Denali: a quick review

The "big scandal" last week was the renaming of an Alaskan mountain to its original name, which, the Right claimed, was an obvious overreach of presidential power and a blatant example of the tyrannical Obama administration desecrating American history!

The rest of the country yawned. Except in Alaska, where they poured another drink and said "About damned time."

The outrage pretty much played itself out almost as quickly as it began, but let's take a quick run-through of the actual facts of the situation.

On Friday, August 28, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell issued the order changing the name to Denali.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) expressed his deep disappointment on Sunday night about the decision. Of course, since he spends every day looking for new things to complain about regarding Obama, nobody really cared.

Another Ohio congresscritter, Rob Portman, whined on Facebook that "This decision by the Administration is yet another example of the President going around Congress." Which is technically correct - it's a job that Congress didn't need to be involved in. The Secretary of the Interior was just making an administrative correction to the record, changing the mountain to the name preferred by the people of that state.

But perhaps you should hear the whole story.

See, the Athabaskan natives who inhabited the area called it Denali, which, loosely translated, meant "that big fucking hill over there." (OK, admittedly a very loose translation.) The Russians, when they owned the area from around the mid 1700s until 1867, called it Большая Гора (Bolshaya Gora) or "Big Mountain" basically the Russian translation of Denali. The Russians left, and it was Denali again (with a brief period as Densmore's Mountain in the late 1880s and early 1890s, after the first English-speaking white man to reach the base of the mountain).

In 1896, a gold prospector named named William Dickey wrote an account in the New York Sun about his travels through Alaska, and took it upon himself to name it "after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of the wonderful wilderness."

(Side note: McKinley was a strong proponent of the gold standard, so it follows that a gold miner would be a big fan.)

William McKinley was elected president the following year. The United States formally recognized the name Mount McKinley after President Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act of February 26, 1917. Which confused the Alaskans, most of whom had been calling it "Denali" all this time.

In his entire life, McKinley never visited Alaska, and in fact, he'd been dead for almost 60 years before it became a state.

In 1975, the Alaskan legislature backed a proposal to switch the name back to Denali. But when the Board on Geographic Names requested public comment on the matter, Ohio Rep. Ralph Regula, who represents the district where McKinley grew up, swiftly came to Mount McKinley’s defense. He convinced the entire Ohio congressional delegation to oppose the recommendation, and the names committee put off the matter. He also added an amendment to the 1980 legislation expanding the national park around the mountain that would rename the park “Denali,” but keep "McKinley" for the peak, in hopes that a compromise would settle the debate.

So basically, it's just Republicans and people from Ohio whining about it. Because apparently, "state's rights" doesn't mean as much in the GOP as it once did.

Bristol Palin, taking a break while waiting to whelp yet another out-of-wedlock child, weighed in to complain "By the way, no one is buying the 'Denali is what the Alaskans have called it for years' line. I’ve never called the mountain Denali... and neither does anyone I know..."

Bristol, permit me to introduce you to someone you might be interested in. Her name is Sarah.

Right about a minute and a half in, Sarah says "Denali, The Great One, soaring under the midnight sun." It's subtle. You might have missed it, particularly if you nodded off like most of us do when your mom starts talking.

Rob Portman (R-OH) took to Facebook to whine "I now urge the Administration to work with me to find alternative ways to preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name."

Well, I'm sure there's an outhouse up there somewhere that could use a name plaque. Because seriously, what the hell business is it of the people of Ohio to try and interfere with a matter internal to Alaska? Send them a statue - I'm sure they'll be happy to mount it in front of the Visitor's Center. Or name something in your own godforsaken state after him.

Once again, our friends in the GOP just started whining as soon as they saw Obama's name. This one fell apart on them pretty quickly, but I'm sure they'll be on to something new soon enough.

Maybe they can complain about the color of Obama's suit again. That one was pretty funny.

Nothing New Under The Sun. Or In Pop Culture.

Do you think memes are something new?

In 1928, a cartoon by Carl Rose, which was captioned by E.B. White (of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web fame), was published in The New Yorker. Broccoli was a new thing on the American plate, having been introduced by Italian immigrants on the East Coast.

The New Yorker was only three years old at that point, and was not as successful as it would be later. (Also, in what might be entirely coincidence, "spinach" was a term in 19th Century England for "nonsense.")

For whatever reason, the phrase caught on: "I say it's spinach" came to mean "to hell with it," and eventually "spinach" came to mean something worthless. Elizabeth Hawes, for example, titled her 1938 autobiographical exposé of the fashion industry, for example, Fashion is Spinach.

Alexander Woolcott used the phrase in 1934's While Rome Burns ("I do not myself so regard it. I say it's spinach.") S.J. Perelman was an American humorist who wrote (among other things) two Marx Brothers movies (Monkey Business and Horse Feathers) and, in 1958, a TV version of Aladdin with music by Cole Porter; he wrote a story in 1944 for the Saturday Evening Post called "Dental or Mental, I Say It’s Spinach."

Speaking of Cole Porter, other musicians used the phrase, too.

As with most immigrants, Israel Isidore Baline (better known as Irving Berlin) felt he needed to be more American (and more patriotic) than anybody around him. (It's pretty common with a person "born-again" into any subculture - religious, societal, or any other coherent group.) His way of doing that was to be more in touch with popular culture than anybody else. So he wrote songs that reflected "the common man" - many of them, we would now consider racist (but that was very common in America at the time).

In 1932, Berlin was already a successful musician, when he wrote the musical Face the Music. (That wasn't redundant. Shut up!) In it, he included the song "I Say It's Spinach (And The Hell With It)."


The lyrics start at 1:14, if you're in a hurry.

Also, despite the impression you get from the video, the first Popeye cartoon was made by Fleischer Studios a year after this song was recorded, in 1933. And at the end of the song, the Popeye-like voice is by a man named Poley McClintock. He'd been using the low, croaky voice on records since 1927; some people have suggested that voice actor William (Billy) Costello based the voice of Popeye on McClintock.

So, even without the internet, a single meme could find a place in the popular culture of America before parts of the country even had running water.

Are Democrats racist?

Wandering around the conservative end of the internet, every so often I'll slam up against the phrase "the Democrat Party is the most racist!" Usually misspelled, and often in all-caps.

It's easy to refute, but you end up knocking down the same arguments, over and over. For example:

The Democrats are the Party of the Klan

Now, it's true that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Democrat even before he set up the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (there have been three, if you're curious). And it's also true that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican when he was first elected.

(Fun fact: Lincoln left the Republican Party at the end of his first term. Republicans are rarely aware of that: for his second term, Lincoln created the National Union Party, a coalition party made up of both Republicans and Democrats.)

But here's the thing: at that point in time, the Republican Party was liberal, and the Democratic Party was conservative. (This fact particularly angers the Teabaggers, who've been brainwashed to think that liberalism is synonymous with "evil.") And from the Civil War to about 1950, the Southern Democrats (sometimes called "Dixiecrats") were among the most conservative (and usually racist) people in America.

In 1948, though, Truman, as the Democratic candidate, put forward a very mild civil rights platform, and that was too much for the Southern Democrats: 35 of them walked out of the Democratic National Convention, and they split off into their own political party, called the States Rights Democratic Party (a.k.a. "Dixiecrats," a term which has been used ever since for hyper-conservative Southern Democrats).

The Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond for president, and actually managed to carry four states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina) along with one stray electoral vote from Tennessee. (Incidentally, that, plus the 39 electoral votes drained from Truman by Progressive Party nominee Henry A. Wallace, was expected to have produced a Republican victory, which is why we have the most famous newspaper flub of all time.)

The Dixiecrats never ran another presidential candidate, and eventually the party dissolved. And following that victory, the liberal Democrats became a stronger and stronger force in the party, eventually reversing the formerly conservative platforms, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This same action, of course, drew the Republican Party to the right, in an effort to pick up the disillusioned Southern Democrats.

Following the 1964 Civil Rights act, LBJ famously said “I think we just lost the South,” which would prove to be remarkably prescient: in the late Sixties, Richard Nixon, with the help of his advisor Pat Buchanan, devised the "Southern Strategy," using dog-whistle racist terms (example: "states' rights" - the states would have the "right" to ignore these new civil rights laws).

In 1980, Ronald Reagan (working with Nixon's advisor Pat Buchanan) further honed the "Southern Strategy." In fact, it was another of his aides, Lee Atwater, who famously spilled the beans years later, thinking he was speaking off the record to a reporter.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

And that's where the Republican myth of the "racist Democrats" comes from: the Dixiecrats, and the changing face of the Democratic party. Back when Democrats were the conservative party, they were, in fact, racist; in swinging to the left, they also became the party of racial equality. To the point that, yes, the Ku Klux Klan may have been founded by Democrats, but these days, while not every Republican is in the KKK, almost every Klansman votes Republican.

__________________

Edit: (12/6/14) Corrected "North Carolina" to "South Carolina," with apologies to any North Carolinian in the audience.

Number One with a Bullet

The slavering ammosexuals have been making some headlines lately, with their "open carry" protests and mindless claims that "Obama's going to take our guns!" (Despite, you know, the lack of a single gun-control measure to emerge from this administration since he came into office.)

Here's the thing: the NRA-fellators get sweaty and start spewing spittle if you point out that the Holy Second Amendment has an opening clause that's just getting ignored.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

A simple grammatical test will tell you that the first half of that sentence defines why the second half exists. You have the right to own guns because the country needs a well-regulated militia.

(If you want context, the Founding Fathers didn't believe in a standing army - they knew that the fledgling country couldn't afford one, and they also believed that having an army around was how tyrants stayed in power. That's why Article 1 of the Constitution limits the army to a 2-year lifespan.

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years

(Weirdly, no such restriction on funding the Navy - our Founding Fathers loved their boats: rum, sodomy and the lash - you know how it is.)

The NRA used to understand this, but that day is gone. The modern NRA is a lobbying group supporting, not the people, but the weapons manufacturers. The only right they support now is the unrestricted sale of firearms, but it wasn't always thus.

The first president of the NRA, back in 1871, was former Gen. Ambrose Burnside (he of the famous facial hair), and he acted as a symbol of the "civilian militia" concept. One of the first actions of the NRA was convincing New York State to build them a firing range to promote marksmanship. Through the decades, the NRA helped various state and federal legislatures write gun control legislation.

In 1938, NRA President Karl T. Frederick (lawyer and Olympic gold-medalist for marksmanship) spoke in support of gun control laws before Congress. "I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. ... I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

Now, in the Sixties, there was this thing they called "the Civil Rights movement." Blacks were tired of getting lynched, attacked, and occasionally beaten by the police. They started patrolling the streets on the "black side of town," carrying rifles, as a means of "policing the police." As Malcolm X put it:

I must say this concerning the great controversy over rifles and shotguns. The only thing that I've ever said is that in areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it’s time for Negroes to defend themselves.

Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun. It is constitutionally legal to own a shotgun or a rifle. This doesn't mean you’re going to get a rifle and form battalions and go out looking for white folks, although you’d be within your rights — I mean, you’d be justified; but that would be illegal and we don’t do anything illegal.

Then, in 1967, in California, the NRA assisted California Assemblyman Don Mulford in writing the "Mulford Act," which would prohibit carrying of loaded firearms in public. While it was being debated, the Black Panthers staged a protest, where they walked into the California State House, openly carrying guns.

That strategy backfired on them just a little, as it ended debate quickly, and the bill (soon to be part of the California penal code) was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan.

In fact, Reagan, having been reminded that black people were allowed to carry guns too, explained to reporters "There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."

So, apparently, that's what we need. In order to get some sort of reasonable gun control passed, we have to organize and arm brown people. Let's have black people wearing berets, walking the streets with semi-automatic weapons. Let's have armed Muslims outside of mosques, and keeping their neighborhoods safe.

Hell, let's have armed Sikh patrols, too! The beards and turbans already freak some people out.

We'd have the Second Amendment repealed within a month.

McRussia

The 31st of January dawned cold but clear in Moscow in 1990. It had been two years since the Communist Party had given their permission to open the first McDonalds in the former Soviet Union. Located in Moscow's Pushkin Square, the largest McDonalds restaurant had 28 cash registers and seating capacity for around 700 people.

That capacity was quickly exceeded, as people stood in line for up to six hours for their first taste of Western fast food. The Moscow restaurant broke a record for first-day sales for any McDonalds in the world - they served 30,000 people that day alone.



They remain popular in Russia almost 25 years later: McDonalds controls 70% of the Russian fast-food market, and the flagship store in Pushkin Square still serves 20,000 people per day. Ironically, it wasn't the American headquarters of the McDonalds Corporation which had pushed the new branch of the franchise. It was the head of McDonalds Canada, George Cohen, who had opened the twelve-year-long negotiations with the Soviet Union.

But within 8 months of the first McDonalds restaurant opening, the Berlin Wall fell. And within two years, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Ronald Reagan toppled the USSR, you can tell them that, no, it was Ronald McDonald that killed the bear.

Who remembers Nicaragua?

So, on Face the Nation this weekend, Peggy Noonan called New York mayor Bill De Blasio a "Sandinista" – she tried to walk it back almost immediately, as soon as the host called her on it.



But, you know, it's a funny thing: that idea seems to be the latest right wing talking point. In November, Rush Limbaugh called De Blasio a Sandinista and a communist, as did the pundits on Fox "News."

So let’s be clear what’s going on here: the right wing is assuming (perhaps justifiably, considering how they’ve destroyed education) that nobody knows who the Sandinistas were. But before we get to them, the first thing you should know is that the Somoza family ran Nicaragua for 43 years (either directly or through puppets); they were wonderful guys, who kept power through assassination and torture; their relations with the US finally fell apart finally when the Nicaraguan National Guard was caught on tape gunning down ABC reporter Bill Stewart (and his translator Juan Espinoza) in early 1979.

In 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza regime by force: the only way possible when faced with a tyrant, with a secret police force and a prison full of anyone who spoke out against them. In 1988, Bill De Blasio traveled to Nicaragua, and came away with admiration for what the Sandinistas were accomplishing to help their people.

And, admittedly, the Sandinistas got a little repressive later on - mostly in order to fight the Contras (more on them later), but never, by any stretch of the imagination, did they get as bad as the government they replaced.

But Peggy Noonan was speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, who supported the Somoza regime. This was not surprising, because Reagan had this habit of supporting murderous thugs around the world, like the Taliban, the racist government of South Africa and their policy of apartheid, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and many others. Essentially, it wouldn't matter how many of his own people a dictator killed or tortured: if they bought their guns from the US instead of the USSR, Reagan liked them. He was friendly that way.

In fact, one of the most memorable acts of the Reagan administration (you might have heard of it) was when they quietly sold arms to Iran (the same country that had just recently taken over their American embassy), and funneled the money to a terrorist organization called the Contras.

Remember the Contras? They opposed the Sandinista government. And they showed their opposition through the gentle, humanitarian tactics of rape, murder, destruction of entire towns, kidnapping, blowing up health care clinics, and targeting doctors for assassination. You know, just good, clean fun; these were the people Reagan supported.

So, let's draw a few lines: Peggy Noonan worked for Reagan, who supported the Contras, who were opposed to the Sandinistas. So I guess it's understandable that Noonan might think badly of the Sandinistas, as well.

Because she, too, apparently loves murderous thugs and hates freedom. At least, that’s the impression I get. Can anybody explain what it is that I might be misunderstanding?

Godwin's Law Redux

There is a constant drumbeat from the right comparing Obama to Hitler. I mean, let's ignore the fact that Obama's signature legislation is a method to ensure that everybody can go to a hospital when they're sick without ending up living out of their car. Because that's exactly the same as slaughtering six million Jews and attempting to take over Europe in a bloody campaign of destruction.

Yeah, let's ignore that. Instead, let's ask ourselves why every single time that somebody disagrees with a politician, it's become de rigueur to compare them to Hitler? Why is the litmus test for political arguments the ability to reduce your enemy to the level of the worst dictator in history? Last week, I pointed out an unintentional violation of Godwin's Law, but let's consider the issue a little, shall we?

Following World War One, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty included Article 231, which is commonly called "the guilt clause":

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

Using this as a legal basis, Germany was forced to pay reparations to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, Germany didn't think they'd lost the war - the German High Command told their citizens that the Army had never been beaten in the field, and the defeat was actually due to actions by civilians, particularly Jews, Socialists and Communists (the Dolchstosslegende, or "Stabbed-in-the-Back Legend").

That's right - Hitler didn't start the rumor that Jews were destroying the economy. Antisemitism was well-established in the German culture long before he was born.

So the Weimar Republic resisted the reparations, and defaulted on payments quite frequently. The French and Belgians, realizing that the Germans were able to pay and simply weren't, eventually invaded and occupied the Ruhr valley, which was the center of coal, iron and steel production in Germany.

Take this reduction in raw materials for the Germans and the resulting reduction in cash-flow, and add to it the fact that the German government funded a passive resistance movement among the citizens of the Ruhr by simply printing more money. This led to the famed hyper-inflation of post-WWI Germany.

Technically, the inflation started when the Kaiser decided to fund WWI by borrowing money instead of taxing his people and using his own fortune: the value of the German mark fell from 4 to 9 per US dollar. But the war ended in 1919; by November 1923, the American dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. Or in more concrete terms, in 1919 a loaf of bread cost 1 mark; by 1923, a loaf of bread cost 100 billion marks.

This was the situation when Adolph Hitler rose into power. During the course of his leadership, he brought his people back from the brink of ruin and ensured they could eat.

People want for life to be simple. They want their enemies to wholly evil, so that there's no question that "destroying them" is a bad thing. The reductive power of the human mind wants those we disagree with to have no redeeming features. Homophobes want gays to practice pedophilia and beastiality. Radical conservatives want liberals to be fascists and totalitarian dictators. Radical liberals want conservatives to be inhuman monsters who laugh as children starve in the streets.

The reality is that people are more complex than that. But to see that, to understand the forces that drive someone, is to understand that perhaps evil is not something simple. Perhaps evil and good are in all of us. That bad things are done by good people, and good things are done by bad people, and the world isn't the simple place we want it to be.

Would you like to see the most frightening picture of Adolph Hitler ever taken?

Hitler, holding hands with a little girl and walking in a park. Hitler loved children. He loved animals: he was a confirmed vegetarian and was opposed to vivisection.

Were you aware that Eva Braun took home movies?


Hitler was a human being. It challenges your worldview: he should be a monster, pounding on desks and ordering people to their deaths. But he lived, he loved, he laughed, he played with children.

He also destroyed much of Europe, threw the world into war, and established concentration camps where 11 million people were killed.

Perhaps "good" and "evil" aren't the simple concepts that some people want them to be.

Columbus

Were you aware that there is a movement to rename Columbus Day "Exploration Day"? It's true: a general celebration of exploration, rather than the glorification of just one man.

First celebrated nationally in 1937, Columbus Day pays homage to Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas. It is, needless to say, viewed very differently by different groups of Americans. Some people forget it's a holiday at all. Some Italian Americans see it as a point of cultural pride. Other people — especially Native Americans — point out that Columbus personally oversaw the murder and enslavement of thousands and see the holiday as an intrinsically cruel celebration of the beginning of a massive genocide and generations of oppression.

Christopher Columbus, much like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson after him, is a widely mythologized figure, remembered in song and story for having discovered America, thereby proving once and for all that the world was round.

Thanks to the miracle of the American educational system, that's pretty much all most Americans know about the story. It also happens to be complete crap.

First of all (and this argument is actually known by most Americans), how could he have "discovered" America when the Native Americans were already there? Or when the Vikings were in Greenland, and possibly points south, from the tenth century through the mid-fifteenth century?

(There's also the theory that Chinese Admiral Zheng He discovered America in 1421, but that's been mostly debunked - Zheng He [a.k.a. "Cheng Ho"] stuck primarily to known trade routes, and visited India, the Middle East and Africa, the islands around them, and some various stops in Asia.)

On top of which, the people of Europe were well aware that the world was round: Aristotle had proven that in the 4th Century BC.

You might also think that Queen Isabella of Spain gave him her jewels to fund the trip: actually, she turned him down. It was King Ferdinand who overruled her and paid for half the expedition; the other half was financed by Italian investors who Columbus had lined up.

What were the names of his ships? The Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, right? Well, that's not even entirely accurate: the Santa Clara was nicknamed Niña ("Girl") because her owner was named Juan Nino of Moguer.

A lot of the mythology comes from Washington Irving, who, in 1828, wrote "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which actual scholars have called "fanciful and sentimental." (Really? The guy who wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" might have an active imagination?)

Columbus never set foot in North America: after his first voyage (he had four), he was named Viceroy and Governor of the Indies (which as far as he was concerned, was mostly Hispaniola), and he poked around in the adjoining islands, which included Cuba; his third voyage touched down briefly on the north-east corner of South America, and on his fourth voyage, he actually explored part of the Central American coast.

But he wasn't a particularly good or moral man. He tortured, killed and enslaved the local people; when the native Taino people of Hispaniola revolted at their treatment and killed the men left there as a colony from the first expedition, Columbus demanded a quarterly tribute in gold and cotton. Anyone over the age of 14 who didn't deliver had their hands cut off and was left to bleed to death.

He and his men frequently kidnapped and raped the native women. One of Columbus' childhood friends, Michele da Cuneo, wrote about one such incident this way:

While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked - as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But - to cut a long story short - I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.

After his third voyage, some of his sailors revolted, claiming he'd lied to them about the wealth they'd be able to find in the New World (which, by the way, Columbus was still saying was the Orient); that, plus continued reports of his treatment of the natives, caused the Spanish Crown to order his arrest and return to Spain.

He only spent six weeks in prison before the crown ordered his release; after all, he'd paid back his debt, and more, in gold and slaves. He was allowed to make one more expedition, with the Santa Maria and three smaller ships. All four were destroyed, and Columbus and his men were stranded on Jamaica for a year before they were rescued. (The new governor on Hispaniola hated Columbus, and refused to allow any of his ships to rescue them.)

He returned to Spain, where he lived out his last two years of life. He tried to get the Spanish Crown to pay him 10% of all profits from the New World, as they'd agreed before his first voyage, but since he'd been relieved of his duties as governor, Spain didn't feel they needed to pay him. (The lawsuits filed by his heirs because of this lasted through the end of the 18th century.)

So Columbus opened the Americas to European settlement, and made Spain the preeminent power in the area for many years; he also managed to bring one other thing back, along with gold and slaves: he introduced syphilis to Europe. The initial outbreak is thought to have killed more than five million Europeans.

Why Does The GOP Love Mitt Romney?

I've been trying to figure out why the Republican party nominated Mitt Romney as their candidate for president. They spent 2004 castigating John Kerry as a "flip-flopper," but now they want to elect someone who has literally reversed himself on every single issue.



But then it hit me. There's no way that they couldn't love Mittens. He's one of them.

The right wing has spent years trying to claim how much they dislike the "liberal elite," so it's somewhat ironic that their 2012 presidential candidate is a Harvard lawyer and multi-millionaire with four houses and a freaking elevator for his cars. But it's understandable, because, just like Mitt, the GOP has managed to reverse themselves on almost every policy they ever supported.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves; admittedly, he left the Republican party (like any reasonable person would), but he did it. In fact, the party was founded six years before the Civil War by anti-slavery activists and "modernists." Despite having that history to act as guide and beacon for their moral compass, the GOP has opened their arms and embraced every bigoted pinhead out there.

Those of us who wander the dark side of the Internet are treated to a daily flood of images of Obama as a monkey or an African witchdoctor, watermelons grown on the White House lawn, variations on "can we still call it the White House?" and every other racist stereotype they can dredge up.

Do you want to see how ugly it can get out there? Turn Safesearch off and google "Obama nigger." (But trust me, that's not a nice place to spend any amount of time.)

Have you heard the Republican position on unions lately? With all their assaults on collective bargain and worker's rights, it's sometimes hard to recall that the GOP once embraced unionization as an important step towards strengthening the middle class.

Back in the day when the Republican party still supported the ideals of the "common man" over the aspirations of the super-rich, they knew that only by organizing and acting in groups, could the poor gain any influence in negotiations with the wealthy.

Admittedly, they still know that: they just don't think it's a good idea any more.

As Reagan put it, "where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." What, you don't believe me? Honest, he said it!


Despite their current efforts to do away with environmental protection and their mantra of "Drill, baby, drill!", the Republican Party used to consist of ardent conservationists like President Teddy Roosevelt, whose policies led to the creation of the National Park Service. And though they don't like to talk about him, Richard Nixon was a Republican, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency.

They've always been a little bit prudish. On October 28, 1919, a Republican-controlled Congress overrode the veto of President Woodrow Wilson (of the Progressive Party), and passed the Volstead Act, banning alcohol and bringing us Prohibition. Also, it was Edwin Meese, Attorney General for Ronald Reagan who created the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, which succeeded in getting magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse removed from convenience store shelves.

Yet despite this continuing drumbeat of "family values," it's the traditionally "red" states that consume the most pornography; at their national conventions, strippers prefer Republicans, who outspend Democrats three to one. Republican Congressmen hold a solid lead over Democrats in number of sex scandals, as well.

The GOP likes to claim that they support the concept of smaller government, but if that's so, why does every Republican president increase the number of government employees, while every Democratic president reduces them?

This is not the Republican Party of your father. (Nor of mine, although he's most likely going to vote for them.) But overall, on issue after issue, the GOP shows why they support a hypocritical, lying gasbag who can't keep a consistent position as their candidate. He's what they aspire to be.

Pérák, the two Jiří's and the Nazis

No politics today. It isn't always about politics.

I was randomly hopping around the internet this morning, just following links as I ate breakfast, and happened across a blog (Monkey Muck - I'm not even clear what led me to it, but somebody out there linked to him), where he'd dug up a little piece of animation history.

It was May, 1945. The Germans, who hadn't run a particularly peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia to begin with, had gotten their noses bloody in the Prague Uprising, which ended in a stalemate, and both sides declared a ceasefire that lasted all of a day before the Soviet troops rolled through the country two days after "Victory in Europe Day," expelling the last of the Nazi troops.

(Yes, that's a simplified look at a long, bloody struggle. There was also no way that the people of Czechoslovakia could know about the ensuing weirdness of the next almost-half-a-century. That's just the least you need to know for perspective.)

Very few people in the West have heard of Jiří Brdečka, but he was a writer and illustrator (you might have heard of Limonádový Joe ("Lemonade Joe"), a series of short stories (occasionally gathered into book form and later adapted as a play), which was made into a movie in 1964, a parody of old-time westerns which reputedly numbered Henry Fonda among its fans and was considered something of a cult classic among Czechs for many years.

(Proponents of the run-on sentence regard me as a master of the craft.)

I'm not sure when they first met, but after the war ended, Brdečka got together with Jiří Trnka (an illustrator and puppeteer), and they would later set up Studio Bratři v triku, the leading producer of Czech animation for decades. The studio logo shows three boys, possibly a reference to the two Jiří's and Eduard Hofman, a writer/director they worked with.

(Bratři v triku is commonly translated as "Brothers in T-shirts," possibly because of the logo. But technically, it's "Brothers in Tricks," and "tricks" (or "trick films") was also a term used to refer to animation at the time. God, I love trivia.)

Of the two Jiří's, I think Jiří Trnka is the more interesting. Considered the founding father of Czech animation, he had worked as a illustrator for Melantrich, a Czech-language publishing house in Prague (named after yet a third Jiří, a Czech Renaissance printer named Jiří Melantrich of Aventino).

As a child, Trnka had carved and sculpted puppets out of wood, to stage shows for his friends. Later, around the same time that he was hired by Melantrich, he started a puppet theater, which closed down with the start of WWII. And later in life, when he found himself uncomfortable with traditional animation, Trnka changed his focus to the medium which gained him some measure of world-wide fame, animated puppetry, mostly stop-motion.

He's been called the "Walt Disney Of The East, although where Disney made films for children and families, Trnka aimed his work at an adult audience.

But this work is before all that. The war had ended, the country was trying to rebuild, and the two Jiří's had gotten together to fill a niche that few other people were considering: animation.

Without a studio, without much backing, they produced a handful of short films together as an experiment, and one of them was Pérák a SS (alternately translated as "Perak and the SS," "The Springman and the SS," and occasionally "The Chimney Sweep").



Pérák the Spring Man was an folktale in WWII Prague, a man who could... well, he could jump. Over trains, walls and small buildings. Much like Victorian England's Spring-Heel Jack (only without the varying descriptions making him into a monster, with burning red eyes, fangs, wings, or whatever). Pérák was just a man. Who jumped.

Czech media would later often retcon him into a superhero, but he started out as just an urban legend of a bouncy guy, who sprang out of alleys and startled people. (It was a simpler time.)

The cartoon was easily on a par with other animated shorts of the period (it was 15 years after Steamboat Willie, and it didn't have a lush feel of Max Fleischer's later work, but aside from the black and white nature of Pérák, compare it even to the current output on Cartoon Network, or any of the 700 Disney channels). And it managed to combine the resentment of a conquered people to their oppressors, with the light-hearted, somewhat fantastical world of the animated Everyman.

(Yes, I can do "pedantic" when I want to. I just don't feel like it too often.)

All in all, it's a cute piece of history that definitely deserves a wider audience.

To the Wayback Machine!

Maybe this is how we should teach history.



(Do I need to warn you that there might be some bad language? Or have you figured that out about me already?)

(That statement was merely a warning of potentially inflammatory commentary, and not meant to imply ownership or creation of this video.)

Memes from the Wingnuts

A very common attitude among the right-wing websites is a dismissive attitude about anyone who points out when the economy went to hell - "Oh, you can't stop blaming Bush, can you?" The term "all Bush's fault" is often used as a perjorative to indicate someone is blindly liberal, and is particularly common in the comments.

This is a meme they've been trying to push since January 21, 2010: scorn for anyone who suggests that Bush might have been involved in tanking the economy. Even though Bush isn't particularly popular among conservatives, it's difficult for them to let go.

After a decade (or more) of upper echelon conservatism pushing for a united front (even against all logic), it's hard to break ranks and argue against core positions. So they continue to make excuses and avert their eyes.

It's all about core positions: if Bush was wrong about the tax cuts for the rich, then the tax cuts should end. But if tax cuts created jobs, Bush would have had record low unemployment, instead of hemorrhaging jobs. If deregulation was a good idea, then the free market would fix itself, instead of collapsing.

To admit Bush was wrong, conservatives have to admit they were wrong. So, instead, the idea is treated with scorn, in the hopes that it will go away.

But sadly for them, it hasn't worked:

...the American public isn’t blaming Obama for the current economy, with more than six in 10 respondents still saying he inherited the country’s economic problems from his Oval Office predecessor.

Also, while a combined 47 percent believe George W. Bush and his administration are "solely responsible" or "mainly responsible" for the current economy, just 34 percent in the poll say the same of Obama and his administration.

It's very sad. All that work, for nothing.

Meanwhile, this dates back to the inauguration, but it fits.

America - Fuck Yeah!

You know, there are people out there who don't understand what it means to be an American!

I mean, you know what we learned today? That secret prisons where people got waterboarded led us to Osama!!!

Yeah! Waterboarding worked! How about that, libs? We got actionable intelligence by torturing somebody! Awesome, right?

I mean, yeah, there's this guy, Mohammed Basardah. He talked. He spilled all kinds of names and locations and everything else. They couldn't shut him up, he talked so much. They rounded up all kinds of people based on what he said. He gave them so much intel, they let him go out of gratitude for the help.

But, I mean, that's where it gets funny, right? Because Basrdah turns out to be just a small-time pot dealer in Mecca. He made up all this stuff, and threw in some names of people he didn't like, or that he'd heard of, or just fake names. So we round up all these people, and they have no idea what's going on, right? But we have "actionable intelligence" saying that they DO know, right?

So, they act like they don't know anything, and do we have a choice? Hell, no! We have to waterboard them to get the truth out! I mean, yeah, they don't know what the "truth" is, because it's just stuff Basardah made up, right?

But that's what's so funny!

Same thing with these people that the Pakistani tribes sold to us - they were just passing through, but we were offering thousands of dollars in bounties! What could the tribesmen do? How could they resist that kind of money? So they sold us tourists - can you blame them?

Now, we have these people in custody, and they claim they're innocent, right? As if! So we have to waterboard them, or chain them up, or do the sleep deprivation thing, until they answer us, right? I mean, do we have a choice?

You know, looking back, maybe there are some hippies who'll try to claim that when we torture innocent people, we might be making another generation of people who will stop at nothing to kill us. But what do they know, right?

Because we're Americans, motherfucker! We do what's right! Even if it seems like it's wrong! I mean, this is what we have got to do, right?

Right?

...right?

Connect the dots

So, let me see if I've got this straight. 100 years ago today, in lower Manhattan, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people (a third of the people working in the building) who couldn't escape a ten-story factory because the owners, in an effort to prevent theft, had locked the exit doors.

Because there were no unions to protect their rights or ensure workplace safety, the employees who died were often underage, worked twelve to sixteen hour days, six days a week, and earned less than $2 a day.

Out of that two dollars, they had to pay the owners for the needles, thread and electricity they needed to do their jobs. And they could be fired for any reason, including missing a day of work or talking to the person working next to them. Or joining a union.

In fact, unions were under assault. Literally: with clubs, knives, guns and dogs - until a quarter of a century later, when the Wagner Act was passed, supporting unions and collective bargaining.

Oh, and 15 years before the fire, the National Guard was sent into the Homestead Steel Works to break up a strike by steelworkers. Just so you know.

But, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. That was 100 years ago today. Happy Birthday.

One hundred days ago today, a fire in a Bangladesh sweatshop killed dozens of people and injured over a hundred more. To prevent theft, the doors had been padlocked shut by the owners,

That was, as I said, 100 days ago today.

The workers in Bangladesh are among the lowest-paid in the world, and frequently die because of workplace safety, which isn't enforced by anyone. Like, say, a union.

This was one of two manufacturing plants run by the Hameem Group, who makes clothing for the Gap, Wrangler, JC Penney, Target, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Osh Kosh B'Gosh.

Oshkosh B'Gosh. Founded in 1895 - three years after the Homestead Steel Strike. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Last month in Wisconsin (85 miles southwest of Oshkosh), Governor Scott Walker was mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard, in case unions protested his attempts to destroy collective bargaining rights. In the course of the next few weeks, that same Governor Walker, outraged because striking workers were occupying his Imperial Palace the Wisconsin State Capital Building, had doors locked and windows bolted shut to keep strikers from getting food.

Initial reports that the windows were welded shut proved to be merely rumors. There are, however, pictures of the new bolts preventing the windows from opening.

So, locking people inside a building with a sporadic record of safety inspections. Because he's trying to bust unions.

Quick test: what have we learned in the last century?
A. Jack.
B. Shit.