Op-Ed

Before the fake holiday known as Columbus Day completely disappears for another year, I want to grab hold of it for a moment and look at what it really has to offer us: a dizzying dose of historical realism.

We’re not who we think we are. The social order in which we find ourselves is far more the result of dominance and dehumanization than principled integrity — a reality that demands deep introspection, not celebratory lies and a silent shrug as the worst of who we are continues.

The scariest part about the legacy of Columbus, and Europe’s “Age of Discovery” — ah, the white men break out of their cage and find the rest of the world — is that it’s still alive. And while there’s a growing demand that we should dump Columbus Day as a national holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think something else is necessary as well: We need to look deeply at the legacy of Columbus and begin to own it. No more whitewash!

What if we stopped separating the looming national chaos into separate categories —racism, climate change, war, vote suppression, election theft, pandemic, science denial, white supremacy, police brutality, etc. — and tried looking at it all at once?

This may be the legacy of Donald Trump, our first corkscrew-in-chief: He has popped the cork on who we are and reality, so it seems, is gushing uncontrollably like never before. Trump, with his defiance of political correctness and the norms of the status quo, not to mention his desire to be the American Mussolini — unchallenged in his leadership either by election results or medical consensus — has created much of the chaos on his own. But the bulk of the chaos is simply America the Terrible emerging from the shadows: our real history suddenly visible.

Ohio’s biggest-ever bribery case is rocking America’s reactor industry ... and the fall election.

Full details of the shocking arrest of Ohio’s powerful Speaker of the House are still unfolding.

But on Monday, the FBI charged Larry Householder and four associates with taking $60 million (that’s NOT a typo) in bribes from “Company A,” suspected to be the Akron-based nuke utility FirstEnergy. The company has not been formally named as the source of the bribe, but FE’s stock has since plummetted.

Householder is suspected of buying votes for the widely hated $1.5 billion bailout of two decrepit nuke reactors on Lake Erie. Donald Trump lobbied at least five legislators to support the cash giveaway. Ohio’s moderate Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has asked Householder to resign. 

Without the bailout, Perry and Davis-Besse would already be dead in the rising tsunami of US reactor shutdowns. 

The handout also supported two ancient coal burners (one in Indiana), and ten small solar plants. It killed a big, highly successful state-wide efficiency program and crippled further Ohio development of wind and solar. 

This isn’t free unsolicited advice on your new name, because (1) you’ve pretended to ask everyone for input, and (2) if you name your team the Washington Warriors next year, as I’m guessing you would have done by now if not for some legal dispute, I’ll be happy to sell you the URL washingtonwarriorssuck.com for a donation of .00001% of the U.S. military budget to the people of Yemen.

So, here’s my non-free and fully solicited advice: don’t be a moral imbecile. Name your team for something positive. Don’t name it something else cruel and offensive just because nobody’s objected yet.

Do you remember when they had to rename the Washington Bullets, not because they cared that bullets were being used to murder people all over the world, but because the city of Washington, D.C., had become famous for its high level of shootings?

Here’s a quietly unsettling moment from the current cries for change churning across the nation:

A teenage girl is at a grocery store in the small town of Marion, Virginia. Her brother, Travon Brown, age 17, had recently become both beloved and hated — the center of controversy — in the town, because he had organized a protest against racism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This was one of thousands of such protests across the country, but the majority-white town was nonetheless riled up over this affront, according to the Washington Post, which took a long, deep look at events there.

On June 12, 2020, Matt Taibbi published a rather confrontational article entitled “The American Press is Destroying Itself.” In it, he laments that “the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres, who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” Taibbi cites a litany of recent “newsroom revolts,” which signal, in his mind, an editorial crisis of political correctness, where journalists have been beaten into submission by the new leftist brigade of groupthink.

To be sure, Taibbi’s concerns are not entirely misplaced. Anyone who’s spent a day on Twitter knows it poses a uniquely high reputational cost for publishing anything even mildly controversial. But Taibbi talks in existential terms. He presents a grand narrative in which the left is cannibalizing itself, supplanting “traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance” and “free inquiry” with “shaming, threats, and intimidation” of those who deviate from the accepted view.

The U.S. government was created with the mandate to not establish any state religion or to forbid any religion. There were a couple of ways this could have gone.

Here’s one path that was not taken. The freedom of religion and the separation of religion from the state could have encouraged a widespread understanding of what a crock of malarkey religion all is. If no religion can actually persuade everyone of its claims, if people choose their various and sundry religions based on factors wholly unrelated to persuasive argument, then why not let religion fade away with other myths and superstitions?

Here’s a large part of what actually happened. The freedom of religion created the practice of respecting as beyond question multiple conflicting and contradictory dogmas because each was declared by some person or group to be their religion. The right to believe what you declare it important to you to believe is more widely cherished in the United States than is the right to a decent standard of living.

Grassroots outrage and nationwide protests after Minneapolis cops murdered George Floyd have pushed much of U.S. corporate media into focusing on deadly police mistreatment of black people. The coverage is far from comprehensive on the subject of racism in the “criminal justice” system -- we’re still hearing very little about the routine violations of basic rights in courtrooms and behind bars -- yet there’s no doubt that a breakthrough has occurred. The last two weeks have opened up a lot more media space for illuminating racial cruelty.

But what about economic cruelty?

Media outlets routinely detour around reasons why African Americans and other people of color are so disproportionately poor -- and, as a result of poverty, are dying much younger than white people. The media ruts bypass confronting how the wealthy gain more wealth and large corporations reap more profits at the expense of poor and middle-income people.

The global elite is conducting a coup that is designed to destroy all of the key elements of human society. It is doing this by destroying the essence of what it means to be human, by destroying the nature of existing human relationships, and by destroying the political, economic and social institutions of nation states.

Intentionally or otherwise, the elite coup is also fast-tracking four paths to human extinction.

If this coup succeeds, the human individual will have been reduced to a digitized identity who lives in a ‘techno tyranny’ serving the global elite or Homo Sapiens will be extinct. There is no third option unless we can defeat the coup and stop key structures and processes being put into place.

Do we have long? According to some scholars, as explained below, Homo Sapiens is already ‘functionally extinct’. If this is the case, only a monumental global effort can give us even a remote chance of surviving.

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."-- Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”  --Noam Chomsky