Deluded lab rats - that's us.

Faute de mieux (that's French), I watched the linked program below. Barry Lando apparently thinks that the Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians, Iraqi Shia, Saudis, etc. have made fools of the United States while wandering the corridors of a maze. This is what, allegory? Extended metaphor? It seems to imply that these people and governments are not purposeful, and that they are not reacting to what they have correctly perceived to be the inherent "intellectual" weaknesses of Americans taken as a whole. Oh, yes, I left out the Israelis and their 5th column. My bad.

I would argue that none of this could have happened if the marketing of pop culture had not become the major motif (Ruritanian?) of American life. Today we hear politicians describe their pursuit of constitutional office as a process of "branding" and "packaging" people who are; wavy haired, moneyed, pretty, minoritied, etc. through a process which assumes that selling government is like selling toothpaste.

Perhaps the political consultants are correct, but I would opine that such a theory can only work well in an atmosphere in which the electorate are so poorly informed and ignorant of basic history, civics (remember that?) geography, etc. that they can be sold dog s--t for toothpaste if the marketing campaign is well enough funded.

This three hour film concerning the Plymouth colony's establishment is an interesting corrective to some of the nonsense most of us were fed in school about the event. This is a good example of our ignorance. Unfortunately only a handfull of "renegades" will ever see it. New England triumphalism in the educational field long ago convinced us that "America" began at Plymouth and that "the Pilgrim Fathers," were men of great ability and vision who arrived in New England in a pristine new land where they suffered nobly and yet persevered through that first awful winter to raise crops and to celebrate the first Thanksgiving the following autumn with their Indian neighbors who had been so impressed with the virtue of the Separatists (Pilgrims) that they had all become pals.

The film discloses the following:

- King James I only reluctantly allowed the Separatists to depart for Virginia to settle in the estuary region of the Hudson River. His reason? He wanted to be rid of them becasue they were waging a propaganda campaign from Holland against the Church of England. (They couldn't get there and decided on the Cape Cod area instead)

- It was far from true that New England (known by that name before the Pilgram settlement) was an unknown shore in England. English and other fishermen had been building and using temporary fish processing camps up and down the New England coast for at least twenty years. How do we know that? According to Bradford's first person account, several Indians who spoke English wandered into Plymouth within the first few months. "Samoset," and "Squanto" would be two such. The first had been working for the English in what is now Maine and the second had been "shanghaied" aboard an English merchant ship and transported to Spain where he and everal others were sold into slavery. He escaped and made his way to London where he worked for several years before taking passage on an English ship to Newfoundland (known then by that name) and then by English fishing vessels back to the Plymouth area where he found that nearly all the Indians that he knew were dead from newly introduced European disease.

- The question of disease (plague of some sort), naturally arises. My wife wisely observes that all the nonsense about blankets infected with smallpox makes no sense. Even if you believe that the the 17th Century English would do that, it was simply not necessary. All you had to do to infect the Indians was breathe on them, share food with them or sleep with a few of their women. Nature would then take its unlovely course. The opposite of this was also true. At both Jamestown and Plymouth the Europeans sickened and died from diseases they had not experienced before. The New England Indians appear to have lost at least half their numbers to European diseases before the settlements at Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay ever happened.

- Professor types and Indian activists are interspersed throughout the production. One of the professors really interested me. He mentioned the Jamestown Colony but insisted that it could "hardly be called a success." No? By 1620 when the Pilgrims arrived at their icebox, there were between 1500 and 2000 people in the Jamestown Colony. They had been through many of the same vicissitudes 15 years earlier and by 1620 had "turned the corner." They had also been celebrating a harvest festival a lot like Thanksgiving for a number of years.

- The Plymouth Colony was a monument to incompetent planning. Evidently, no one with any real knowledge of New England was consulted in "planning" the settlement. But then, we continue that tradition today. After all, like the Pilgrims, we are the representatives of a "brave new world." Old knowledge has little value in a "brave new world." In their ignorance and ineptitude the colonists proceeded with a landing in a sub-arctic wilderness in November. As a result they very nearly all died that first winter. About half survived. If some had not, I would not be writing this. Fortunately for them the ship was forced to "winter over" at Plymouth where it contunued to provide shelter and fortunately the "merchant adventurers" (businessmen) in London who funded the colony had stuffed the ship full of provisions. That's why they didn't starve to death before spring.

- Tradition, they were a "godly company" intent upon creating the "New Jerusalem" somewhere upon a hill where a theocracy could emerge. That was actually true of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony founded in 1630 and carefully restricted to "the elect" as settlers, actually, the "elect" with money. Careful screening took placein Engand before embarcation. The separatists at Plymouth were a different matter. Over half of them were not separatists at all. They were useful folks who had signed on looking for fortune and opportunity in America just like the folks down at Jamestown. John Alden was a non-separatist construction worker. Miles Standish was a professional soldier looking for work, etc. The creation of the "Mayflower Compact' was occasioned by their settlement outside the area of the license or "patent" from the crown. The crown's authority did not extend to New England and the Compact was signed as a temporary bridge to provide a basis for government, not as a new Magna Carta.

- Lastly, the Wampanoag People who inhabited the area from modern Boston to the shank of Cape Cod had lost most of their people to the diseases previously mentioned. Massasoit, their headman, recognized that he needed powerful allies against surrounding enemy Indian "nations." The Pilgrims had guns and had been trained by Standish. They obviously needed allies if they were to survive. the Indian ,Squanto and and a man named Winslow who had the SF gift, negotiated a treaty of mutual security and reliance and so Plymouth survived.

---------------------------------

Does this sound like the mythos (that's Greek) that you were fed as a kid? Does this sound like a basis for "American Exceptionalism" as justification for self satisfied meddling? Where is the "city on a hill" in this example of bungling and eventual resort to balance of power politics and diplomacy? Massachusett's Bay colony was a prime example of narrow minded theocratic oligarchy. It was even worse.

My ancestors did not care for it. They just kept moving west, farming, fighting Indians and working for the railroads unitil they reached the Pacific.

God Bless Them. pl

http://www.hometheaterinfo.com/desperate_crossing.htm

Comments

[walrus]

.........and the Pilgims weren't rugged Libertarian individualists either.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:

May be I am too cirtical; but when I look at how Mexico is suffering as a consequence of North Americans' drug culture and it potential impact on US well being and security and the threads on this forum on containing China and waging war against Iran; I feel like Mike Royko and his "Governor Moonbeam" cooment.

Earth to the United States, Earth to the United States, Come in please, come in!

[turcopolier]

Babak

You are an enemy and so I care not what you think or say. My comments are for my deluded countrymen. pl

[turcopolier]

walrus

Much about them was pathetic. pl

[walrus]

Col. Lang, apparently David Frum has joined the reality based community out of frustration with deluded Republicans. Would you call Frum a respectable Conservative?

"Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”"

http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:

I never considered you an enemy.

Therefore, I am personally insulted by your statement.

And since I do not have a thick skin, I once again must decline to participate in this forum, which I had joined again per your own earlier invitation.

[Cronin]

Col. Lang -- I'm a native of the Old Colony, and I'm glad that the more varied, nuanced, and more truly human reality of New England colonization is becoming more widely known. It has the virtue of not only being true, but also more interesting. I suppose I hadn't realized that the Pilgrim Fathers myth was as entrenched in other regions of the country -- though I will say that I think New Englanders are beginning to have a more accurate and less mytho-poetic understanding of their own past (full disclosure: I'm working on my doctoral dissertation on Plymouth County, 1740-1840; also, not to be pedantic, but the Wampanoag territory didn't actually extend to Boston -- that was Massachusetts territory, who were devastated at a much higher rate by the plague of the period c. 1618, and thereby left themselves more vulnerable to acculturation and conversion - Eliot's 'praying Indians', who got the worst of both sides in King Philip's War. Wampanoag territory extended along a line sloping southwest from Scituate Harbor, dipping southward to take in some of the great ponds and cedar swamps of western Plymouth County, and then continuing southwestward to the Narragansett lands along their eponymous Bay).
I would want to say, though, that the only thing that I somewhat object to is your apparently strong dislike of New Englanders; perhaps this comes as a reaction to having a myth of uniquely pure and virtuous Pilgrim Fathers pushed down your throat. Sir, let me say that I could take the same attitude toward Virginians (as many do here -- thus the Internet meme "f--- the South", which is popular in Northern and Great Lakes states), especially given that we fought on opposite sides of two civil wars -- Cavaliers and Roundheads, Yankees and Confederates. And while it is true that Jamestown was 'turning the corner' in 1620 away from its first disastrous years (the 'starving time'), it's also true that, for most of its residents in the 17th C., Virginia was more likely to be a place of indenture or fever than wild success (unless you were a wealthy widow, of course, in which case you were likely to acquire even more wealth). But I think to focus on differences like these is ultimately beside the point -- New Englanders and Virginians fought together on the front lines of the 18th Century struggle for independence, and in all American wars ,save one, since. That matters more to me than the - admittedly significant -- differences in political economy and culture. I'd like to lastly say that, though I'm glad your people found new homes in the west, 'those who stayed behind' did not tamely submit to a theocratic order -- quite the contrary, as the success of the Jeffersonians in breaking, at long last, in the first decade of the 19th C., the Federalist stranglehold on New England politics, showed. This is not to say the struggle between free-thinking individualism and rigid orthodox school-marmism in New England is over -- but nor is the struggle between the great planters of the Tidewater and the plain yeomanry of the Piedmont and the Shenandoah (I speak figuratively in both cases). On this weekend of gratitude, looking across the Bay at Plymouth -- the steeple I see now adorns a synagogue, which I think is a fine reminder of the current reality and historical roots of American religious pluralism (in Plymouth, in Virginia, even Mass. Bay and Connecticut, though against their wishes, and of course Rhode Island and Maryland) -- on this weekend, I am grateful that there are men and women, of New England and Virginia and all the several sections of the far-flung Union, that remain committed to republican government; what a pity that so few of them hold elected office in this ostensible 'republic' of ours.

[turcopolier]

Babak

Everything about you says enemy. Goodby. pl

[turcopolier]

Cronin

"New Englanders and Virginians fought together on the front lines of the 18th Century struggle for independence"

My Revolutionary War kin were all in the Connecticutt Line and various engaged militai units.

"F--k the South?" you associate yourself with that? pl

[turcopolier]

Walrus

Frum? A Canadian immigrant and Zionist neocon. pl

[turcopolier]

Cronin

In addition, thanks for geography lesson. I take it that the metes and bounds describe an area roughly the same shape but somewhat smaller. I never lived in that part of New England. My wife and mother were/are New Englanders of Canadian descent. Their/my people arrived in New France before 1650. I lived in Maine when I was in hIgh school. It was not my intention to dump on New England although I subscribe to the view that "if the US had been settled from west to east, New England would still be uninhabited." My father's people did not begin to leave NE until around 1800 having arrived between 1620 and 1640. My point had to do with the utterly false and destructive mythology that underlies the aggressive, self, righteous attitude displayed by so many Americans on both the right and left. That attitude ultimately comes from New England and it has permeated the country. The "poor f-----g South" has little in the way of such mythology as a native ideology. Jefferson and Washington are revered but Jeffersonian ideas can hardly be said to predominate. No. "Exceptionalism" prevails now in the south and that is from New England. "F--k the South?" well, why not. the North and Middle West already did that and now they reap the fruits of "a love so strong it could not let them go..." Tant pis pour eux. " pl

[Adam L Silverman]

Sir,

This pretty well sums up the advertising/corporate driven nature of what you referenced in terms of marketing of pop culture:
http://blog.thephoenix.com/BLOGS/talkingpolitics/archive/2011/11/25/romney-s-ad.aspx

[Cronin]

Colonel -- I don't want to get into the War here (you know which one), because I think fightin' words would soon be spoken, but I want to say firmly -- I do not at all side with any fool who says 'F--- the South.' Quite the contrary. I think it's stupid and corrosive, a species of nonsense and chauvinism. I will admit that I had, several years ago, quite a bit of New England sectional bigotry, and probably still do -- but the experience of having the best-read person I've ever met, a native Alabamian and historian of the antebellum South, as a dissertation advisor disabused me of some of my facile notions about the former slave states (as well as southern-settled parts of the Midwest, e.g., lower Indiana, Illinois, Ohio).
As for who is responsible for 'City on a Hill' exceptionalism -- I can't abide it, wherever it comes from politically, and though I think New England has a lot to own for it, I hardly think it's alone in terms of the sections. The War Hawks of 1812, after all, Clay and Calhoun, were hardly New Englanders, and we really didn't want much to do with Texas and the Mexican War. It seems to me that there are multiple versions of chauvinism, one almost for each section (which really are more analagous to European or Latin American nation-states in some ways) -- e.g., there is the above-mentioned City on a Hill syndrome, from New England; but also, for instance, isolationism, which, to me, seems to be the great sin of the Midwest - the delusion that the rest of the world is both wicked and irrelevant. Western or West Coast chauvinism, at least in my experience, often finds expression in the conviction that everything east of the Sierra Nevada is backwards and unfree. Southern chauvinism had (and has) to do, I would suggest, with the maintenance of a system of white supremacy over several centuries. Perhaps some of your ire comes from the fact that, whereas Southerners have had to actively confront their history (I mean, look at Faulkner, one of my all-time favorites), almost as a part of who they are, the rest of the regions are able to whistle through the historical graveyard, as it were (e.g., Ohio's 19th Century 'black laws' were the most restrictive in the Free States). At any rate, you're absolutely right about one thing: no one in their right mind would settle the Gulf of Maine if they had the choice of Santa Barbara. But then again, there is something to the idea of climate and culture being related, and I will not deny that New Englanders are a bit crazy, myself included from all the snow and wind. (Have you ever seen Jefferson's list of north-south differences? Very enlightening). Anyway, do keep up the good work around here, I read your blog daily and value it highly (especially the commenter-community).

[Cronin]

Let me add also: you're entirely right about the parlous state of our body politic. I wonder if a free people can subsist with this much advertising.

[turcopolier]

Cronin

There is an interesting paper for someone to write cmparing the Powhatan Wars and king Philip's War. i had kin in king Philip's War. pl

[Cronin]

Col. -- you're very much correct about those two conflicts -- it's amazing, but a paper like that would, I think, be really looked down upon by the proponents of gender and cultural studies that currently rule the American historical academy (I don't have a problem with either category per se, I just don't think they are the end-all-be-all of human existence). For instance, Harvard's Jill Lepore wrote what I thought was an entirely inadequate account of King Philip's War (THE NAME OF WAR), but it was very well received in the graduate seminar in which I read it. It had very little about the war itself, instead concentrating on its cultural influence decades later. I was so outraged, as someone who grew up amidst those once-dark and bloody grounds, that the one book talking about Anglo-Indian warfare that we read concentrated almost not at all on said warfare. These were people's lives! These events literally determined the course of nations, yet we'll not examine them closely? I've never seen such a faddish bunch as a lot of today's academics.

[Ramojus]

Col. Lang:

As I recall, being a Chicagoan, Mike Royko's "Governor Moonbeam" label was his moniker for the past and current California governor, Jerry Brown, when he was running for president in 1976(?)

[Cold War Zoomie]

Whenever I hear the modern conservatives talk about how we were founded as a Christian nation, I think of this:

http://www.nchistoricsites.org/bath/legends-whitefield.htm

It's quite possible that I had family members there as early as 1717. I'd really be proud if some of them pissed off Whitefield!

[highlander]

Babak,

You best have a thick skin,when you cross swords with the Colonel!

Hell, he has thrown me off the train before, and our ancestors wintered at Valley Forge together.

Such is life.

[turcopolier]

babak

highlander reminds me of my ill nature. i do not accuse you. sorry. pl

[The Twisted Genius]

Although I'm now comfortably ensconced in Virginia, I still consider myself a New Englander. Looking back on my early education, I can see the signs of regional bigotry. I attended the Algonquin School from 4th through 8th grades. We were raised on a steady diet of King Philip's War, the Pequot War, Queen Anne's War and the Revolution. Funny, we learned about the Civil War during the war's centennial, but it just seemed so far away and foreign. We read lots of Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper in our literature classes. Oppressively heavy stuff for us kids, but it was seasoned with Kenneth Roberts and Mark Twain (because he settled in Connecticut, no doubt). We had to read some Cotton Mather rantings. Most of us kids decided the Pilgrims and Puritans were a bunch of ass hats (or whatever the 1960's grammar school equivalent of that term was). We were more the Natty Bumpo or Langdon Towne types. I really didn't start widening my world until the Jesuits took me by the ear in high school.

Cronin, I appreciate your learned and even handed defense of the old sod... cold, rocky sod.

[turcopolier]

TTG

Marguerite tells me tat we did the Pequot War. So, I guess we were features in your curriculum. the Algonquin scholl in Prospect, CT. pl

[Fred]

Texas? There's a whole new mythology there.

[Green Zone Cafe]

I think you are missing irony in the Colonel's statement, Babak. Consider the context.

[turcopolier]

GZC

He doesn't do irony. pl