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July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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July
3, 2002
Lynne Cheney's
Primer
"G"
is for Gloss Over
by Robert Jensen
This Fourth of July, many American parents will
no doubt be reading Lynne Cheney's alphabet book, America: A
Patriotic Primer, to their children.
If kids pay close attention they will
learn a lot, but unfortunately it will be a lesson in obfuscation
and distortion. Cheney --the wife of the vice president, former
chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a noted
conservative intellectual
-- offers a whitewashed version of U.S. history that is morally
and intellectually offensive.
Note, for example, the letter T, for
tolerance: "Free to think and believe and pursue happiness
in our own way, we recognize the right of others to do the same."
No argument with that sentiment; I'm all for tolerance.
But skip back a few pages, to the letter
N, "for Native Americans, who came here first," on
a page adorned with drawings of American Indian notables and
names of tribes.
Even allowing for the fact that it is
an illustrated children's book and not a detailed history, her
N page leaves out some rather significant facts that could be
easily summarized. Yes, the Native Americans came here first.
Then the Europeans came. Then the Europeans killed almost all
the Native Americans and took almost all the land.
I suppose one could claim that the Europeans
were T-is-for-tolerant of the Native Americans, at least tolerant
of those who accepted less-than-human status and did what they
were told. American Indians were free to think and believe and
pursue happiness in their own way, so long as they got out of
the way of the white folks who wanted the land and resources.
And along the way, those white folks
carried out the one of the most successful genocides in recorded
human history. Depending on the size of the indigenous population
in North America at the time of Columbus' arrival (12 million
is a conservative estimate), 98 to 99 percent of that population
was dead by the end of the 19th century.
As native scholar Ward Churchill has
pointed out in his book, A Little Matter of Genocide, the fact
that a large number of those indigenous people died of disease
doesn't absolve white America. Sometimes those diseases were
spread intentionally, and even when that wasn't the case the
white invaders did nothing to curtail contact with Indians to
limit the destruction. Whether the Indians died in war or from
disease, starvation and exposure, white society remained culpable.
I review that history not so all us white
people can sink into a state of guilt; one can't be guilty for
what was done before one was born. The point of telling the truth
about the history -- of naming this original sin of the United
States -- is to both establish some minimal level of intellectual
honesty and enrich contemporary political debate. So long as
Americans lie to themselves (or in the case of Cheney's book,
lie to our children), there is little hope that white America
and the United States government can deal honestly with the consequences
of that genocide. White Americans shouldn't feel guilty about
a depraved past we did not create; instead, we should take moral
and political responsibility for the resulting inequities and
injustices that remain in a society that accords us great privilege.
That kind of honesty would lead us to
question why the list of Indian notables on the page includes
only one who fought the United States, Tecumseh. Even then, Cheney
mentions only his attempts to create a confederation of Indian
nations, deliberately excising the fact that Tecumseh's goal
was to expel the white settlers. Don't bother looking on the
N page for a mention of Crazy Horse or any other Indian who resisted
the genocide. Apparently, they aren't part of Cheney's Native
Americans. (To be fair, Sitting Bull appears on another page,
though with no mention of his historical importance).
This rendering of the Native American
is particularly ironic coming from Cheney, who wrote another
book called Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country
Have Stopped Making Sense--And What We Can Do About It. Apparently
the truth should be told, except when it interferes with the
task of cultivating patriotism in children.
In Cheney's patriotic primer, H is for
heroes and I is for ideals. In my assessment of her primer, H
is for hypocrisy and I is for ideologue. Our children, deserve
better.
Robert Jensen
is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin,
a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the
Mainstream. His pamphlet, "Citizens
of the Empire.
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
Today's
Feature
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
Dave Marsh
John Entwistle's
Heaven and Hell
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
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