Pogo* said it years ago: We have met the enemy and he is us. A lyricist for the Broadway musical “Li’l Abner”** may also have been right: Progress is the root of all evil, progress is the cause of it all.
There was tremendous “progress” for “us” in the interstate highway system (see HERE and HERE) that led to the rape of the countryside for suburbia and the gutting of cities throughout the land in favor of asphalt-surrounded malls nearby. Cars and trucks were the way to go; with petroleum used up “we” need to be always on the move electrically. Don’t think — drive.
(The above suggestions originate in comic strips of newspapers of yore. The Berkshire Eagle op-ed page for today, July 6, launched some of what follows.)
Columnist Carole Owens writes (“Mohican dispossession a dark spot in local history”) of the swindling from a band of the Mohican nation of their land in southern Berkshire County and nearby by politically astute — and rapacious — whites. These native Americans had abandoned it and vamoosed entirely by the early 1800s, westward eventually to Wisconsin. A Christian missionary named John Sargeant, a pair of Woodbridge brothers, and, later, the Puritanist theologian Jonathan Edwards come out rather well in this story.
(Readers of this blog from outside Eagle territory are respectfully urged to contact any of the newspaper’s subscribers they know to see this excellent summary, which deals with a mere dot on the whites’ march across the continent; properly importuned, perhaps some of those subscribers will somehow share its contents.
(Owens makes use of a wonderful piece by Lion G. Miles (1934-2020) in the New England Quarterly titled “The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818.” To be able to read it via a free subscription, you may have to find it in on a search engine and follow directions, entering the name of your local library as “institution” and then describing an interest, like “history.” You will be handsomely rewarded.)
Lower on the same op-ed page is Errol Morris’s look at a key Washington insider’s machinations, blandly headed in the Eagle “Donald Rumsfeld’s fog of memos.” Also published in the New York Times, it may be found HERE.
Morris begins, “Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task.” His sketch of one of the system’s consummate political manipulators, who died last month at 91, is some of the fruit of his following Rumsfeld for years, directing the documentary “The Known Unknown” about him, and writing a series of articles about the neocon who was twice secretary of defense.
The op-ed concludes with this paragraph: “[Author] George Packer recently called Mr. Rumsfeld America’s worst secretary of defense. But this isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not the man, so much as the methodology. And the methodology, alas, seems ubiquitous. It’s not just him. It’s all of us.”
“Methodology.” It’s how Ephraim and Elijah Williams and their ilk, with help from a distant legislature, could dispossess Mohicans of any land and send them packing. It’s how “neoconservatives,” with help from just about everyone including — and this is essential — the news and entertainment media — can wage Cold War and later “the war on terrorism” to keep ruinous imperial games going.
Rumsfeld, his turn-of-the-21st-century “deputy” defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and fellow co-signers of the Project for a New American Century manifesto including Dick Cheney were only the obvious conductors of a system they mastered. They have used entities throughout the world including the United Nations and a controlled international press the way the Williamses & Co. used the General Court in Boston to have their way more than two centuries before.
So don’t go pointing fingers. Just get in your car and drive.
— Mark Channing Miller
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* A comic strip possum created for posterity by Walt Kelly.
** Also the name of Al Capp’s daily comic strip featuring Li’l Abner himself and his wife Daisy Mae, mostly in Dogpatch.