THE ALL AMERICAN BULLET HEADED SAXON MOTHER'S SON

The opportunistic grifters who comprise the leadership of today’s Republican Party are, each and every one, bad people.  Some of them – the Mitch McConnell wing of the party – are fairly bright; they’ve figured out how to get rich by gaming the system.  Most of the rest are at least smart enough to keep their heads down while cashing checks from their megadonors.  The irredeemably dumb ones tried to form a House America First Caucus.

They issued a vision statement of sorts: “America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions.”  There are a lot of dog whistles in that sentence, but “uniquely Anglo-Saxon” is the loudest.

I feel I have a right to comment on this “Anglo-Saxon traditions” thing because according to Ancestry.com, I’m 94% Anglo-Saxon.  I take a lot of pride in being a descendant of the valiant warrior race that stood up to William “the So-Called Conqueror” and repelled the Norman Invasion in 1066.  And furthermore…. 

Wait, what’s that you say?  The Anglo-Saxons – spoiler alert – DIDN’T repel the Norman Invasion?  You’re telling me that my ancestors (or 94% of them, anyway) lost to a bunch of cheese-eating surrender-monkeys?  That’s a cold shot. 

But that information begs the question of what other uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions are floating around out there that we commoners are supposed to respect.  Some scholars have mentioned “wergild” – the practice of letting rich people commit crimes (up to and including murder) and pay a fine to avoid additional punishment.  That’s a tradition that would obviously appeal to wealthy criminals, many of which occupy positions of leadership in the Republican Party. 

But what other traditions are there?  The most famous Saxon king was Ethelred the Unready, whose name doesn’t stir the blood the way Alexander the Great or Ming the Merciless might.  Of course, the most famous early British ruler was King Arthur, but – assuming he existed at all – Arthur would have been a Celt, not a Saxon.  As a Celtic king in the 6th century, Arthur certainly wouldn’t have had much respect for Anglo-Saxon traditions.  He’d have killed as many effing Anglo-Saxons as he could. 

It is, as the saying goes, a puzzlement.  After much deliberation, however, I have a hypothesis. 

Call me a cynic, but I think the America First Caucus expects us to understand “Anglo-Saxon” as a synonym for “white.”   Shocking, I know, but that interpretation helps illuminate the rest of their statement.  The “border” provision, which regular folks might take as a throwaway line, serves to remind True Believers of that Wall that Mexico totally paid for, as well as those dreaded migrant caravans that pop up every two years during election season.  A national border, in their minds, is basically a “get off my lawn” sign. 

The common culture they yearn for is equally bogus.  You think Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jim Jordan spend time reading Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare?  Who cares about boring old coastal elitist literature, even if it’s limited to the Dead White Male canon?  No, the America First Caucus’s “common culture” is grounded in the imperialist fantasies of propagandists like Rudyard Kipling and John Louis O’Sullivan, who imagined “the white man’s burden,” and “manifest destiny.”  Not that the America First Caucus reads those guys either.  The AFC isn’t big on reading.  Their version of common culture comes from mid-20th century American TV and movies.  Father knows best, but only if the father is Anglo-Saxon.  And there are no Normans in the neighborhood.

And that’s it.  Manifest Destiny, with its foundation of racism, is the dog their dog whistle rhetoric is trying to summon.  Oh, they’ll bob and weave – it didn’t take long for the “leaders” of the America First Caucus to see their shadows when they got a little pushback.  But shortly thereafter, fellow traveler Rick Santorum kicked the can a little further down the road by opining on CNN about the absence of “culture” that 16th and 17th century Europeans found when they encountered the indigenous populations in the New World. 

To be fair, many of those civilizations were decimated by mass die-offs from Old World diseases to which they had no immunity.  But that was a long time ago, and as today’s anti-vaxxers like to say, they’d have died of something by now anyway, so what does it matter?

Republicans argue that our primary responsibility is to be fair to the descendants of the real “first Americans” – the ones who came over on the Mayflower.  They did the best they could, but they were prevented from Anglo-Saxonizing the country when what was left of the original inhabitants kept complaining that the land belonged to them?  Show us the paperwork, buddy, or take a hike.  And so the indigenous populations hiked.  All the way to Oklahoma, some of them.  The ones who survived.

What I’m saying, in my usual roundabout way, is that Joe Biden’s election helped this country dodge a bullet.  Or, more likely, an extinction level event comparable to the Chicxulub meteor strike 66 million years ago.  The bad news is that there are lots more Republican meteors out there.  They know they can’t win honest elections, and they won’t give up without a fight. 

The bad guys won an important battle in 2020, when Trump’s minions screwed up the census count.  It’s not clear that they gained an immediate advantage – their two most reliable pockets of electoral votes come from Florida and Texas, who (like Arizona and California) might have missed out on an additional congressional seat and electoral vote due to the Hispanic undercount – but the Republican Party has succeeded in muddying the waters, and that’s before they start gerrymandering.

As the Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” 

That kind of sucks.  I just turned 74, and I’m tired of vigilance.  But a feller’s gotta play the hand he’s dealt.  We aren’t out of the woods yet.  The lesson of the Trump Era is probably that we’re never out of the woods.  We get comfortable under our little tree, and then Antifa activates a Jewish Space Laser.  Voila, we’re looking for yet another safe space to lead our lives. 

Wrapping this up, as some of my FB friends have politely noted, my output has slowed lately.  Mostly that’s because I feel a lot less urgency now that the Former Guy is safely former.  I’ve had both of my shots (Pfizer, represent).  Most of my friends are my age, and have had their shots too.  It won’t be long until I can begin to hang out with my friends again.  The star-spangled banner yet waves. 

But it’s hard to escape the knowledge that a lot of Republicans would +be happy to see it replaced by the Confederate battle flag.  Or maybe a mid-20th century German battle flag.  Hey, today’s GOP is a big tent, and every flavor of bigotry has a place in today’s Republican Party.  Why limit yourself to just one when there are so many people to hate? 

In other words, the war’s not over, and I will soldier on – likely a bit more slowly than heretofore.  Thanks for the kind words and birthday wishes.  I appreciate my readers.  Especially you.