#33: The Assault on National Identity

To this day, I still have the image of an armor suited Balboa, his hand up shielding his eyes, looking out over a huge, sunlight expanse of blue ocean and saying, “I think I’ll call it ‘the Pacific’.” The image comes from the history primer I had at P.S. 28 in the Bronx back in the early 1950s. I also remember saluting the American flag and reciting the pledge of allegiance, and singing such songs as ‘the Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘America the Beautiful.” Of course, we also learned not only about George Washington and the cherry tree, but also about Abraham Lincoln, “Honest Abe,” his emancipation of the slaves, and, believe it or not, about George Washington Carver and his peanuts. In general, patriotism wasn’t exactly in, it was more assumed. I quite liked it as a child, still do.

I now know that it’s unlikely that Balboa actually said what was written in quotations marks under the picture in the primer, and certainly he didn’t say it in colloquial early 1950s English. He probably wasn’t even shielding his eyes in just that way. George apparently didn’t chop down the cherry tree. I learned a lot of things that may not have been true or, at best, only half true. Maybe Stonewall Jackson wasn’t exactly as he was represented, nor Daniel Boone, nor William Travis, nor James Bowie. Maybe even the battle at the Alamo was not as we learned it back then. It’s possible. But to be honest, I don’t care. But apparently others do.

I don’t think my life was damaged in any way by my having been taught these things; I actually think it was enhanced. But there are others who do not share this view. I have just read that there is a quite general movement afoot across the United States in the grade schools to “correct” the teaching of history to children. Right now, it is Christopher Columbus who is the target of the “correctors.” While these “correctors,” for example, charge Columbus and his crew with bringing smallpox to the “new world,” they fail to point out that he very likely also brought syphilis to Europe from the “new world”. Apparently, they are so committed to “truth in history” that a special focus on the faults of all American heroes is now necessary, though their virtues are of little or no interest. In all fairness, however, I should add that this rule has its exceptions. Some notable ones are Abraham Lincoln, F.D.R., all of the Kennedys, and, of course, Martin Luther King, who are astonishingly clean and free of flaws. All the others, though, need to be (politically) “corrected”. God forbid that American children should grow up believing that the founding fathers were indeed great men! This one had slaves (duh! What a surprise that is – it was the late 18^th C), that one had a mistress, that one fathered an illegitimate child. They were no heroes, they were flawed and evil. But, worst of all, they were WHITE MALES and we all know what that means! And the America they created is equally flawed and evil, and it is all because of those damn WHITE MALES. If there is anything good at all in this terrible country, it is because throughout it’s evil history there were also (abused and marginalized always) people of color and women and the little children. Whew! If it weren’t for that, we’d really be doomed and double-damned now. Thank God (whoops, sorry, Thank the Ecosystem) that we have the people of color, the women, and the little children to save us. But wait! Those little children are the future, and some of them at least potentially male (though their “sexual orientation” remains for them to choose!). Those little children have to be told the truth about their history. But why? Apparently, the teachers of our schools have found a sudden appetite for history that is “true.”

The “true history” explanation is not very persuasive. First, it makes very little difference in the life of a little boy if he believes falsely that Washington was a wise heroic visionary. I actually still believe that he was, false wooden teeth and all! And, second, the same ones who would push these desperately important “truths” onto the little children are those who also have maintained, when that was convenient, that there really isn’t any historical truth at all – that history is the narrative chosen by “the victors” (that’s code, by the way, for … er ... White Men!). So what’s really on the agenda, eh?

I don’t think it’s a mystery. The objective is to erode the sense of national pride, to undermine the foundations of a national identity. A nation is united and unified by a common language, a common iconography, and a common fund of stories, a common and commonly accepted mythology. All of these have come under attack.

Arguably, the earliest signs of this movement came with the introduction of the idea of a universal international language: Esperanto way back in the late 19^th c. It’s expressed intention was to foster the brotherhood of man. Very nice, but it also would have had the effect of removing one piece of nationalist glue. In more recent times, American blacks have tried to argue that their “dialect” is itself a language and should be taught and used in schools: Ebonics. And now it is quite common to hear of the U.S.A. becoming a bi-lingual country with Spanish as the second tongue. Anything at all, as long as it serves to further tear the fabric of the nation.

And what are the icons? They come mostly from Christianity. It was Christians who made the country in every way. It was Christians who invented, who conceived, who fought for and defended the country. Every day we hear the legaloids, the “intellectuals” practicing anti-Christianity under the guise of an even-handed assault on “religion.” But there is no equivalent assault on the religion causing the real havoc of our time. I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t Buddhism! No, the only assault is on the religion that has most matured through the centuries. But other icons include the media figures of the twentieth century who have to varying degrees been adopted as symbols of the nation.

The American cultural narrative has been consistently under attack by the mass media, ranging from the majority of Hollywood producers through to the news-as-entertainment shows. And some would claim that the “serious” news shows hosted by the likes of Jim Lehrer are not entertainment – I would beg to differ! Those shows cater to the semi-literate liberal middle class who watch them for what I would call “flattertainement” – while they watch those shows, all their critical faculties go into a numbed stupor as they allow a moist warm flow of sanctimony, sophistication, and superiority wash over them. The Left wing television news “intellectuals” have the American equivalent of the caché of royalty for the liberals of the two coasts. Like royalty, just their bare attention flatters the recipients. It is to vomit.

This attack on children’s history is only the latest blow in the assault. It was not so long ago there was the hullabaloo about Jefferson fathering a child by one of his slaves. Columbus had already been assaulted numerous times in the past: he was not the first one to “find” America, he was not a nice man, he brought smallpox, he did this, he did that. Blah, blah, blah. The Iwo Jima photograph was staged and the poor Indian in it, Ira Hayes, died a drunk. Oh, and Truman was a bastard, he dropped the bombs. Churchill was a son-of-a-bitch, he carpet-bombed the Germans. And we don’t like Thanksgiving, it celebrates the abuse of Aboriginal Peoples, Halloween is demeaning to children, Christmas is just a pagan holiday under a new name, and by the way, there’s no Santa Claus. An excellent example of this trend in the movies (I avoid the pretentious term “cinema”) was the ecstatically received “Broke Back Mountain” in which those mythological heroes of twentieth century America, the “cowboys” of the West were “outed.” Yes, the Leftoids chortled gleefully, yes, yes, yes! Those heroes you worshipped, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and many, many others, they could have been queer! And, and, and … some of them were! Yeah, that’s the ticket, the actors, they were QUEER. And you thought they were so manly. Take that, America! Queer, queer, queer!

One can easily see the Left’s adulation of homosexuals as part and parcel of this process. Bringing down America means bringing down the actual builders of this country, and those builders, apologies to Betsy Ross and Laura Secord, were men. So, just as the Left beavers away at finding the warts on the Founding Fathers, undermining them and undermining their achievements, they seek to undermine the male ideal that was admired and so often exemplified in the heroes of the American past. Just as they want to say that the Columbus we celebrate is a fiction, the Washington we celebrate a fiction, the Cowboys we celebrate are sometimes also fictions: they are not the men we thought they were: they were actually gay. And, they love to continue leeringly, neither were those other men so many admired as manly: Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, and so on, and so on.

America has a powerful culture that was invented by a most remarkable assembly of men. That culture is expressed in a set of remarkable documents dating from the time of the revolution: the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and, perhaps it could be argued, at a much lesser level, the Federalist Papers. The statesmen of those times have rarely been equaled, never surpassed. The closest anyone has come to their stature was Winston Churchill. That initial foundational culture has acquired layers of rich additional material through the many decades it has now been in existence. It includes Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, ragtime piano, the songs of Stephen Foster, the novels of Herman Melville and Washington Irving, among countless others. But it also now includes the entire narrative of the American West, interpreted not only in pulp publications of the late nineteenth C, in the novel, but also in the movies and on television. The new “correctors” in our schools are intent on teaching the coming generations that most of these stories were “lies” and where there actually is truth, there was also evil.

The objective of the Left Fifth Column within our schools and universities is to diminish all those sources of American pride, to diminish the men (who were admittedly white) who created the country and its theory, to diminish what they wrote. The term that used to be used in describing the activities and narratives of predecessors of the “correctors” was “anti-Establishment,” but placing a new name on something ugly doesn’t change it, as placing lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it beautiful. “Anti-Establishment” is anti-American culture and values, and the only alternative out there, face it, is internationalist Socialism. And the reason the anti-Establishment works as it does in the schools and universities is clear: the country’s narratives, some of them true, some of them fable, are part of the cultural glue that maintains the land as One. Socialism is ab initio and in essence internationalist, and this entails an unremitting war on its part against cultural identities everywhere.

The Leftist termites within the house politic understand with a clarity no longer shared by the citizenry at large the truth of that well worn adage: United we stand, divided we fall.

If their erosion of the cultural mythology is allowed to continue, if they are continued to be given a free hand with the children of the country, then they will produce a bleak, brain washed, passionless, childless, hopeless population of worker ants herded to a new altar by government truncheon-wielding brown-shirts. Civilized man will have returned to his animistic roots, worshiping shrubs and trees, the earth and the sun, led in his prayers by the new high priests, the likes of Al Gore and Michael Moore and their inevitable successors.

One single new Socialist world, united in its worship of the inanimate universe. Its history rewritten, it will increasingly, in Camus’s perfect phrase, have neither the memory of a lost home, nor the hope of a promised land.

O, brave new world.