Skip to main content

Rush Ho! Ho! Limbaugh and the Spirit of Thanksgiving

Rush Limbaugh is in a dither about the President's
Thanksgiving proclamation.  The President referred to
the "contributions of Native Americans, whose skill in
agriculture helped the early colonists survive, and whose
rich culture continues to add to our Nation's heritage".

Well, you can understand how that got Rush all lathered up!

Rush apparently doesn't think those early European settlers
owe much of anything to Native Americans.  They even
scammed the immigrants by selling them Manhattan, which
belonged, Rush said, to someone else.  About all Rush
can find that Native Americans contributed to the European
immigrants was tobacco, and lung cancer, and all that.
(Rush Limbaugh is a champion cigar smoker, himself.  But
no mind!  This isn't about making sense!)

No, Rush says, we immigrants don't owe Native Americans
much of anything, not even survival!  What really happened,
Rush says, is that the immigrants (I don't think Rush calls them
"immigrants") had experimented with socialism, and that
they almost didn't survive until they became capitalists.

Rush is right.  We get so caught up in giving thanks to God
and eating turkey that we forget what Thanksgiving is
really all about:  becoming capitalists, and how Native
Americans scammed us and gave us tobacco and cancer.

Just in case you are not sure:  this is the same Rush Limbaugh
who scares the crap out of any Republican who disagrees
with him.  There have been a few who tried, but who recanted.

Incidentally, how did you vote in the recent election?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...