Folklore Keeps Plowing On

by

Gadfly

           Folklore need not be true, merely plausible.  If it’s a good story, it will replicate within a culture, essentially shaping and possibly defining the culture.  Why is this important?

On October 30, 2008, an individual running for the most powerful position in the world, remarked that he and his followers were a mere five days away from fundamentally transforming America.  Without specifics, the transformation was all about hope and change.  What did the change involve?  Nobody really knew, but it was a good story.  Eventually the change came to light.  Dr. Paul Kengor captured it well in his commentary, “How Obama Made Good on His Promise to Fundamentally Transform U.S.A.”  America has been transformed.

In an interview with Charlie Rose (before he was outed and put out to pasture by the #MeToo cohort), Obama was asked what his biggest mistake was in his first term of office.  He answered that the nature of the office “is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”  This story telling included lionizing Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Black Lives Matter while demonizing the top 1% in America (“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”) and Christians (“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”).

Peter Wehner rebutted the Crusades-related “high horse” comment in his commentary, “Get Off Your High Horse, Mr. Obama.”  Much of what modern Americans know about the Crusades is folklore.  In a book review of Jonathan Riley-Smith’s book Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, Thomas Madden observed: “It was Runciman [an untrained historian] who called the Crusades ‘a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.’ The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.”

            So how does the folklore keep plowing on in America today?  One major example is The New York Times “1619 project.”  Speaking to a choir audience, a Times’ editor bemoaned the failure of the Russia collusion project; thus, they felt compelled to make the case for Trump racism in an attempt to defeat him in the 2020 election.  This year, 2019, they assert is the 400^th anniversary of the birth of racist America.  Their research revealed that the first black slave arrived in 1619.  I do not dispute this fact.  Yet, the Times’ story does not tell a more complete one.  If one reviews the history of slavery, it lasted several millennia and had little to do with the color of one’s skin.

 

In 1619, America was a British colony.  The slave trade from Africa involved much more than America.  As the table below reveals, America, as a British colony, represented 2.7% of the nearly 11 million slaves transported via the Atlantic slave trade.

As the British colony, called America, matured and realized its citizens preferred liberty and individual sovereignty over rule of subjects by a King, they severed their bond with the British monarchy in 1776 (157 years after the first slave arrived in the British colony called America).  Language in the Declaration of Independence declared “all men are created equal.”  There were no racial or ethnic qualifiers in the Declaration.  Wrestling with the issue of the international institution of slavery that the new nation of America inherited, language in the Constitution was also very carefully worded in order to accommodate a transition away from slavery.  In defense of our Founders, a recent book, No Property in Man:  Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation’s Founding, by Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, provides a compelling analysis of the language.  Peter C. Myers provides an excellent review of the book in a Claremont Book Review article, “Vindicating the Constitution.”

Less than 80 years after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, America entered into a civil war to set all men free.  The cost was well over 600,000 casualties to pay for the sin of slavery.  Many would argue this cost met or exceeded just reparations.  How many other nations in the table above sacrificed that many humans on the altar of reparations?

 

Today, we again hear political candidates calling for reparations.  Not a single individual in America today is or has ever been a slave.  Nor has any individual in America today owned or ever have owned a slave.  If the definition of justice is to give to a person what is due to them, then after 154 years since the end of the Civil War how would reparations in America be just?

There certainly are individuals who harbor hatred towards others for bigoted reasons.  This does not represent America as a whole.  And for those who believe Trump falls in this category, they distort what he actually says and does or simply repeat mainstream media folklore.  For example, Trump is not anti-immigration (he’s married to an immigrant).  He is against illegal immigration.  He believes in the rule of law, even to the point of honoring federal injunctions to his executive orders.  Trump didn’t criticize Colin Kaepernick because he is black.  He criticized him because he’s unpatriotic and visibly insulted a national symbol for which millions of fellow Americans have died protecting.

 

Folklore can feed bigoted hatred.  Unfortunately, when someone in America aspires to the Office of the Presidency and pushes false folklore, such as institutional racism in America, we should call them out.  This includes The New York Times, which is clearly demonstrating it may be the modern-day version of The Daily Worker, which aggressively advanced propaganda (which, in turn, became folklore among the rank and file) in support of Soviet Communism.

America has been a beacon for other nations because it was known as a free and just society.  America has no slaves (with the exception of the sex trade industry); but with the ever-powerful administrative state, many Americans are now experiencing characteristics of serfdom where political elite determine how much of our income we get to keep and how to redistribute wealth.

Truth will set us free from the chains of illusions and delusions.  And there can be no justice without truth. Folklore is not an advocate of truth.  Yet, it keeps plowing on.