The Bureau of Indian Affairs

Image by wwboy from Pixabay

This is: A weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids and my great-grandkids — the Stickies — to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — A Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering. Viewing with a tablet or a monitor is highly recommended for maximum enjoyment.  

About 

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A gentlereader

"I am aware that as presenting myself as the advocate of the Indians and their rights, I shall stand very much alone." -Sam Houston 

"There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Calvery." 

                                                                            - George Armstrong Custer

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

Fortunately for black people, The Fedrl Gummit doesn't include a Bureau of African-American Affairs. Unfortunately for Native Americans, there is such a thing as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). 

In fact, having been set up in 1824, it's almost 200 years old.  

By the time the Pilgrims arrived off the coast of present-day Massachusets most of the previous occupants of the area had conveniently died. 

“Within these late years, there hath, by God’s visitation, reigned a wonderful plague, the utter destruction, devastation, and depopulation of that whole territory, so as there is not left any that do claim or challenge any kind of interest therein." -King James the first  

Yes, that King James.

The Pilgrims, not having access to GPS, or even AAA TripTiks, arrived in Cape Cod Bay after more than two months at sea. They were more than 200 miles north of their intended destination, Hudson Bay. 

They were a day late (several days actually) and a dollar short. 

[A dollar short?]

I'm speaking metaphorically, Dana, cool writers do that. Literally speaking, they were running out of food and their timing was terrible. It was early November and they parked the Mayflower in what is now the Northeastern region of the U.S.A. 

Winters there were/are even worse than those here in Northeast Ohio (aka Canada's Deep South).

[Shudder!]

They were supposed to have landed in the Big Apple (actually it was the little apple back then) having heard good things from the Dutch. Having once spent a winter in the NYC area I can verify that winters there are much milder than New England winters, or even Northeast Ohio winters. 

[Shudder!]

They nearly didn't make it; they almost became a historical rounding error. However, they discovered that by breaking into Native American homes and graves there was food to be had.  

By the time November rolled around again they had (temporarily) befriended some of their new neighbors and had, um, recycled cleared farmland and empty native villages left behind by the locals who had been dying off in droves from European diseases for over a hundred years.

In short order, the Europeans set out to save their souls while stealing their country. The rest is history. The fact that the majority of the natives would die from disease and didn't have to actually be killed sped the process up considerably. 

(Very) long (and complicated) story short — two centuries of theft, exploitation, and attempts at forced assimilation by The Fedrl Gummit. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is about to celebrate its 200th birthday. 

If one defines the Deep State as I do, as a group of mostly faceless, unelected bureaucrats that write and enforce most of the Rules&Regs of The Fedrl Gummit, we should be preparing to celebrate(?) the Deep State's birthday.  

Now, I'm a firm believer in what I call the That was Then, This is Now philosophy of history. That is to say, while the sins of the past should be acknowledged, lessons learned, and where realistic, compensation paid in some form or fashion, what can actually be done to actually solve a given problem so we can all move forward together?           

While I freely admit to knowing virtually nothing about the plight of modern Native Americans living on reservations googlin' the phrase why are Indian reservations so poor? immediately pulled up a nine-year-old article from Forbes (.com) titled, Why Are Indian Reservations So Poor, A Look At The Bottom 1%.

Another very long story short: 

"The vast majority of land on reservations is held communally...This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse and environmental degradation. "

It's the exact same reason most inner-city housing projects are a disaster. Property rights change everything. The article explains why, in detail, if you're interested. 

For our purposes, suffice it to say that if the provisions of the Dawes Act, passed in 1887, had been implemented and all Indian land privatized we could've solved this problem a couple of centuries ago. 

But what happens when Fedrl regulators, special interests, and self-serving, local Native American officials wind up on the same team? 

Ya get a 200-year-old agency of The Fedrl Gummit that's been working on the same problems for 200 years.

"Any Indian who didn’t win clear title to land by 1934 was left with a fractional share of the reservation’s land held in trust. With every generation, each share was divided among more family members and today hundreds of people may have a partial claim to one share of trust land."

Wednesday, April 30, 2121

HHS Task Force Releases Report

 

Washington (AP) — Dr. Anthony Steven Fauci III, Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, has announced that the Report of the Joint Task Force appointed to study and recommend reforms to the American healthcare system is now in the hands of President Kardashian and will be released to the public shortly. 

Dr. Fauci, asked if a final determination as to whether face masks work and under what circumstances had been made (as specifically requested by President Kardashian) responded, "Well, that depends..." 

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

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Racialism

Image by M Vaughn from Pixabay

This is: A weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids and my great-grandkids — the Stickies — to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — A Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering. Viewing with a tablet or a monitor is highly recommended for maximum enjoyment.  

About 

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

"The word racism is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a racist." -Thomas Sowell 

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

Racialism is an interesting word. 

[And what, pray tell, is racialism?]

Well, Dana, that depends on who you ask, which is what makes it interesting. If one goes a-googlin' the very first page of returned links may connect to sources that contradict each other. 

Also, two different kids entering the word on the exact same make and model of their school-issued Chromebooks are unlikely to be offered the same set of links to choose from. 

[Wait-wait-wait. Who you callin' kids? Is a 20-year-old college student a kid? Is a...]  

98.7% of all H. sapiens under the age of 30 or so, student or not. It's not an insult, it's a fact. It's a fact that, fortunately, will be recognized and remedied by 94.3% of all H. sapiens by the time they're 30, at the latest.

As for the remaining 4.4%... well, we must all do what we can to minimize their impact on our lives, hopefully without having to resort to violence.

Luckily for me, although I was a card-carrying member of the 4.4% until I was 32 years old, I managed to survive till April of 1985 with relatively little damage to myself and others, whereupon my head popped out of my ass. 

I've been paying restitution ever since but I'm cautiously optimistic that by the time I'm deleted the bill will be marked paid in full.     

Regardless, my point is that the Goog, by design, customizes search results based on what it knows about you, what it thinks you might want to see, and what it thinks you should see.

Given that the Goog is more likely to start making donations to Republicrats than revealing how the secret army of Algorithmites goes about deciding what information you'll be offered, constant caution is called for if you're actually seeking truth and not mere confirmation of your biases. 

And entering a word like racialism, which means whatever the user wants it to mean, is especially problematic.

[Great (yawn) But what the fu... what the heck does it mean?]

Well personally, I define it as the tendency of certain people to insert the subject of race into every possible situation. What used to be called playing the race card has gone mainstream. 

A fundamental tenet of the Church of the Woke is that Pasty Patriarchs, and even the melanin-challenged women they hold in bondage, are, by definition, all Neoracists all the time.

[What's a Neo... Never mind, let's move on. That doesn't make any logical sense; it's impossible to prove all white people are racists.]

Proof? Proof and logic are merely weapons that the oppressor class uses to control the oppressed. 

This is why you white people just don't understand what's going on. You think that just because proof and logic, fundamental to that Enlightenment thing that's produced a society that our ancestors couldn't even imagine, will show us the way forward. 

[I'm a literary hallucination, not a white person. You're the white person.]     

Not anymore, I've awokened. I've decided to stop resisting the fact I self-identify as an African-American lesbian woman named Coco who could pass for Hale Berry's twin sister. 

[Whatever gets ya through the night, Coco. But what's that got to do with turning your back on the "Enlightenment thing?"] 

To be a Wokie is to reject logic and proof and embrace a revelation. New religions are based on a revelation of some sort that enables their adherents to reject everything that came before and start over. The revelation provides a firm foundation to stand on that can't be questioned. 

"There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger." -The Shahada

All Caucasians, and all the "Western" traditional notions of morality, ethics, lifestyle etc., are racist by definition. Therefore, when any given white person says they're not racist it proves that they are. -Me

We Wokies believe that life on Earth is merely the story of the strong oppressing and exploiting the weak and the marginalized. For the last several hundred years this has been all about Caucasians versus everyone else.

St. Karl thought it was all about economics, the evil rich vs. everyone else. When more modern thinkers were trying to figure out how it was the Russian revolution so quickly morphed into hell on Earth and not the predicted utopia they concluded two things.    

White people had managed to take control not only by economically exploiting everyone else they perpetuated a cultural fraud that was hidden by the fact that anyone anywhere that applied the life lessons so-called "Western Civilization" had spent several thousand years learning (the hard way) could prosper and thrive. 

This is why it's been so tough, till recently, to wake people up. 

But now that there's enough money sloshing around in developed countries to free us from traditional restraints such as self-restraint, the belief in/need for a higher power, the nuclear family, patriotism, ya just can't have it allism, etceterism — a new version of the devil has been created, "constructed" if you will.  

Everything that's wrong with the world is due to white privilege and power. 

This trope enables everyone that's piling up the dough — multinational firms that have turned their backs on the blue-collar types that built and maintain the world, Hollywood, universities, most of the media, certain black superstar athletes — to thrive and prosper as long as they say the right things and pay off the right grifters. 

That's racialism, and that's why I'm now officially a black lesbian, I could really use the money.

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Comment, share this column, or access older columns below. If you find my work pleasing you should buy me some cheap coffee with PayPal or plastic.    

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Cranky don't tweet.       

     

        

  

OK, Boomer

Don't trust anyone over 30. OK, Boomer?

Image by Rudy Anderson from Pixabay

This is: A weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids and my great-grandkids — the Stickies — to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — A Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering. Viewing with a tablet or a monitor is highly recommended for maximum enjoyment.  

About 

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

"At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it's the baby boomer thing."  -John Travolta

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

The phrase OK, Boomer, according to Wikipedia, "...is a catchphrase and meme often used by teenagers and young adults to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with people born in the two decades following World War II, ...it has increasingly been used to refer to pre-millennial people in general, regardless of when they were actually born."

[You had to look it up? OK, Boomer. The implicit, eye-rolling sarcasm was over your head, Mr. Obvious? ]

No, Dana, I was already well aware of the significance of this snarky, smug dollop of ageism.

I wish to compare and contrast the meme in question to a meme that was popular among Boomers when Boomers were callowyutes, and memes were not yet called memes. 

[Huh?]

Patience. 

I looked it up merely because I wondered if my fellow English speakers were inserting a comma betwixt OK and Boomer which I think is grammatically correct. (My grammatical abilities are not what I wish they were.) 

Also, I tend to favor color, melody, and rhythm over technically correct and I've found that using commas to "set off nouns of direct address" often looks discordant, Dana, so I was...

[Huh?]

Never mind, it's not you, it's me.  

In the sixties, the meme don't trust anyone over thirty was quite popular. I love irony for some reason and...

[It's because you were a cynical old bastard the day you were born!]

That's not true. I was a cognitively dissonant combination of idealism and cynicism for quite a while. Reality has gradually boiled off most of the idealism but it occasionally rears its nieve head when I'm least expecting it. I think it has something to do with having a kid, and grandkids.  

As I was saying, I love irony and there's a double dose to be found in comparing these two memes. There's the obvious one, Boomers who sneered at their parents being sneered at by their progeny. 

And then there's the less obvious one. 

Don't trust anyone over thirty is credited to one of the founders of the Free Speech Movement, Jack Weinberg, a movement that stemmed from an incident on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1964. 

Fast forward to the present era and the epidemic of college students shouting down, and often shutting down, the free speech of the unwoke — including students at UC Berkeley.

Nowadays, no shortage of uncollegial collegiate callowyutes favor restricting free speech if they or one of the high priests of Neojacobinism rule that a given utterance is hate speech since they conflate alleged hate speech with violence.

[Wait-wait-wait. Should Neojacobinism be capitalized?]

Well... Jacobinism is, and from what I can tell the word is usually rendered as Neo-Jacobinism. However, I prefer rendering as one word, as in neoconservative or neoliberalism. 

[OK, Boomer but...]

Anyways, even silence is violence if one is not promptly and properly parroting the party line. Somewhere, George Orwell (and some otherwhere, Chairman Mao) are smiling.

[You know, not everyone likes alliteration as much as you do.]  

OK, boomer is illustrative of another current phenomenon — the effortless kneejerk reply by uninformed or inarticulate social media mavens with fractured attention spans — one of several reasons why Cranky don't tweet. 

For example, suppose I was a Tweeter and posted something like, "I'll wager that the majority of Wokies, particularly younger ones, don't even know what a Jacobite is and why canceling someone is the modern equivalent of sentencing them to death by guillotine without having to get blood on their coke white kicks." 

[What are...] 

Unblemished sneakers.

[OK Boomer]

No meaningful response is required, not even a link to someone else's meaningful response is required. 

[OK Boomer] 

Touche', Tweety.  

[Hey, wait a second. You've been known to take a shot or three at your fellow boomers.] 

True, I've devoted entire paragraphs, and then some, to my contention that unless a given Boomer is as sharp, productive, and relevant as Einshtein at his best it's time to leave the stage — if one can afford to — and mentor a grup or a callowyute if ya' can find one that'll pay attention.

Hint: you may have to do so surreptitiously. 

Otherwise, get a new job, or get a hobby, or volunteer to be a volunteer that _______.

[Einshtein?] 

Yes, that's how it's pronounced you Neandertal. 

[OK, Boomer.]  

On a related note

I don't know if Dr. Anthony Faucci is as sharp, productive, and relevant as Einshtein at his best. He has many fans, but also many detractors. I do have a problem with the fact he can dance the Walkback as adroitly as any given politician. That's not an ability that inspires trust and confidence in a scientist in my semi-humble opinion.

Regardless, he's 80-yeas-old and was paid $432,312 in 2020. This makes him the highest-paid employee of the 4,000,000 or so people that work for The Fedrl Gummit. 

And yes, that's more than we pay our commander-in-chief. 

I can't help but wonder if there's a younger person somewhere out there, a medical genius, that could and would change the world if given the chance.        

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Comment, share this column, or access older columns below. If you find my work pleasing you should buy me some cheap coffee with PayPal or plastic.    

Feel free to comment/like/follow/cancel/troll me on Cranky's Facebook page.

Cranky don't tweet.