First Principle About America; First Questions

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2020 elections, Bureaucracy, Business and economy, Elitism and Class, race and culture, Religion

Homo neanderthalensis by Thomas Vogt-Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) [Brain volume up to 1750cc (Homo sapiens average 1270 cc) LWL Museum of Natural History, Münster, Germany]

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Is America an accident? A freak of Nature?  Or, is America the product of Intelligent Design?

I don’t intend to try to answer the second half of that question here as that requires an inquiry into philosophy and theology. But by the longest list of scientific and common sense proofs, I think I can say without equivocation that America is no accident. We cannot be a freak of Nature. So you can sort of figure out the rest yourself.

This is something we no longer teach our children, but we are unique.

Now, scholars (intellectuals) for the past 200 years have had no problem ignoring this question, for they think it’s a trick question, which does not really require an answer. If they reply that Yes, America is a freak, then the obvious response from the trickster asking the question is: Then why has America survived so long? In nature almost all mutations quickly die out. They can rarely survive into a second generation, much less a third.

And America is into somewhere around its 118th generation of de facto self-governance, while, before the 1787 Constitution, there is no recorded history of a real nation (bigger than a tribe) ever making it past one. (Agreed, also prior to 1787, almost all history was written by “scribes of the kings”, the real name for “historians” for millennia, so there could have been dozens of nascent self-governed peoples who were simply squished, or gobbled up by a next-door invading king, only they were too small and insignificant to rate a page in the “annals of the king” being prepared by his historians.)

In fact, the archaeological record of pre-dynastic Egypt suggests this is how several tribes of farm people in the Nile region slowly morphed into an organized hierarchical “corporation”, with a chairman of the board king, a head priest, and every other person in the realm owing some duty to them. Subjects.

The Egyptians and a few other empires in a region from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley (India) started this process of “civilization” about 3000 BC, 5000 years ago. And they did many wondrous things, especially building things that for generations for centuries could; i.e. monuments to themselves, which was their purpose[…]

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ICYMI:

• Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the Biggest Hoax Russia Ever Perpetrated on America

“I am Not Responsible! I am Not Responsible!”

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Beoing 737 Max, Boeing, Bureaucracy, Business and economy, Ethiopian Airlines, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Malaysia MH-370 wormhole

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

You may not recognize this phrase much anymore, but in the 1960s it was a common plea, heard up and down the line at any railroad station in Delhi, Bombay, Cape Town, Singapore, and thousands of smaller stations where clerks sold tickets, or ran small offices that had to deal with the teeming masses on a regular basis.

Having been to most of those places, I can say that Indians, South Africans, Malays, and Indonesians do not appear to be naturally self-defensive about their actions. But one needs to step back another few generations to Charles Dickens’ London to find the source of this “I am not responsible” cultural crutch, for the British colonial empire was the cement that glued all these low-level administrative factotums into one. As one of the themes woven into one of his later novels, Little Dorritt (1857) Dickens described the endless revolving door in dealing with the English bureaucracy. (This was at a time in history when the bureaucracy had almost no impact on American business and commerce, for the simple reason our people refused to be taxed in order to pay for one…a subject we talk about all the time here.)

The British Empire was built on the back of its civil service class who dealt with the (teeming and irate) public on a daily basis. They took all the heat at railroad stations or any point of contact for public services. I can’t count the number of times in southern Asia I had a clerk, usually as a sign of resignation and an abrupt goodbye, (and a “don’t let the door bump you in the arse on your way out” shrug) simply throw up his hands and say, “I am not responsible, I am not responsible.”

In their world it is always the passenger’s job to find the root of his problem. They are not responsible.

Having not traveled there for 25 years, I never gave this little cultural quirk much thought until MH370 fell off the map in 2014. I last flew Singapore Air in 1987, and had checked Malaysian Air out at the time, in both Hong Kong and Singapore. They were considered better that other Asian regional airlines, though not as chic as Singapore.

The missing MH370 was a Boeing 777.

But it only took 2-3 days after the plane went missing to note that various agencies in the Malaysian government were sometimes less than helpful in finding this aircraft. I tried to construct in my own mind how the Airline, the Malaysia air agency, and the Malaysian government in Kuala Lumpur, perhaps all the way down to ground crew supervisors, up through ministries, might already have been trying to immunize themselves from any kind of responsibility…because that’s what over 200 years of Mother England had taught them to do[…]

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Mexico Lindo, A Brief History

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Business and economy, Elitism and Class, Immigration

(stock photo)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Three men, standing at the Mexican border, looking south:

Man #1: Mexico Lindo.

Man #2: I don’t see nothin’ so ‘lindo’ about it.

Man #3: Just looks like more of Texas to me.

Man #1: You have no eyes!

(Iconic lines from a film, anyone want to guess which one?)

It’s an interesting history, for by the time the first settlers dropped anchor at Jamestown in 1607, all of South America, Central America, Mexico and what is now the southeast United States, as far north as South Carolina, had come under the dominion of Spain and Portugal.  Mexico was first, when Hernan Cortes subdued the Aztec king in 1519. Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, all the way down to Argentina soon followed. Brasil was captured by Portuguese which only made a difference in the tongue that would be the national language and the customs that would be adopted in their civil administration.

All of South America was Spanish for all intents and purposes.

And all of this territory was under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Catholic Church.

This is significant for a pecking order had emerged in the early Church that next to Rome, where Peter was crucified, the English, Spanish and French churches were ranked in order of firsts; England, interesting enough because the first above-ground church was built there in the 1st Century, by none other than Joseph of Arimathea, so legend says. France came next because it was where Mary Magadalene purportedly built her church, near Marseilles. And third, Spain, where St James is said to have been buried, although he is also purported to be buried (at least his head) in the Armenian Church in Jerusalem after being beheaded by Herod Agrippa. (I know its confusing, and that is exactly what makes the 1st Century so interesting…you can’t come up with conclusive evidence about anything, yet you still know many definitive, historical things had to have happened.)

[…]

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“An Extremity of Nominal Democracy”

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2018 election, American revolution, Barbara W. Tuchman, Business and economy, Constitution, Education, race and culture, Republican Party establishment, The Dutch

The Five Senses: Smell by Adriaen Brouwer [Circa 1631] Source: Wikipedia

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Barbara Tuchman was one of my two favorite historians, (the other is still alive). She published The First Salute in 1988, then died of a stroke early the next year, so this book was to have been her last salute. I have three well-underlined volumes on my bookshelf, and this last volume is about the American Revolution’s impact on Europe, principally the Dutch and the French, but ultimately, the world.

France we know about, the Netherlands not so much. The book’s title is based on the entry of an American vessel, the Andrea Doria, into the harbor of the tiny Dutch trading outpost of St Eustatius in the Caribbean in November 1776, just a few months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Hoisting the American colors, the Andrea Doria fired a 13-gun salute and the coastal battery returned a 9-gun salute, thus acknowledging the new American revolutionaries as a member nation.

The First Salute.

A big deal, actually, for the English, who owned just about all the remaining islands in the Leeward Island chain, were infuriated, some of their governors and admirals writing long letters of protest making even some of my essays seem like a quick read. In one letter I counted 14-lines without a single period. (For harrumphs and bluster, no one beats the Brits.)

But tiny St Eustatius (only 21 sq kilometers) was an important port in those days, with today a population of less than 4000. In those days its only product was money in trade. And the Dutch had decided to trade arms to  the Colonies in exchange for all the products we could send them, because of only one thing; location, location, location. The island sits at the northernmost tip of the Leeward chain, so is first in line in the seagoing traffic moving south from the  Colonies.

It was profit, and not philosophical simpatico, that caused the Dutch to risk the anger of the stronger English Navy.

When John Adams went to Amsterdam in 1780 to obtain a loan that would keep the Americans less in debt to France and Louis XVI (who also had  mercenary reasons for taking our side against England, namely a long term plan to annex the American colonies for itself) Adams wrote that he had entered  “the capital of the reign of Mammon (the Biblical name for Money and Greed)”[…]

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Nike Swooshes America

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Business and economy, Conservatism, Corporatism, Dicks' Sporting Goods, Nike, Patagonia, Progressives war on America, Progressives War on Donald Trump

Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

So many pieces, so little time.

An awful lot of points of national survival converge from this little misstep by Nike in re the Matter of Colin Kaepernick as their new #JustDoIt poster boy.

The first piece of the jigsaw is why do so many corporations these days get away with throwing their “brand” and potential profit margins under the bus, when both are treasures their boards of directors and management in publically-traded companies are required to protect? By law?

Nike took a five point tumble when they launched the new Kaepernick campaign a few days ago, but have gained much of it back. And sales have increased, so any notion that Nike may lose money long term is premature to call. In fact, overseas, where America (and Trump) is seen as an enemy to European political and ruling class anyway, Nike’s stock may go up.

Brand analysts are guarded about the long term risk Nike has taken, and may profit from it, since most of Nike’s buyer-base are high-end spenders who are largely indifferent to patriotic themes, National Anthem and such, but virulently opposed to ideas that are sold to them as racist.

I’m most taken  by the notion that Madison Avenue largely sees America as little more than a “brand” that can be bought and sold.

Hold that thought, for in the up-scale buying market, everything, including ideas, have to be sold. They are rarely learned or discovered anymore, either from intellectual inquiry or by personal observation.

Brand analysts know this, even if most of us don’t. And they’ve known it for a long time. And their best paying jobs are in politics, not in selling retail products.

In the Kaepernick case, it’s almost as if some market guru came to Colin three years ago and said, “Since your career’s not going anywhere anyway, let us pitch this idea.” Maybe they even sent in the succubus.

Don’t laugh, this is perfectly plausible.

So in a related story, people thought Dick’s Sporting Goods would suffer when they distanced themselves from the NRA brand after the Parkland shootings in February. But they had actually stopped selling assault-style rifles long before, in all but a few subsidiary stores, after Sandy Hook in 2012. Dick’s is down over 10 points since Sandy Hook (close to 25%) but up about 5 since Parkland (2017), so the retail chain’s financial condition may have little to do with the NRA or its 2nd Amendment position.

While publically traded, Dick’s is still a family company and its brand loyalty is nothing compared to the iconic name of Nike and its swoosh.

But Dick’s sells Nike, so we’ll see as the NFL season progresses if they can dodge a second round of outrage from an even broader audience[…]

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