What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
― Frederick Douglass
This two-bit country will cheer the idiotic, overpriced, absurd “tanks” on the White House Mall as this other two-bit in chief can pull on his polyester orange locks and ogle over his daughter Ivanka!
According to report published by USA Today on 7 March 2006, Trump made the comment during an appearance on the daytime talk show The View while discussing the possibility of Ivanka’s posing for Playboy magazine: “It would be really disappointing — not really — but it would depend on what’s inside the magazine. I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
Why would I bring up that bit of perversion on July 4th, 2019? Values, man, and ethics. What a world that in 2019, this non-military veteran slathers his mouth with Big Mac juice while watching tanks sink into the tarmac and overpriced death machines do tricks in the air. This is the “pussy grabber in chief.”
Fact — On July 4, 2019: In 2018, there were 159.41 million men in the United States, compared to 165.92 million women. By 2024, it is projected that there will be 167.08 million men and 173.9 million women in the U.S.
So, this Cadet Bone Spurs has so many rape and sexual assault allegations against him, and he states this creepy stuff about his daughter, well, that’s what — in his mind and in his July 4th bang-bang-bang followers’ noggins — Makes America Great Again. The USA has a slightly higher number of women to men, yet this is it for the apotheosis of POTUS? Does he represent my 23-year-old daughter’s needs and values? Any woman’s values? Come on!
What more has to be said about this country’s schizophrenia, political bankruptcy, failing education systems (PK12 and college) and deplorable people who allow child abuse after child abuse on all levels, but also in those internment camps on the border?
Doctor compares conditions for unaccompanied children at immigrant holding centers to ‘torture facilities‘
According to Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, the center’s annual profiles on child poverty in America, some 41 percent (29.8 million) of America’s children were living on the brink of poverty in 2016 — including more than 5 million infants and toddlers under age three.
I’m dealing with a burn ban in my county on the Oregon Coast, and then all these pop-up tents have been selling ballistics and rockets red glare for the big days leading up to the big lie — God Bless America!
We have a plastic bag ban in the county, and the state of Oregon, but bozos can take out their Roman Candles and big ass rockets — One Bad Mother, Excalibur Artillery Shells, America’s Glory, Chasing Booty!
I even argue with so-called environmentalists how we should be tabling all around the waysides and Marine Reserves/Sanctuaries to not only point out the magnificent gray whales and orcas, but to inform people “to can” their fireworks since they are toxic, belly-choking, neck-strangling, PTSD-inducing examples of the mindlessness of USA. This Article here, which is pretty benign!
Depending on the effect sought, fireworks produce smoke and dust that contain various heavy metals, sulfur-coal compounds, and other noxious chemicals. Barium, for instance, is used to produce brilliant green colors in fireworks displays, despite being poisonous and radioactive. Copper compounds are used to produce blue colors, even though they contain dioxin, which has been linked to cancer. Cadmium, lithium, antimony, rubidium, strontium, lead, and potassium nitrate are also commonly used to produce different effects, even though they can cause a host of respiratory and other health problems.
Just the soot and dust from fireworks alone is enough to lead to respiratory problems like asthma. A study examined air quality at 300 monitoring stations across the United States and found that fine particulate matter spiked by 42% on the Fourth of July, compared to the days before and after.
Physical particles — colored paper, metal wires, plastics, etc. Think of all those murres and fish and seals mucking about the ocean with volumes of this shit floating nearshore and on beaches?
Of course, TerraPass has a scheme to buy off (carbon offset double speak) the pollution, the embedded, transportation and packaging energy used to produce, package and move the products to those pop-up fireworks tents here in Lincoln City.
Environmentalists, using their “capitalism needs fixing” mentality, will never cross that line, especially now when these greenie weenies are afraid to even engage in simple rhetorical debates with fellow citizens of the deplorable Trump-David Duke-Nazi-Racist kind. I have had a million conversations on how these animal lovers will never have a verbal debate with an in-the-round live Trumpy.
These are the failings of America, from day one, really — to not engage the Indian-Killers, Women-Rapers, Baby-Beheaders, Nature-Razing pigs of the pulpit and penury.
So these racists, these Joe Arpaio-loving Arizonans want that Betsy Ross White Supremacist Shoe Sold in Phoenix? While their state engages in mass arrest, mass child abuse, mass concentration camp policies!
This entire show — cult of celebrity — is yet another chink in the rusting armor of the mythological madness of American might. Schizophrenia, maybe! WSWS:
On Tuesday evening, the San Francisco Unified School Board voted unanimously to destroy or cover over the historic 1936 “Life of George Washington Murals” at a district high school. The vote is a reactionary decision that marks a new stage in the censorship drive that began last December.
The 13 murals created by left-wing artist Victor Arnautoff were products of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal arts program for unemployed artists during the Great Depression. The murals at George Washington High School (GWHS) depict the contradictory character of early American history, portraying many of the progressive aspects of the American Revolution and also depicting slave labor and the genocide of Native Americans.
At the crowded meeting, supporters and opponents of the murals were each allocated 30 minutes, one minute maximum per person, to state their reasons for or against the preservation of the murals. Speakers from the George Washington High School Alumni Association, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, United Public Workers for Action and many others offered statements in support of the murals.
Alas, July Fourth — what the hell does it mean to the rest of the world, or the few brave people in my cadre who have taken the blinders off at age 12. I recall the fights –physical ones and administrative ones, too — for not standing at football games, assemblies or the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m 62, so this is pre-Celebrity Colin K’s “take a knee” protestations. I was 12, a white boy, sure, in Arizona of all places!
I teach, write about education, and am around youth — big time. We are destroying youth from the inside out, for sure, and we are giving them what is a common but true refrain — they are what they hear and don’t hear or can’t hear; they are what they read (and never read); they are what they see in museums, concerts, performances, readings, art shows (and what they don’t see); they are what they are taught, mistaught, never taught; they are what they are encouraged to be, not encouraged to be, forced to be; they are what their options give them, offer them, force them to take; they are what they self-profess, never-profess, forced to profess.
Forget about the chronic illnesses and the gut diseases, and the effects of Round-up, Atrazine, plastic polymers, and a Rachel “Silent Spring” Carson laundry list of toxins, from gestation to through adulthood. This is what is killing revolutionaries like me —
A mural depicting George Washington’s life at a San Francisco high school is fueling an emotional debate.
The board of educators is considering covering the historic new deal mural that greets students at George Washington High School.
Senior Kai Anderson-Lawson said seeing dead Native Americans and African American slaves working the fields for Washington sets a demeaning tone and it’s time for a change.
“It’s a lot of emotional stress,” Anderson-Lawson said.
“One of the reasons it’s hard to go to school sometimes is because of the mural in the lobby.”
Others however, said it provides an important history lesson and should remain.
“In San Francisco we should be teaching about the mural and what it means,” said Donna Parker. “I, as half Native American Indian see no problem with the mural.”
A tale of two upbringings, perspectives and for me, one of these children are being coached and cajoled and forced to not see the crimes of this country.
That’s $600,000 to paint over a radical’s art work — welcome bombs bursting in air, July 4.
This is the painter Victor Arnautoff, born in 1896 in a small village in present-day Ukraine and then emigrated to San Francisco in 1925. He was part of a leftist art collective. Imagine these faux teachers and poor nanny society children being part of any collective in capitalism, where they can individualize their fake hurt, and then gather together and strike down a radical artist’s work.
Happy July 4th!
Arnautoff was an ardent supporter of workers’ strikes during the “great” depression” and then became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in 1937. He was even drawn and quartered by one of Trump’s mentors, or both, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, the year before I was born, 1956 — for drawing a “Communist Conspiracy” cartoon that caricatured then-Vice President Nixon.
Get this — with this blasphemy of destroying art, we have youth who will get to the tenth level of hell’s cluelessness. In “The Life of Washington,” the artist put Native Americans, African Americans and working-class revolutionaries front and center in the four largest panels, pushing Washington to the margins as a way to honor the real people and denigrate in artistic fashion the mythological Washington, Father of the Nation . . . Birth of a Nation!
Can anyone imagine those school board members, the teachers and the students and parents who support destroying radical history in this artwork even having the guts to really support those causes of the people that count?
Happy July 4th!
It seems that everywhere I turn and go full force into, I end up back to the linchpin of my life — exposing the lies of a faulty education system that has quite elegantly transformed the collective consciousness and cognition of generation after generation. Anyone want to paint over the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Seattle offices? Well, that would never happen with these kids, and for those of us who have protested Gates in Seattle, we ended up locked up by the Seattle Nazi Police.
Fresh off his successful efforts to transform K-12 education through a combination of investment and support of policy initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards, Bill Gates has turned his eye toward higher education.
His move is the establishment of the Postsecondary Value Commission, which promises to develop methods to measure the “value” of a post-secondary degree or certificate, essentially answering the question “What is college worth?”
They want to know definitively about the “return on investment” of college.
To ease the path towards achieving this goal, Bill and Melinda Gates have started the Gates Policy Initiative, a lobbying group tasked with further the preferred Gates solutions on issues of “global health, global development, U.S. education and outcomes for black, Latino and rural students specifically, and efforts to move people from poverty to employment.”
I would like to take a moment to speak directly to Bill and Melinda Gates.
Please, please, please, please, pretty please don’t do this. I am certain you mean well, but honestly, please just stay away from education. You’ve done enough already.
I’m back.
That opening paragraph several inches above is what in the writing business we call, irony, a.k.a., a joke. Bill Gates has not had success transforming K-12 education. His ideas backed by his wealth have had a tremendous, largely deleterious effect on our systems and schools.
Alas, I will be writing soon about a young fellow — 37-years-old — for my bi-weekly column for the trendy Oregon Coast Today. He’s a product of Lincoln City’s PK12 schools (dropped out at 10th grade) and he is his own man, a carpenter, and he questions his own lack of male role models in his life, and now his significant other has four children from previous relationship, three of which are struggling: 13 and 16 year old boys; 18-year-old young woman.
Justin wants to know what can be done with more and more youth missing almost everything, including ethics, work values, and the ability to use their hands and learn hands-on math, science, reading, writing, history.
And this fellow is working class, blue collar, and not some liberal limp wrist or intellectualized union guy. This conversation with Justin, twice while he was hammering away, has been more valuable to me as I embark on the “how to kill children and society too” pamphlet around the “good, bad, ugly of the American education system” than any interview with this or that superintendent, principal, educational consultant or guru.
Gates is Satan, sure, a bumper sticker in Seattle. Bezos is Beelzebul, also a sticker in Seattle.
We can read or listen to Anand Giridharadas as he hawks his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Sure, this young Turk tells us that these shameful ploys — philanthropic efforts undertaken by billionaires like Gates — are really premised on keeping not only the status quo but to in order to cement their position atop the social order. These guys (and gals) are eugenicists and social engineers who need their billions recirculated into society!
Happy Fourth of July (not)!
Thanks to Frederick Douglass —
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
[…]
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Finally, a Happy Birthday America goes out to the people we are proud to accept as our own concentration camp “citizens” and “non-citizens” alike:
Japanese concentration camp, Manzanar, Independence, California, circa December 1942 . . . but Rohwer, Arkansas (former Japanese concentration camp) is being considered now for Mexican and Central American immigrants rounded up by CBP and ICE and Trump and Company!
Canadian Japanese internment camp, circa March 1942–