship has been presented throughout fiction and the
entertainment media, in my opinion, in a multitude of unfair
portrayals."
Bonner goes on to argue that the slaves in the book and the
film—Mammy, Pork, Prissy and Big Sam—all supporters of the Confederacy
and loyal to the O'Hara
family, represent a true picture of many, maybe most, blacks in the
antebellum
South. He cites the small headstone at the feet of Philip and Eleanor
Fitzgerald in the local cemetery that reads "Grace, Negro servant of
the Fitzgeralds"
and insists "that Grace was honored as a family member."
That Grace was given no last name on the stone and was buried, like a
pet, at the feet of those who owned her seems to escape Bonner. Did
Grace have a
family? A mother? A father? Brothers? Sisters? Grandparents? Aunts?
Uncles? Cousins? A husband? Children of her own? Or had they been sold
by her beloved
owners?
We stopped outside the 1839
Stately Oaks plantation house,
which originally sat on 404 acres before being moved into the city. It
is now part of the Margaret Mitchell Memorial Park. The mansion hosts
white re-enactors
in period costumes, including Confederate uniforms, the equivalent of
re-enactors dressed in SS uniforms giving cheery tours of
Auschwitz.
In squalid, overcrowded shacks outside Stately Oaks, children were
born, lived and died enslaved. They spent a lifetime engaged in hard
labor, misery and
poverty. They watched in agony as mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers were sold off, never to be seen again. They lived in constant
fear and humiliation.
They were beaten, chained, whipped, castrated and sometimes shot or
hanged. The male slave masters routinely raped black girls and women,
sometimes in
front of their families, and often sold their mixed-race children.
"Like the patriarchs of old,"
Mary Chesnut,
a white South Carolinian, confided in her diary in March 1861, "our
men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the
mulattoes one sees
in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready
to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in
everybody's household
but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."
The Southern tradition, as
James Baldwin
pointed out, "is not a tradition at all." It is "a legend which
contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply
than it should be,
is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means
of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro."
The ability to disregard the horror of slavery, to physically erase
its reality, and to build in its place a white fantasy of goodness,
courage and virtue
speaks to the deep sickness within American society. Most Confederate
monuments were erected under the leadership of the
Daughters of the Confederacy
from 1890 to 1920, a time when the terror of lynching by the Ku Klux
Klan was at its peak. These statues were designed to romanticize white
supremacy
and divide blacks into good and bad "negros." There are no statues to
Reconstruction governors and senators or black political leaders, not
to mention
the leaders of slave revolts such as Nat Turner or
Denmark Vesey.
The few Confederate generals, such as James Longstreet, who supported
black rights after the war are not memorialized, nor are the 186,000
black soldiers—134,111
conscripted from slave states—who served in the Union Army. The
historian James Loewen calls the South "a landscape of denial."
"Public monuments," the historian Eric Foner writes, "are built by
those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are
worth commemorating
and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."
One of the most outrageous public celebrations of white supremacy is
Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Carved in the gray stone are
massive figures of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the generals Robert E. Lee
and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The Confederate leaders, all mounted
on horses, hold
their hats over their hearts. The carving covers more than 1.5 acres
of rock face and rises 400 feet. It is the largest
bas-relief
in the world. It is also the most visited site in Georgia.
William Faulkner published "Absalom, Absalom," his searing
condemnation of slavery and the Old South the same year Mitchell
published "Gone With the Wind."
The hate-filled slave owner and Confederate veteran Thomas Sutpen in
Faulkner's novel, unlike the characters in "Gone With the Wind," is
"demonic evil."
Sutpen, who engages in miscegenation, buys his slaves "with the same
care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses
and mules and
cattle." Faulkner understood "the past is never dead. It's not even
past," that it is subject to constant revision by those seeking to
justify and hide
their crimes. He warned that the lies we tell ourselves about
ourselves lead to moral squalor and self-destruction.
The tour bus stopped at
Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery,
which holds the remains of some 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died in
the Battle of Jonesboro. Most are unidentified. The walkway is laid
out in the shape
of a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag flies at the entrance.
"In 1872, the state of Georgia pays Stephen Cars, a local
cabinetmaker, to rebury the Southern soldiers' remains and place them
in the Patrick Cleburne
Memorial Cemetery here," the audio recording said. "Mr. Cars did not
bury over a thousand soldiers by himself. Mr. Cars had a slave named
Tom who left
with a Yankee captain after the Battle of Jonesboro. When the war was
over, Tom returned to Mr. Cars' house asking for his job back. It was
in 1872 that
Tom and Mr. Stephen Cars reburied the Confederate soldiers in this
cemetery. I told this story to the state of Georgia building authority
years ago, they
oversee the cemetery, and they remarked that Tom was very similar to
the O'Hara slave Big Sam."
The bus paused in front of a 10-room green house built in 1880 that
once belonged to the president of Middle Georgia College.
"Under Reconstruction, five Southerners were not allowed to meet
together without a federal marshal present," Bonner said on the audio
guide. "In 'Gone
With the Wind,' meetings were held in secret. In Jonesboro, there were
those secret meetings that dealt with the issues the town had to deal
with, including
the violence in shantytown. Shantytown was a real location in
Jonesboro and many other cities that had a large population of former
slaves who are without
a job or a home. When this house was being restored in 1995, it was
found to have a secret room in the attic, believed to have been used
for those secret
meetings. There was also a ladder in the wall leading to the cellar.
In the cellar, people believed they had found a tunnel. However, upon
further research,
they found out it was not a tunnel but a bomb shelter where the city
fathers planned to store the county records if and when they got back
to war" (meaning
if and when they resumed the fight against the Union).
It is a safe bet that this house was also a meeting place for the
heavily armed goons of the Ku Klux Klan, who rode four abreast at
night through the Jonesboro
streets to terrorize the blacks in "shantytown." Over 4,000 people
were lynched between the end of the Civil War and World War II in the
United States.
Georgia had the second highest number of lynchings, with 589. Only
Mississippi, with 654 murders, had more.
Lynching was a popular public spectacle in Georgia that could last for
hours and included sadistic torture and mutilation. Children were let
out of school
and workers were given the day off to witness the events. When Sam
Hose, who had thrown his ax at a white man and killed him after the
man pulled a gun
on him, was lynched on April 23, 1899, near Newman, Ga., 1,000 people
attended. Many arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Hose
was stripped
and chained to a tree. His executioners stacked kerosene-soaked logs
around him. They cut off Hose's ears, fingers and genitals. They
flayed his face.
Members of the crowd thrust knives into him. The logs were lit.
"The only sounds that came from the victim's lips, even as his blood
sizzled in the fire, were 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,' " writes Leon
Litwack in "Trouble
in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow." "Before Hose's
body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into
several pieces and
his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over
these souvenirs, and the 'more fortunate possessors' made some
handsome profits on the
sales. (Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents, a piece of liver
'crisply cooked' sold for 10 cents.) Shortly after the lynching, one
of the participants
reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver to the
governor of Georgia a slice of Sam Hose's heart."
On the trunk of a tree near the lynching, a placard read: "We Must
Protect Our Southern Women."
In May of 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, publicly denounced
the lynching of her husband, Hazel "Hayes" Turner, who had been
murdered the day
before. She threatened to take those who lynched him to court. A mob
of several hundred in Valdosta, Ga., hunted her down. They tied the
pregnant woman's
ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her
clothes with gasoline and set her on fire. Someone used a
hog-butchering knife to
rip open her womb. Her baby fell the ground and cried briefly. A
member of the mob crushed the infant's head under the heel of his
boot. Hundreds of rounds
were shot into her body. The Associated Press reported that Mary
Turner had made "unwise remarks" about the lynching of her husband
"and the people, in
their indignation, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude."
In commenting in 1894 on lynchings, the crusading editor and activist
Ida B. Wells said, "[O]ur American Christians are too busy saving the
souls of white
Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones
from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians."
James Baldwin, in the second half of the 20th century, repeatedly
warned white Americans that their relentless refusal to honestly
confront their past,
and themselves, would lead to grotesque distortions of the sort that
decades later we see embodied in Donald Trump. There is a severe cost,
he wrote, for
a life lived as a lie.
"People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have
allowed themselves to become," Baldwin wrote. "And they pay for it
very simply by the
lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these
individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the
generality, as social
and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are
probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any
color, to be found
in the world today."
The first recorded lynching in Georgia took place near Jonesboro in
1880. We have only the name of the victim, Milly Thompson. No one
knows if Thompson
was male or female. There is no record of Thompson committing a crime.
But I suspect that, as in the cases of most lynching victims, the
crime Thompson
committed was the crime of freedom. If you were black, in this land of
gallant cavaliers and Southern belles, and you objected to being human
chattel and
to enforced deference and submission to whites, they killed you.
Chris Hedges
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