Waverly Woodson: D-Day Hero

My maternal grandfather was a WW2 Veteran. Unfortunately by the time I was old enough to be interested in such things I didn't see him that often. He was gone way too soon as far I was concerned. I can still get stories about him from other relatives but it's not really the same as getting it direct from the source.

I don't know if my grandfather was ever in combat. I do remember the seemingly HUGE rifle that he brought home. Memory is important. And it's because of the importance of memory that Joann Woodson, the 90 year-old widow of WW2 D-Day hero Waverly Woodson, is fighting to ensure that her late husband receives all the praise and commendations that he should have received during his life, including the Medal of Honor.

PHILADELPHIA (CBS/AP) – For years, a widow has been fighting for recognition of her late husband's heroism during D-Day. Waverly Woodson Jr. was one of an estimated one million African Americans who served in World War II, including 2,000 who were at Normandy. All served in segregated units and their contributions are often overlooked. Joann Woodson, 90, wants everyone to know the sacrifice her husband made when he stormed Omaha Beach 75 years ago as a medic.

"He said that the men were just dropping, just dropping so fast. Some of them were so wounded, there was nothing that you could do but just give them a few little last rites," Woodson said.

General John Kelly and The Confederacy

I want you to imagine any US general or politician saying that Nazi Gestapo/SD head Reinhard Heydrich, a prime architect of the Holocaust, was "a principled man and skilled violinist who gave up a promising career in the performing arts to serve his country with honor and dedication. Now we may disagree with his principles but that was a long time ago. Things were different then. We shouldn't judge people by today's standards. Heydrich made the decision to soldier for his country. And that's not something to be lightly dismissed".

Such a statement by anyone with anything to lose would probably not be made during normal times because the statement is so profoundly callous and ignorant about the evil that Heydrich committed. But we are not in normal times, as Trump Chief of Staff General Kelly recently demonstrated.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly told Ingraham. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

“I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society and certainly as, as individuals, when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say what those, you know, what Christopher Columbus did was wrong,” he said. “You know, 500 years later, it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then.LINK

Columbus Day

1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them..

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world and they were meaner than anybody else and they had gunpowder...The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their ability to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were."-Kurt Vonnegut
This past Monday, October 9th was Columbus Day. It's a federal holiday but many people do not receive the day off. Increasingly Columbus Day has become a flashpoint between people who would like to bring to light that Columbus wasn't really a good man as the term is understood today or in 1492 and between those who see any attempt to revise bad history as a simplistic attack on whites, Italians, or Western Civilization. I was reminded of how the second group thinks when I was listening to a local white (supposedly liberal) radio host bemoan the city of Detroit's planned renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. The radio host and most of his callers were of the opinion that everyone (by which they meant non-whites) was just too sensitive these days. They said that well sure maybe Columbus did some bad things but Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't perfect either. 

And in their view because America existed now that made everything okay. The radio host closed out with what he thought was the devastating conclusion that Columbus was good because "our European ancestors never would have made it here were it not for Columbus".  Wow. How can anyone argue with that logic.

Book Reviews: Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor-a visual history commemorating the date that will live in infamy
by Randy Roberts and David Welky

On December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. Japan destroyed the best part of the US fleet, the battleships and killed over 2000 US military personnel. It was an almost perfectly executed surprise attack. The Japanese military then went on a rampaging offensive against US and European colonial territories throughout the Pacific, curbstomping Dutch, Brits, Americans, and anyone else who got in its way. The Japanese military simultaneously put an end to the idea of Caucasian military invincibility while creating its own shameful reputation for brutality, criminality and rape. The Allies were reeling from the Japanese blows. The strains faced by the Allies in the Pacific theater would hasten post-war decolonization. It was difficult to talk of European superiority when an Asian power long thought to be second rate had so thoroughly demolished European armies and navies. 

That said, though in attacking the US, Japan showed that it had literally gotten too big for its britches. There's a saying that "You [mess] with the bull, you get the horns". There was tremendous anger in the US establishment and populace about the sneak attack. Ultimately Japan had to learn the hard way that it was no match for the US when it came to a fight. The late comedian Richard Pryor had a bit where he opined that that the Japanese elite were only familiar with Americans from laid back California, snooty Harvard or officious Washington D.C. Pryor said that if the Japanese only knew people like that then yes maybe it made sense that the Japanese would think they could beat them. Pryor said that the Japanese hadn't been to places like Texas, Alabama or Mississippi where there were white folks so dangerous that people had to keep them on leashes. Once those folks got into the game it was lights out for the Japanese. 

Confederacy Redux

Recently, in the South people have begun removing some noted Confederate monuments from places of honor.  There are so many of these though that it would take forever to do it. Some US federal institutions are named after Confederates. It's important to remember that the Civil War was started by Southern white supremacists who feared that Northern whites were insufficiently dedicated to the twin causes of black slavery and white supremacy. So the South tried to break apart from the United States. The South started the bloodiest war ever experienced by the United States. Ironically, in their desire to defend and expand their right to own, whip, rape, exploit and murder black people, the Confederacy ineptly but fortunately brought about slavery's demise earlier than otherwise would have been the case. 

With the exception of the honest white supremacist, many present day defenders of Confederate monuments, flags and namesakes do not like to admit what it is they are actually defending. The United States is not a white man's country. Black people actually do have rights that white men and women must respect. And despite Kris Kobach's best efforts Black people get to vote. How about that? All of this was anathema to Confederates, then and now. For Confederates blacks were slaves. Period. End of story. There was a Supreme Court decision which established that blacks had no rights whites needed to respect. How much more clear does someone need to be. At its core the Civil War wasn't about tariffs or balance of powers between the Federal government and states. It was about enslavement and exclusion. This isn't a modern revisionist idea.

Blissfully unencumbered by any political niceties, after all they were about to start shooting people, Confederate politicians detailed for posterity their purpose in seceding. If we weren't living in a post-truth society this evidence would prevent particularly malevolent or obtuse people from arguing that the Civil War from the South's POV wasn't about slavery and white supremacy.

Hannah Duston: Heroine?

The other day I was reading thru the latest Quarterly Journal of Military History. I'm not sure I saw enough to justify the $13 purchase price but I did read about the story of Hannah Duston. I hadn't known about this story before. I thought it interesting and relevant to today's world. As you know the French and English colonized much of North America. They brought over their national, political and religious rivalries. These conflicts routinely erupted into war. In 1687 during the war that was alternately known as King William's War or the Second Indian War, the Abenaki Native Americans, allied with the French, attacked the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts. They killed 27 English colonists and took captives, including one Hannah Duston, her six day old daughter, and her nurse Mary. Hannah's husband Thomas escaped with the couple's other older children, though some people in Haverhill wondered if he was a coward. Some people thought then and now there's no way Thomas Duston should have been alive if his wife and baby were captured. Thomas' defenders argue that he had responsibilities to his other children to consider. As I've written elsewhere you have to make hard choices in tough situations. Hannah may or may not have been raped. That can't be determined. What is certain however is that the Abenaki military party decided that Hannah's new baby daughter Martha wasn't likely to survive the trip north. And they didn't want to be bothered with the trouble of taking care of a baby. So they killed the infant by dashing her brains out against a tree. 
As you might imagine that didn't go over too well with Mrs. Duston. But she bided her time. She was assigned/sold/gifted to a different Abenaki group. Six weeks later, in New Hampshire Hannah saw her opportunity. Along with Mary and another English captive, a fourteen year old boy named Samuel, she went Lizzie Borden on her captors while they slept. Hannah, Mary and Samuel killed two men, two women and six children.

Likely motivated by revenge, a bounty on Native American scalps, and most of all the need to prove that women and a youth had done what they claimed, Hannah Duston also scalped the Native Americans. She escaped back to her home. Hannah Duston became the first woman in colonial America to be honored by a statue. There are memorials and statues across Massachusetts and New Hampshire commemorating Hannah Duston. In fact the axe she used to handle her business is honored in a museum. Some descendants of the Abenaki felt that any glorification or commemoration of Hannah Duston was not only wrongheaded  but racist. 

Margaret Bruchak, an Abenaki historian, said in order to properly understand the Duston story, it’s important to understand the Abenaki culture’s view of combat and captivity.

“The whole point of taking a captive was to then transport that person safely. For the whole of that journey they were treated like family,” Bruchak said. “When captives were taken, they were almost immediately handed off from the warriors to individuals who would then look after them. Hannah, we know for a fact, was handed over to an extended family group of two adult men, three women, seven children and one white child.”

That’s why the Abenaki viewed Duston’s actions after she escaped with such horror, she said.
“It’s almost like the Geneva Conventions, when you think about it. Hannah betrayed the Abenaki Geneva Conventions. It wasn’t while she was in the midst of warfare that she did these supposedly brave acts. It was while she was in the care of a family,” Bruchak said. “If she had merely escaped, there probably would be very little story to tell, but the fact that she escaped, then stopped and went back to collect scalps – the bloody-mindedness of it is really quite remarkable. …

LINK
The Abenaki historian here glosses over the kidnapping of Hannah Duston. It takes some serious chutzpah to criticize Duston for bloody-mindedness after her baby was murdered. The reason that this story and the Abenaki reaction to it struck a chord with me is because it was not long ago that some conservative (and not so conservative) whites got very upset about the unveiling of a Charleston, South Carolina statue commemorating African-American freedom fighter Denmark Vesey, who attempted to lead a slave revolt and escape to Haiti. Vesey was betrayed, tortured and executed.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.Y. — ON Feb. 15, a group of activists in Charleston, S.C., unveiled a life-size statue of Denmark Vesey, a black abolitionist who was executed in 1822 for leading a failed slave rebellion in the city. For many people, Vesey was a freedom fighter and a proto-civil rights leader. But the statue, the work of nearly two decades, brought out furious counterattacks; one recent critic called him a “terrorist,” and a historian denounced him as “a man determined to create mayhem.”

Radio hosts, academics and newspaper bloggers condemned the project as “Charleston’s parallel to the 1990s O. J. Simpson verdict,” and suggested other African-Americans they believed more appropriate subjects of memorialization, like the rock pioneer Chubby Checker or the astronaut Ronald E. McNair.

LINK

Yes, because when I think of someone who stood up against all the odds and was willing to die for what was right, Chubby Checker is the first person who comes to mind. Ridiculous. That is exactly like an Abenaki historian saying that the Hannah Duston statues in Haverhill should be replaced with Rob Zombie ones. And the people complaining about the Denmark Vesey statue seem to have missed all the statues and other commemorations given to slaveowners and rebels. Now although you could make (and some have made) the argument that the European settlers never should have been in Massachusetts in the first place I don't think anyone would argue that a mother who had just seen her captors kill her infant child by dashing its brains out wouldn't be justified in seeking some payback. Similarly you have to be tone deaf and ignorant not to understand that if you violently enslave someone (and their children and their children's children) then you shouldn't be too surprised or outraged if they decide to make you bleed rather than submit any longer. Now whatever you think of violence (and if you're like most people you probably seek to avoid it) you must understand that violence begets violence and hate. In short if you mess with me I am going to mess with you. That's human nature. As Muhammad Ali said: “I'm a fighter. I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I'm no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won't hit back. You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.” There's no way we can logically admire Hannah Duston and scorn Denmark Vesey or Gabriel Prosser or Nat Turner. Or rather there is no way we can do that and still pretend to aspire to a universal sense of morality. If you have a severely attenuated moral sense that only responds to what is "good" for your kith and kin, then yes you can cheer for one and not the other, but don't be surprised if someone calls you on your hypocrisy. No human can be kidnapped, enslaved or see his or her relatives brutalized and not want to do something about it. It's a cliche but it certainly often remains the case that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. History is less about what actually happened and much more about what we're supposed to learn from what happened. So although history is past it's very much a political endeavor of the present. There is a reason why Duston is glorified while people like Vesey, Turner, Prosser and John Brown are ignored or denounced.

Confederate Flag: No Big Deal?

Something which unites some people on the hard right and on the hard left or nationalist black left is the desire to sneer at the removal of the Confederate Flag from such official public spaces such as the Columbia South Carolina Statehouse or from Texas state license plates. The usual line of "reasoning" on the right will claim that because removal of the Confederate Flag will not stop the horror of "black-on-black" crime or any other pathology which apparently only affects black people it is therefore a waste of time and (this part is important because it dovetails nicely with what many right-wingers think of black people anyway) STUPID for black people to spend any time or energy trying to get the flag removed from public spaces. After this seeming axiom is pointed out the right-winger will usually try to convince you that the Confederate Flag has nothing at all to do with white supremacy or slavery and for that matter neither did the Civil War and anyone who thinks otherwise is the real racist, not them. I think the people who try to argue this are either mentally slow or think that you are. On the left of course there are people who understand the symbolism of the Confederate Flag and do not initially seek to claim that it has no meaning of hatred or a very specific and ugly type of white identity politics. Nonetheless they usually wind up claiming that the flag is harmless and/or needs to be understood with some sort of nuance . Another form of left-winger, disproportionately found in academia or other bastions of so-called radical thought, will claim that the US flag is the flag that black people really need to reject. And then of course there is the "more radical than thou" type who is thoroughly convinced that unless and until we can undo, eliminate and repair each and every incarnation of racism, capitalism, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, speciesism, transphobia, fat shaming, xenophobia, whiteness, nationalism, and any other "ism" you can think of going back to 1492 or before, then your protesting the Confederate Flag or being happy that there is a growing clamor to remove it from public spaces is just evidence that you're a brainwashed sap who's too quick to go for the okey-doke. 

From this point of view you're watching people take flags down and thinking you did something while the power structure remains unchanged. Man you're stupid. Much like some of their counterparts on the far right, some people of the left really do enjoy believing that they're much smarter and thus more moral than the average putz on the street. This is not a political failing. It's a human one. Both of these critiques of people who are trying to remove Confederate Flags from public spaces miss the point. Each "argument" creates a straw man which is then thoroughly beaten. It's quite simple. The Confederate Flag is a symbolic "f*** you" to Black people. There are perhaps other meanings arguably but everyone knows, whether they want to admit or not, what the primary, secondary and tertiary meanings are. People don't like it when you insult them to their face, particularly when they're paying for the "honor". And by the way, the Confederates lost. Although many apparently disagree, I think it was a good thing that they lost. So the flag of the losers has no business being on the public space of the winners. If you want to wear your Confederate Flag belt buckle, wave it at your concerts, tie it to your pickup truck, knock yourself out. But it shouldn't be officially installed on state or federal property. And to those who argue that the US flag is the one we need to reject, the difference is that for all the evil that's been done and blood that's been shed in its name the US flag has the promise and possibility of inclusion and fair play. The Confederate Battle Flag does not and never did. The Confederate Flag is forever fixed in its meaning. Black people in the 1860s were not at all conflicted about which flag offered a better opportunity for advancement and recognition of their humanity. It is, public protestations to the contrary aside, possible for people to walk and chew gum at the same time. You can work to stop inner city violence, lower infant mortality rates, create better food and exercise options, stop police brutality, feed the hungry, assist the homeless or impoverished, prevent redlining, interrupt the flow of black people into prison, and STILL think that the Confederate Flag should come down from public display. 

Phil Robertson, Justine Sacco and Free Speech

I didn't want to write about this until it had reached some level of closure and now that A&E has rescinded its non-suspension suspension of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson I'd like to discuss a few things.
We've talked about this before here and here and here. People should understand what free speech means. With a few exceptions the government, (state, federal, municipal) can't physically prevent you from expressing or sharing your opinion, fine you or put you behind bars for your thoughts, pass laws to make your opinion illegal, or require you to get permission from the government before expressing your opinion. There are increasing attempts by governments at all levels to undermine these protections. The First Amendment limits government actions. Private actors are far different entities. The blog lawyers could detail the case histories but corporations and individuals often have the right to hire and fire as they see fit and associate with whom they want. Their money, their company, their rules. If you don't like it well go find another outlet that more closely approximates your belief system. So when Phil Robertson said: 

"Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right" 

and 

"I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson is quoted in GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” 

It was no violation of his free speech rights for A&E to have suspended him from Duck Dynasty (which was just PR as the new season was already filmed) or for other groups to have criticized him.

When  PR exec Justine Sacco sent out her joking tweet about AIDS and her employer decided that it could continue to make money and thrive without her contributions, again, there was no threat to her free speech. No one put her in jail. She is free to make all the jokes about AIDS and Africans that she wants to make. Go for it I say. At least for now she can make such statements without being encumbered by such constraints as gainful employment. But I'm sure she'll land on her feet eventually. She must find an employer with different values than her previous company, one that understands and accepts her odd (racist) sense of humor. I doubt that will take too long.

Those doggone white people

You would think that conservatives, who at least when it comes to contraception, abortion and racist speech, champion the rights of corporations and individuals to exercise freedoms of speech, religion and association, would understand that the door swings both ways. These freedoms apply to everyone, not just conservatives. Regarding the content of Robertson's statements I'll echo what most intelligent people already pointed out. Robertson was born in 1946. He was a boy when some of the first court decisions opposing segregation came down and a young adult by the time the South was forced, kicking and screaming, to allow desegregation. When Robertson says he didn't know any black people that were saying "those doggone white people" he might have considered the fact that many black people in 1950s and 1960s Louisiana would have thought twice before expressing their honest opinions to any white person, self-described "white trash" or not. It was after all often the "white trash" who were burning buses, beating sit-in protesters, and committing other violent acts. Robertson doesn't say if he or his family members were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. If he had been perhaps he would learned people's true thoughts. Or Robertson might have, if he were so inclined, when he was 18, travelled to Jonesboro, Louisiana and talked to the Deacons of Defense, a group of armed black men, who intended to protect themselves and their community from conservative violence both official and non-official. The Deacons shot back when they were shot at, something which infuriated racist whites. 

In fact given Louisiana's vicious history of segregation and violence, you have to wonder what planet Robertson was living on if he thought black people were happy with their lot in Louisiana or anywhere else in the Jim Crow South. I wish the GQ interview had delved a little more deeply into the difference between Robertson's claimed experiences and the reality of what was going on. Why the hell does Robertson think Nina Simone wrote Mississippi Goddamn?  Because that's not a very happy song. No it's not a happy song at all. Since I do happen to know and be related to black people who lived under Jim Crow I can safely say that Robertson doesn't know the whole story. "Welfare and entitlements" don't have anything to do with being harassed or murdered because you opposed the Southern terror state.

There is actually scripture that would seem to condemn gays. AFAIK there's next to nothing in the Bible that would seem to condone a GLAAD approved positive view about homosexuality. However there is also scripture that would seem to condemn just about anyone. Although Paul condemns homosexuality, Jesus doesn't speak on it. Theologians can argue but people tend to pick and choose which sins they condemn. Jesus talked about this hypocrisy in his Sermon on The Mount but apparently no one listened. When you set yourself up to judge, well that's not really a believer's job, according to Jesus. If you don't adhere to Robertson's views on gays, find a different Christian interpretation that's more to your liking. There's no shortage of sects. But this whole discussion about Biblical injunctions presumes that the Bible should be the basis of secular law or morality. Unless and until you're ready to start stoning disobedient children or allowing men who rape unmarried virgins to make amends by marrying them and paying their father fifty shekels, you might have to admit that the Bible might not always be the best basis for a modern legal or moral system. 

Robertson's comments bothered me less than the hypocrisy of conservatives who sought to cast him as a free speech martyr even as many of the same conservatives did their best to harm the careers of other people with whom they disagreed. Do you remember the conservative rush to protect the free speech rights of Lupe Fiasco, Ward Churchill, The Dixie Chicks, Martin Bashir, Louis Farrakhan, Van Jones and Reverend Wright to say what they wanted without criticism or danger to their careers. Of course you don't. 

Free speech is an endangered species. Those “intolerants” hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.

-Palin speaking of Phil Robertson

"Those with that platform, with a microphone, a camera in their face, they have to have some more responsibility taken," she said on Fox & Friends.

-Palin speaking of Martin Bashir

All we learned from the Robertson and Sacco incidents is that money talks and bs walks.
Robertson is an integral part of cable's top show. His family backed him up. A&E and its advertisers, business partners and other corporations made the financial decision that they didn't want to lose millions in revenue. Sacco was not that valuable to her employer so they let her go and kept it moving. So if you're going to say something controversial or even outright vile, make sure you either work for yourself or are extremely valuable to your employer.

Thoughts?