Politics

I.and he confirmed and explained what we had all come to know. Osama bin Laden is dead.  American soldiers shot and killed him.  No more can he live or breath or speak or take action. But only the man is no more.  Osama bin Laden the symbol yet lives.  Bin Laden the symbol will never die so long as anyone remembers what happened on September 11, 2001. Yet just as a living, breathing person ages and changes over time, so too can a symbol shift and evolve.  While Osama bin Laden will always represent villainy and hatred, never again will he represent frustration.  Instead, he will symbolize the imminent defeat of Al-Qaeda as well as the perseverance and courage of Americans.  He will symbolize our long fought victory.

Last time I talked about how, as the U.S. economy grew and the nation on the whole became wealthier during answer as to how to fix it.  And at the end of the day, government programs do play an important role in keeping the neighborhood afloat.  So indirectly, in extreme examples like this, welfare ends up subsidizing a cycle of dysfunction that has no end in sight. However, there’s another critique about the ways in which we subsidize poverty in this country, and it’s not about failed government policies.  It’s about the failures of the free market. The de-industrialization of America is an old story at this point.  Free market policies have contributed to the decline of good-paying jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers.  Most of those jobs have been shipped overseas, and now the average hourly worker in this country only makes a little over $10/hour in real wages.

“Growing up, I had little sense of class differences . . . I had no sense that we were poor or struggling.” Linda Chavez, We Were Poor, But I Didn’t Know It If you’ve read any memoirs or autobiographies by people who came up from hard times and went on to make it in the world (Chavez goes onto brag about now having four bathrooms), then you’ll readily recognize that cliche.  of population had limited means, while a small elite of merchants and plantation owners held the lion’s share. However, the nation as a whole actually had very little wealth, and most of it was not in the form of money, but was tied up in land and slaves.  Why?  Because Great Britain had founded and used its colonies to serve the mother country.  So while England had already started to industrialize, the new United States had an economy that was based on resource extraction.  America exported natural resources and produced very few finished goods.  For example, the U.S. had no textile factories; rather, farmers grew cotton and sold it to European industrialists who made clothing.  Americans chopped down the trees, dug up the minerals, and grew the food that fed Europe’s industrial revolution.  The early American economy was based on bartering and very little money actually circulated in this cash-starved nation.  In short, the United States was poor.

Given the state of affairs in 1969, it’s understandable that one of the major themes in Deloria’s book could be summed up thusly (in my words, not his): America, you think you know about Indian people, but really you don’t know shit about us; you just mythologize us and manipulate our history and culture to suit your own purposes. Ergo the title of the book.

historian in the United States is either currently, or has been at some point during their career, a member. Oh, and one more thing worth noting about Cronon.  He’s not an asshole.  You see, academia in some ways is no different than any other profession; there’s no shortage of ambitious, power-hungry, insecure, selfish, pompous wretches at the top.  But I’ve been in the field as a graduate student and a professor for almost twenty years now, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Cronon.  I don’t know him personally, but we move in similar circles, attend some of the same conferences, and have numerous mutual acquaintances.  Academia’s a very small world, and so far as I can tell, Cronon doesn’t just look the way you’d expect a professor would, with his beard, glasses, and underwhelming physique, but he also behaves the way you’d hope a professor would: with professionalism, patience, and kindness.