Independence from Britain: Not Always How We Were Taught it Happened

I've returned this week to the meat grinder of the U.S. War for Independence, or the first Civil War, depending on how you want to characterize it.

I'm galloping throughMaya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011) Knopf, NY (she was a Cullman Center Fellow the same year el V was). This is feeding into the other information we've been gathering in this house that houses such a scholarship library of colonial, independence and early republic America.

Along with the deep re-assessment of our colonial and independence era history, just like with the War of Southern Aggression, contemporary scholarship is seeing this history differently from the previous dominant narratives of our past pasts: exceptionalist, triumphalist, unified. This doesn't mean that we can't admire where admiration may be merited, but it means we no longer 'historically disappear' what is in their primary documents, written by themselves about certain matters. These matters are first and foremost, northerner or southerner, slavery, and second, northerner or southerner, the mob action that was organized and run by the economically powerful elite, to make the declaration of independence from Britain.

This history remarkably resembles the tbaggers and neocon tactics, strategies and objectives of today. We dare not say these people don't know their history. They know very well which clauses of the Constitution to leave out of public readings. They, or at least their runners and handlers, have been studying our past and our political history in minute detail since the days of Nixon. They have studied the history of how we achieved FDR's New Deal, workers' rights, labor unions, Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts -- the strategies and the tactics. They studied how we got Roe V. Wade.  As consequence their plans are bearing bumper crops of wicked fruit in the efficient rolling back of all these progressive political events. We dare not use the terms 'liberal,' or 'feminist,' for the neocons and tbaggers have made them laughing stocks. Liberal is used now in the context of the set of economic policies known as 'neoliberal.'  We cannot call a lie a lie. We cannot criticize the politicians who we elected on the grounds they were to represent our interests for fear of our own, who, out of their own fear,s lambaste us with, "You are a fool if you think there's no difference between electing a dem or rethug!" when you said no such thing.

Judging by our growing ineffectiveness -- and even seemingly (Obama's administration not rolling back policies of the previous ones regarding our civil liberties, for instance) to counter their narratives and their tactics, it's us, the progressives and dems who don't know or study our history.



In the meantime, it's a beautiful St. Patrick's Day -- a beautiful early spring day.  It seems whether NYC, NO, or here, I live where the community is more than signficantly populated with Irish, and they celebrate!  Tents have gone up.  There will be a parade soon, followed by all sorts of public amusements.