On the evening of Sunday, 1 October, a single human in
Las Vegas, Nevada, using his arsenal of assault rifles with extended clips, killed
59 other humans and wounded 527 more humans, making 586 human victims in all,
in the space of about 10 minutes. That
same amount of time is roughly equivalent to one of my pieces for a Left
Ungagged podcast. So, remember that
number, 586, and let’s start counting: one, two, three, four…to be continued.
This mass shooting was brought to you by the archaic
and badly misinterpreted Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the National
Rifle Association, the Federalist Society, the conservative wing of the Supreme
Court, the Republican Party, the Christian Right, and American ammosexuals from
sea to shining sea. To these individuals
and groups, Second Amendment rights and the rights to profit of the arms
industry’s merchants of death count more than the rights to life, health, and
safety and freedom from fear of his victims.
Don’t be surprised if one day the government alters the U.S. national
motto to “There is no god but Profit and Ayn Rand is its Prophet”; in the name
of truth in advertising, of course.
By 1426 EDT on today, 4 October, there had been 46,873
shooting incidents leaving 11,725 people dead by gunfire and 23,795 people
wounded by gunfire in the USA in 2017. The
Christian Dominionist words “under God” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance
after the phrase “one Nation” should be changed to “under fire”. Because that’s what the USA is; one nation
under fire. Or, to put it another way,
“Houston, we have a problem”.
The Pledge of Allegiance, by the way, originated as
nothing more than a sales gimmick. Its
author, Francis Bellamy wrote it and devised the ritual for its recitation for
a campaign by the mail order company he worked for to sell flags to every
school in the country. He introduced the
Pledge on Columbus Day in 1892, which is fitting from pretty much any point of
view. The method Bellamy prescribed for
saluting the flag during recitation of his pledge was with a stiff right arm
palm down fingers pointed to the flag, a gesture that became quite familiar in
Europe during the 1930s, and now you know the true origin of that salute.
Until Bellamy’s campaign, the only institutions which
flew the national flag were buildings of the federal government and military
and naval installations. Within a few
years, nearly every school in the United States had its own flag to which its children
were marched out and lined up daily to pledge their loyalty and submission to
American imperial capitalism.
Francis’ cousin Edward Bellamy wrote America’s third
best selling novel of the 19th century novel published in 1887 called Looking Backward, a utopian science
fiction conception of a completely socialized America a century later that
launched a primarily bourgeois socialist movement which swept the country. Locals were called Nationalist Clubs and the
philosophy of the movement became known as Nationalism, in this case meaning
the Nation, as in the people, against Capital.
This is the first known link of nationalism with socialism.
Looking
Backward is not the only fictional
work to launch a movement. In 1905, Thomas Dixon published the novel The Clansman, a highly romanticized view
of the post-Civil War Reconstruction and of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1915, D.W. Griffith turned it into the
pioneering film The Birth of a Nation. Besides being the first film ever shown in
the White House and leaving the very racist President Woodrow Wilson in tears,
it inspired a group of anti-Semitic terrorists known as the Knights of Mary
Phagan to reorganize themselves as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The latter organization was established at
the future site of candidate Bill Clinton’s “tough-on-crime” speech in Stone
Mountain, Georgia, during the 1992 Democratic primaries standing in front of
row upon row of Afro-American inmates from the nearby prison.
In 1899, the US Navy adopted the Star-Spangled Banner
as its official song. Racist-in-Chief
Wilson adopted it for military occasions in 1916, and the National Baseball
League started playing it at the World Series in 1918. To distract the nation from the stock market
crash and Great Depression in 1929, a movement began to adopt the Star-Spangled
Banner as the USA’s official national anthem.
It culminated in 1931 with President Herbert Hoover, signing the law
making it so. The anthem did not become
standard before all baseball games until World War II, and while it’s been
played before football games since the same time, players never appeared on the
field for it until the 2009 season, when Barack Obama’s Department of Defense
began paying money to the National Football League (that’s “football” as in
American football, not what we Yanks call soccer) for them to do so.
Which takes us partly back to the beginning of this
piece so we can move forward. Of the 11,725
people killed and 23,795 people wounded by gunfire in the USA thus far in 2017, 1,560 of those people were shot by
cops, with 908 victims of police homicide dying by gunfire or some other means,
a disproportionate number of them people of color, mostly black. That bodycount is the original reason for the
“take a knee” protests started last year by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick,
now spreading across the NFL and spilling over into Major League Baseball as
well as college and high school football.
Pastor John Pavlovitz suggested that if your immediate response to
the shooting of a man or woman of color is to try and justify why he
or she is dead instead of asking why they were shot, you are part of the
problem. Think of Trump’s statement after
Charlottesville that “there was violence on both sides, both sides”. Think of every time when a person of color
was gunned down by a trigger happy cop when Obama invariably said, “We don’t
have all the facts yet. We don’t really know what happened”, even though
there were almost always dozens of witnesses and/or video of the event.
To those in power, and to
too many juries in America, blue lives always matter more than black, no matter
what the complexion of their own skin may be.
The very reason for the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, according to Alicia
Garza, is because to in America, especially to those in power, they don’t, even
though they should.
This morning in their weekly
meeting, the commissioners of Hamilton County in Tennessee voted along party
lines to keep the bust of Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart, wearing his
Confederate uniform, on the courthouse lawn right in front of the main
door. True, after the war, Stewart, a
distant relative of mine, played a huge role in the Chickamauga-Chattanooga
National Military Park for its first 25 years, but having his statue on our
county’s front lawn with him in the uniform of an army that attacked this
country is a bit like having a statue of Kurt Waldheim is his Waffen SS uniform
on the front lawn of the United Nations because of his service as
secretary-general.
It would not surprise me a
bit if next week the commission passes a resolution supporting the NRA’s view
of the outdated Second Amendment, which is in serious and urgent need of
repeal.
…581, 582, 583, 584, 585,
586.
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