Happy Fourth
Jeff Alworth
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...."
Two-hundred thirty-three and still going strong. Happy Birthday, America!
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Jul 4, '09
The BO spit take:
"We hold these [assertions] to be [relative based upon one's hyphenated cultural leanings or attachment to some legally recognized or even unrecognized oppressed minority grouping], that all [people, and animals, and maybe plants even, and certainly Gaia], are [inappropriate establishment of religion deleted] equal, [though some animals in our leadership are more equal than are others] that they are [inappropriate establishment of religion once again deleted] with certain unalienable Rights, [unless they are icky, like rights to a firearm of one's choosing] that among these are Life, [unless you are an unfortunate fetus] Liberty [unless you count our ever growing desire to regulate everything through this agency or that] and the pursuit of Happiness [unless this entails some fantasy about keeping the money you earn you sucker]"
12:03 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
We are a restless, revolutionary people. It's in our DNA. And it can be very unsettling, from time to time.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Happy 4th of July!
12:04 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Boats, get off the couch, turn off the Hannity reruns and head over to the Blues Festival. I'll buy you a beer in the name of solid political discourse.
Happy Independence Day!
12:11 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
And to add something more substantive, let's all remember today that we are Americans, and not just that, but Oregonians. In economic turmoil, we need to remember that we cannot settle for "just okay" or for the easiest option.
We should push for full energy independence right here in the state, rather than settling for inefficient, costly options like coal, nuclear and even LNG.
We should fight to provide true health for all Oregonians, which means adequate drug treatment and mental health facilities, sound school nutrition and definitely a public option for seeing a doctor.
We should create an atmosphere of discourse where leaders listen and respond to the concerns of Oregonians. We have that in some cases, but it should be the rule. Or else, what is independence good for?
Jul 4, '09
My unalienable right to pursuit of happiness requires the destruction of your government.
Sorry.
Jul 4, '09
Independence through increased governmental dependence? The future is gonna suck. Hard.
12:42 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Americana at its best today! The Ashland 4th of July Parade included the usual belly dancers, fire trucks and a smiling Representative Jefferson Smith turning cartwheels in front of the Bus Project entry. Now that was impressive!
12:49 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Well, Paulie, once you've clerked for the ninth circuit.....cartwheels in Ashland are to be expected.
Besides, it never hurts to get your......er.....face out there statewide, in case, you know........sometime in the future.......
Jul 4, '09
I didn't think BO'ers celebrated the 4th? Weird...
Well I just put a new Obama sticker on my bike helmet. Now, I am off to burn some Amerikan flags at a GLBT Uprising event.
Solidarity, Cal
Jul 4, '09
Boats, what do you believe in besides sarcasm?
There is a difference between "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." or "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" and the attitude that all good people are evangelicals, the definition of "people of faith" means only certain denominations, that "values" means following Falwell, Dobson et al, that there is no such thing as people of conscience being Congregationalists, Episcopalians (no matter how many Founding Fathers were of those religious dominations) and heaven help us anyone would be a Jew or a Muslim.
I'm guessing you believe that sarcasm is the highest value, and "the common good" is to you just a "socialist plot".
Many years before ordinary folks had access to the Internet and blogs, there was a debate in political circles about 2 groups of people. The problem solvers talked about specific proposals which people could argue like adults (Govs. McCall and Straub were like that, more recently Kitzhaber's Oregon Health Plan or various campaign finance reform proposals, for instance) and the enemy oriented types.
Name calling does not solve problems, it only reveals such people to be enemy-oriented rather than solution oriented, and in some cases sounding like juveniles.
Have you thought about who you would like to run for Gov., Boats, or would that be too positive for you?
3:50 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Of course liberals celebrate our country on Independence Day. It's just that our particular form of patriotism doesn't require calling half the country (or 23%--whatever number of Americans currently admit to being Republican) disloyal.
Jul 4, '09
Though this isn't the thread for such a discussion, there's no one either running or potentially running that I'd like to see as governor. The top leadership of both parties is long on technocratic meddling and short on substance and conviction.
So, sarcasm is the place to be for me. I have no problem with being an enemy to some utopian vision of "progress." (Just imagine the air quotes). "Socialist plot" would be giving far too much credit for what is far more likely just the bumbling destruction of the national character of America through the mindless expansion of the nanny state and the ad hoc importation of the Third World's surplus populations. Plotters actually think things through a little bit.
Jul 4, '09
Of course liberals celebrate our country on Independence Day. It's just that our particular form of patriotism doesn't require calling half the country (or 23%--whatever number of Americans currently admit to being Republican) disloyal.
No, rather it requires a commitment to turning the most successful nation the world has ever seen into yet another sclerotic Euroweenie welfare state, where, as in the case of Airstrip One, no one but the proles dare to speak the truth about how awful things have become in the name of political correctness and groupthink.
Jul 4, '09
They're wonderful, soaring thoughts. We gonna get around to codifying them in our law in the next 250 years?
4:54 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Boats find some oars and row on over to Thenextright.com
Jul 4, '09
Posted by: Boats | Jul 4, 2009 4:14:15 PM
No, rather it requires a commitment to turning the most successful nation the world
Learn some real history. It was an idea + natural resources. We've screwed both of those brainless. Try that schtick without those gimmes and see how successful the US would be. Well, you seem young and stupid, you'll live long enough to.
Boats and BO constantly remind one of the oldest of political saws, "Any conservative in youth has no heart, and any liberal in maturity has no brain".
Jul 4, '09
Ah, the name calling yet again. How wonderfully refreshing. Plenty of places had ideas and natural resources and blew it.
Jul 4, '09
Boats, our progressive friends cannot reconcile the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" with their ideology. It is not the American Revolution that inspires them but the French. Their banner reads "liberty, equality, brotherhood (fraternity)," and we all know how that worked out.
5:59 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
How about a way to chip in and really properly mark the 4th?
The Multnomah Dems, in coordination w/ the DPO, NW Portland Ministries and the folks at Gallagher Plaza (NW PDX) are calling on folks to donate small items to be shipped in care packages to Oregon troops abroad.
Books, Mags, CDs, toiletry items like toothpaste and brushes, grooming items, etc., are all good items to ship. Use your imagination and look around your digs... got a a used CD, book or some other item you have no more use for? Pass it on.
Items can be dropped off at the Mult Dems office (3127 NE 67th - just south of Sandy) - call first for hours 503-312-1970; the DPO, mon or ts, 9-4 232 NE 9th; or other arrangements can be made for drop off or pick-up ... call 312-1970.
The pack-it-up party will be at Gallagher Plaza on Ts. night, so we'll take items up until then.
Jul 4, '09
Posted by: Boats | Jul 4, 2009 5:20:12 PM
Plenty of places had ideas and natural resources and blew it.
Oh, you mean like New York, Chicago, Portland... I meant the US.
Jul 4, '09
Posted by: Old Ducker | Jul 4, 2009 5:49:26 PM
Boats, our progressive friends cannot reconcile
QED. BO gives progressives a bad name.
7:45 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Boats of course favors the Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all, cause he's under the delusion that it's winnable.
Ducker, you might notice that the concept of equality actually occurs in the Declaration before that of liberty. Nothing against liberty, mind you, just that equality is a core U.S. American value too, which the right wants to efface.
And Boats might consider that Jefferson and Franklin substituted "the pursuit of happiness" for Locke's "property."
Most people pursue happiness in the company of others. Most recognize mutual support as a good thing. Most recognize that promoting the general welfare and creating the conditions for pursuing happiness are linked. Most people recognize that we have a social self-interest, that our own lives tend to be better if we live in a decent society.
And both Boats and Ducker might notice that the Declaration does in fact favor instituting governments among men (generic human sense of the word), to protect the rights mentioned, including multiple ways of pursuing happiness including those that involve mutual obligations.
8:32 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
And Chris, the founders cited the right to pursue happiness, not achieve it. Boats and Ducker, sourpusses both, can wish for any state of affairs they wish. This the founders recognized as critical to the scrum needed in democracy. They are not guaranteed the state they desire. Here they must accede to the wishes of their co-patriots, also pursuing their own versions of happiness.
Jul 4, '09
Thanks for the pleasant birthday wishes to our country Jeff! Sometimes it seems we fail to give writers the benefit of the doubt when something in a post doesn't square with our own views... So then, I'll take it in the spirit I believe it was given - let's celebrate another year that we still exist and can call each other countrymen - whether we be friends or adversaries.
Jul 4, '09
I really wonder what constructive activities Boats and Ducker have ever been involved with. They sound like cynics angry that people disagree with their views.
11:59 p.m.
Jul 4, '09
Excellent point, Jeff.
Jul 5, '09
Boats:"...the most successful nation the world has ever seen..."
Boats (and others) is much too modest about the origins and lessons of America's unparalleled "success". Much more essential to our "success" as a world empire than the ideas that fueled our political emancipation is the core idea that fueled US commercial dominance: the notion of white racial superiority. That critical but convenient racial myth enabled the displaced white Europeans, the American "colonists" to "expropriate" (without compensation) the land and its resources from the people already living on that land and relying on those resources. The idea (not uncontested at the time) of white racial superiority was even more important to the emergence of US world dominance by justifying Black African slave labor, enshrined by our own US Supreme Court, as practiced on US Southern plantation and enabling US commercial development throughout the US Northeast. I wonder on which July 4th we will have a full discussion of the role of all the various and competing ideas that came to be accepted (and rejected), defended and practiced in this country as it struggled to rise to world dominance.
Jul 5, '09
I find myself wondering what LT considers a "constructive activity." There are so many that are just sops to one's guilt that offer no realistic chance of solving the problem they purport to address. It's not the "activity" that is in question, rather the adjective "constructive." Many "constructive activities" are ultimately pointless save for the feel good buzz as one fools him or herself into thinking they actually worked towards solving a problem rather mitigate it for a an hour or two.
Jul 5, '09
. . . .That critical but convenient racial myth enabled the displaced white Europeans, the American "colonists" to "expropriate" (without compensation) the land and its resources from the people already living on that land and relying on those resources. The idea (not uncontested at the time) of white racial superiority was even more important to the emergence of US world dominance by justifying Black African slave labor, enshrined by our own US Supreme Court, as practiced on US Southern plantation and enabling US commercial development throughout the US Northeast. I wonder on which July 4th we will have a full discussion of the role of all the various and competing ideas that came to be accepted (and rejected), defended and practiced in this country as it struggled to rise to world dominance.
Why just talk about it? I have always believed that those most disturbed over the transgressions of their ancestors, those who can't live with the thought that history, and apparently even prehistory, is an endless chain of one group screwing over another, from early Cro-Magnons displacing and murdering Neanderthals, to the Chinese lording it over on Tibet, to racist Arabs in Sudan wiping out black African animists just to take land that is next to useless, should perhaps consider ritual suicide as an appropriate level of apology. Why use mealy mouthed "sorries" or borrow some Chinese cash for reparations when you could just off yourself like a deeply apologetic failed Japanese businessman?
As we all know, only white men could be racist slave overlords without conscience. There was never any slavery, territorial expropriation, simple terroristic slaughtering, colonialism, or other messy old school attitudes in any other society anywhere on earth at any time. Native American warfare, slavery, and such? Fantasies made up by cultural anthropologists with an agenda. Documentation of African, Arab, and Chinese entrepreneurs driving the supply side of slavery? An unlikely tale concocted by demand side apologists. Everyone who is not a white person is entirely racially and culturally blameless for their current condition and absolved for any personal or cultural failings they might exhibit because they have the timeless excuse that some vile whitey fucked over great great great great great great great grandpa.
People running around with unbearable historical guilt for something they didn't participate in should just go to as public a place as possible, hang a placard around one's neck stating "Sorry for what my ancestors did to you, whomever might have taken offense." Douse one's self with the gasoline and get on with the self-immolation.
7:40 p.m.
Jul 5, '09
Boats: Independence through increased governmental dependence? The future is gonna suck. Hard.
This from the guy whose artificially high family income largely derives from his doctor wife, whose salary is high because the U.S. government restricts the number of physicians and medical schools. (Government interference which, naturally enough, he's more than happy about.)
He also doesn't know how much he and his wife make compared to the rest of the U.S., and so pretends his family isn't rich. And despite the money, knows literally nothing about third-world countries, or basic facts about nearly anything. And is angry about paying a few more bucks to help out people in the worst economy since the Great Depression. (Much for the same reason: GOP governance.)
In other words, he's an ignorant hypocritical a--hole. And a modern conservative Republican. But I repeat myself.
Oh, and for anyone who considers these kinds of statements counterproductive, my experience is that you can't be productive with a--holes like Boats. The best thing is sunlight, reminding them repeatedly what miserable excuses for human beings they are, until the sunlight gets so hot, they go crawl back under their rock.
9:10 p.m.
Jul 5, '09
Goats,
The near universality of slavery (see Orlando Patterson's magisterial Slavery and Social Death (1982) does not obviate differences of scale and kind in the role of slavery in given societies. Very few societies with slavery had economic systems in which slavery was integral to them and which depended on it for their economic reproduction, according to the comparative historians of slavery. Among those societies was the pre-abolition U.S.A. (and more generally the New World colonial plantation complex in the Caribbean and Latin America, & post-colonial descendants).
Generally speaking it is a commonly understood ethical principle that the responsibility of one party for its actions does not absolve other parties of their responsibility for theirs. So you are certainly right about there being a supply side to the trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan African slave trades (as well as the medieval European slave trade too and from Russia and in the Mediterranean), as well as an Arab & Indian Ocean largely Muslim demand side, intra-SE Asian trades etc. But that is neither here nor there as to the responsibility of our specific society for our specific role in racialized enslavement and continued post-emancipation oppression and exploitation of the ex-slaves and their descendants, or the expropriation of American Indian peoples, or the racialized exploitation of various other subcategories of workers (including at certain periods people whose descendants later successfully claimed "whiteness" such as the early 19th century Irish and Eastern and Southern Europeans before the 1930s.
The earliest of my ancestors to arrive in the U.S. did so in the 1880s (certain Swedish=French ancestors were in Canada in the 1840s or 1850s but the Larson-into-Lawson anglicized descendants came to the U.S. ca. 1900). So I had no ancestors directly involved in the slavery based U.S. economy (certain Scottish ancestors in a textile industry district may have derived their livelihoods partly from processing U.S. slave-raised cotton, globalization is old). But I have no doubt at all that my great grandparents, my grandparents, my parents and myself have been advantaged in our times by the racialization of of inequality in the U.S., and by the accumulated, even compounded investments of expropriated and exploited wealth into institutions with racialized inequality of access. This is true for my daughter as well, do a somewhat lesser degree.
If you are white, it is also true for you. You can deny responsibility for rectifying current inherited inequalities, that merely speaks badly of your character -- but then I'm hardly perfect either. But if / when you try to pretend you haven't inherited the legacies not just of slavery and expropriation and of Jim Crow, and gained advantage from them, you are lying, not least to yourself.
Harry Belafonte, an enormously talented and intelligent black man who by dint of work and shrewdness in the application of his talents made himself famous and wealthy (I don't know if that shrewdness ever took on ugly aspects, as often it does, regardless of race) was once asked in an interview what he had to complain about from racism and racial inequality. His answer was that if he'd been white, he'd have been president.
Jul 6, '09
Belafonte is an asshat, no matter his color. In that regard he is rather like Mr. Maurer, who think insults actually wound someone who cares not for his opinion on any topic.
I would be more than happy to honestly discuss apologies, reparations, the whole gamut of manufactured white guilt, just as soon as the aggrieved minorities honestly address their catastrophic failures as communities to even to begin to rebound from it. How long is it going to take for instance, to have education be highly valued across the board in African American communities?
Oftentimes, Africans, Jamaicans, Haitians and other "blacks" who have had disadvantaged histories come here to America and excel. Perhaps it's because they haven't on the whole imbibed the "it's all whitey's fault" kool-aid that black liberals in the Democratic Party sell to make a living.
Pushers by any other name.
9:13 p.m.
Jul 6, '09
Boats: the whole gamut of manufactured white guilt
Oh, I forgot to mention that he's racist a--hole too. Silly me.
Boats, go crawl back under your rock. You are not welcome in polite company.
Jul 7, '09
Steven,
Polite company?
Foul language and insults have no place, and are no substitute for rational discourse.
Time to look in the mirror.
10:45 p.m.
Jul 8, '09
Sorry, Mr. Many. Accurate descriptions of evil people are a perfectly acceptable response to them. And the credibility of any attack coming from anyone anonymous is damned close to nil.
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