It seems that at least to the
media, what men do in private is no longer “private,” even when the “crime” is
only hurt feelings, embarrassing behavior, an “inappropriate” comment, or a
joke in poor taste. These are firing offenses if you are a male. I have
no allegiance to any woman, not even my own mother with whom I grew-up in dread
of—the irony of which I no longer fear to speak the truth, which I have seen
and experienced how self-victimization can easily morph into tyranny, oppression,
and worse, massive hypocrisy on all levels of life.
Eventually I’m going to get
around to talking about that, but for now I will say that this avalanche of
sexual “crimes” seems to me a function of the impotence of the media and
women’s advocates to do anything about Donald Trump, so even “friends” are
“fair” targets even if the accusation appears to be the self-important desire to
get in on the “action” of making a “social statement” in between partying,
being a “superstar in their own minds” and making a lot of money. So much of what
we are hearing about now were staples in teen comedy films during the Seventies
and Eighties, which of course causes someone my age to further question the
motivations and politics of the current inundation of sexual “crimes.”
But in the meantime, the world
turns and no one is immune from its affects, although if you are particularly
well-off the hypocrisy is something you can somehow find a way to live with
yourself. Naturally, when it comes to who is making those decisions that
benefit you while you still want to feel like a “victim,” it is useful to note
that all of this is coming from a man and a political party with an infantile sense of historical perspective.
History forgotten, is history repeated. Take for example the following statement.
His passions are terrible… and he could never speak from the rashness
of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke from
rage…I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing (this man) president. He is one of the most unfit men
I know of for such a place. He has very little respect for law or
constitutions…he is a dangerous man.
One may be excused for assuming
that this is a description of Trump, for it seems very much how many people
view him. But although this particular viewpoint does not in fact refer to
Trump, it is in reference to a man who Trump apparently idolizes, probably at
the behest of one of his alt-right advisers, given Trump’s astonishing
ignorance of history. The above quotation is Thomas Jefferson’s frank appraisal
of Andrew Jackson, a man who when in one of his frequent rages contemporaries
noted the tendency of spittle to froth from his mouth instead of words.
When I was in college I wrote a
piece on each of the three presidents who called the state the school was
located “home” for the campus newspaper. Frankly, if this state was my “home,” I’d be somewhat sheepish in
admitting the state produced these men as president. For example, the second of
these presidents, James Polk, was responsible for initiating the
Mexican-American War; none other than Abraham Lincoln challenged Polk to supply
the evidence of where any of those spots of American blood were spilled that Polk
used to “justify” the war, while in his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that this war was
…one of the most unjust [wars]
ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. . . . The occupation,
separation, and annexation [of Texas] were, from the inception of the movement
to its final consummation, a (slave-power) conspiracy to acquire territory out
of which slave States might be formed for the American Union [U.S.A.]. Even if
the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent
war was forced on Mexico cannot. . . . The Southern Rebellion was largely the
outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations like individuals are punished for their
transgressions.
The third president from this state, Andrew Johnson, was infamous for becoming
the first to be impeached, and being but one vote shy of being removed from
office. He also wished to allow ex-Confederate states to re-enter the Union
without punishment and discard protections for newly-freed slaves, This
president also championed the first
Homestead Act, which—the history books usually fail to note—was
essentially another part of the ongoing Indian removal policy.
But the first of these presidents, Jackson, was in many ways as bad and
probably even worse. Although Jackson was supposedly a “man of the people”—he
was born in poverty—his idea of “draining the swamp” in Washington D.C. merely
meant replacing perceived enemies on “Trumped-up” charges with largely
incompetent and unfit amateurs, much like what we see in the Trump
administration, where we find Trump filling important government positions with
people whose only “qualifications” is that they feed Trump’s bigoted predilections,
or with his children and relations in positions of power for which they are
clearly not competent in. It can be argued that Jackson’s “draining of the
swamp” was largely responsible for a culture of government corruption that
would culminate in the Warren G. Harding administration. John Quincy Adams, one
of Jackson’s many enemies, said that instead of creating an “American Union as
a moral Person in the family of Nations,” Jackson used his power to “growl and
snarl with impotent fury against a money broker's shop, to rivet into
perpetuity the clanking chain of the Slave, and to waste in boundless bribery
to the west the invaluable inheritance of the Public Lands.”
Of course we wouldn’t expect
Trump to know any of this, given the fact that despite being a “New Yorker” he is
completely unfamiliar with the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans despite their
large presence in the city. We can also question the “quality” of his Ivy
League “education” for which knowledge of U.S. history is something students
apparently are already supposed to know; I recall reading something about how
students at Harvard get automatic “B” grades for any course work, because it is
assumed that since they are supposed to be “smarter” than everyone else, any
substandard work must be the fault of “lazy” habits.
And it goes on. Trump claimed
that Jackson opposed the Civil War and would have found a way to avoid it. It
has been pointed out to Trump that Jackson died many years before the war, and it
had been decades in the making. Trump seems not to understand that the war was
about the maintenance of slavery, and for the South there was no “alternative”
but war when an “abolitionist” was elected president, despite the fact that
Lincoln had no intention of abolishing slavery, just stopping its expansion.
It is interesting to note Trump’s
ignorance of history in having his meeting with Navajo “code talkers” in front
of a portrait of Jackson, and its meaning to both Native Americans and blacks. While
Jackson has been praised for opposing South Carolina’s “nullification” act
against federal tariffs, he refused to protect encroachment on Cherokee Indian
land in Georgia, and in fact ignored two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that upheld
the enforcement of treaties signed by the U.S. government with the Cherokee.
Jackson is said to have observed that Chief Justice John Marshall should
enforce the decision himself; Jackson’s refusal to protect Native American
treaty rights led to the enforced removal of the Cherokee on the infamous “Trail
of Tears” upon which many died. Jackson was of course a slaveholder, and his
brutal campaign against the Creeks in 1812 was an undisguised effort to confiscate
their land for the use of slaveholders, and the decision to allow Georgia to
confiscate Cherokee land for the same reason supplies another score against
Jackson and places an even bigger dunce cap on Trump.
And yet Jackson is viewed as a
“great” president. Although he did leave office more popular than when he
entered it, and no matter how his biographers attempt to put a rosy face on his
administration, Jackson is arguably a president who was moved more by passions
that do not bear close examination, for they reveal a dark space in the human
psyche. And this is Trump’s “hero.” Yet if he had to have one, Jackson fits the
bill because even with Jackson’s demerits, he is a “better” president than
Trump in his all vast illiteracies can’t even hope to match.
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