Day 132…
I spent most of yesterday thinking that it was Tuesday when, in fact, it was only Monday. On some level, I guess what difference does it make? But it threw me off all day. I could not figure out what to do. I was lost.
When I was a kid and I’d complain to my mother that there was nothing to do, she’d say, “I’ve got plenty of things for you to do.”
Whatever they might be, I knew I didn’t want to do those things. I wasn’t looking for chores, I was looking for something to engage me.
My mother would lose patience and tell me that I was being “bloody minded” and that I should just bugger off and figure it out on my own. Yesterday, trapped under this heat dome weather thing, I was just feeling bloody minded all day.
As I was crankily surfing around the internet, I came upon a piece that had been published in the Smithsonian magazine three years ago by a writer named Lorraine Boissoneault. It was about US politics in the mid nineteenth century. I wasn’t in the mood to read it yesterday, so I saved it for today.
Early in our history, there were two political parties. The Federalists, who advocated for a strong federal government, and the Democratic-Republicans. The Democratic-Republicans had been formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who were opposed to what a certain Alexander Hamilton was trying to do in terms of centralizing the US Bank. There’s a little musical you might have heard of that delves into all of that quite deeply.
After Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828, a new party formed in opposition to him called the National Republicans. The Federalists had basically fallen apart. The National Republicans advocated for a system of nationally financed internal improvements as well as a protective tariff to help foster a strong economy. Their candidate Henry Clay, however, lost in the election against Jackson and the party morphed into a new group called the Whigs, who then, in turn, morphed into another group that became what we now know as the Democratic party.
While all of this was unfolding, an ultra-secret society had formed called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner.
In the early eighteen-hundreds, there was a fairly regular annual influx of European immigrants. Starting in about 1845, because of economic instability in Germany and the potato famine in Ireland, that influx grew into millions of refugees each year. Many of them were Catholic.
To be a member of The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, you needed to be able to prove that you were of ethnically pure Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock and you needed to categorically reject all Catholics. They held secret meeting with passwords and signals and all members were instructed to say, “I know nothing”, were they ever to be questioned about the society.
By 1853, this group had transformed itself into a political party known as the Know Nothings. Laugh if you will, but that party managed to seat a hundred Congressmen, eight state Governors and controlled at least six state legislatures including Massachusetts and California. The Know Nothings got thousands of local politicians elected.
Flyers around Boston were posted with the words, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are...vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.”
A woman named Maria Monk wrote a book detailing her adventures going undercover as a novitiate in a Catholic convent. She claimed that she had witnessed Priests raping Nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. She was exposed as a fraud, but the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies regardless.
The lies spread. Churches were burned and gangs were formed all over the country. The Martin Scorsese movie, Gangs of New York, is based on a real person named William “Bill the Butcher” Poole who was one of the leaders of the movement.
The only thing that stopped the Know Nothings was the Civil War and the issue of slavery. The issue of slavery pushed immigration aside. The Know Nothings fell apart, but what they were fighting for never went away. It simmered and expanded. There was actually a debate in Congress in 1912 over whether Italians should be considered full-blooded Caucasians. Up until the 1930’s, Asian immigrants we not allowed to be naturalized because of their race. Immigration laws in the 1920’s excluded pretty much everybody except for Northern Europeans. Then World War II happened and the attitude towards immigration shifted somewhat.
“I know nothing” became a national catch phrase all over again in the 1960’s. Hogan’s Heroes was a TV sitcom set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. Sergeant Schultz, the Nazi guard, would say it every time he got wind of some plot by the prisoners.
I’m now trying to process the fact that somebody pitched a TV sitcom set in a German war camp and it got greenlit. And became a hit. And I watched it.
Anyway, moving back to the United States and the present day. Nothing has changed in the interim. Instead of just Catholics, the know-nothings of our country have focused their hatred on almost anyone who they can label a “them”.
The main platform that this President ran on in the 2016 election was his promise to build a nearly 2,000-mile wall to separate us from our southern neighbor, Mexico.
In a few short years under this administration, it has become normal for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to show up ununiformed and in unmarked cars to grab suspected illegal aliens off the streets and out of their homes.
The US Department of Homeland Security has deployed undercover troops in unmarked vans to grab suspect anti-racism demonstrators off the streets in Portland, Oregon. The President signed an executive order directing federal agencies to send personnel to protect monuments, statues and federal property during the ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The Department of Homeland Security is planning on taking the same actions in Chicago, it was announced yesterday, and the President has pledged to do the same thing in Democratic-led cities all across the country.
Each of these despicable actions are just an outgrowth of the same cancer that first showed up on the scans a hundred and seventy years ago with the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. The systemic racism that we are seeing in such a vivid way these days is nothing new. It goes into remission every so often, but it never goes away.
During dinner last night, I was trying to explain to Michael about feeling “bloody minded”. His response to me was, “I’ve got plenty of things for you to do”. OMG.
It was still light out but not nearly as hot as it had been, so in desperation, I went out for a long bike ride. I needed somewhere new to go, so I rode all the way down to Battery Park which is about nine miles away. The sun was setting and the view out across the harbor to the Statue of Liberty was predictably, stunning.
Lower Manhattan gets pretty deserted in the evenings. There aren’t a lot of distractions. While I know that the days are starting to get shorter, they feel like they are getting longer. There is so much to do and nothing to do all at the same time. It felt great to be out of my own head for a while.
Bloody-mindedness is basically just a self-imposed paralysis. I think that we can all be forgiven for a bout or two of it. There is a lot going on in the world around us and a lot of it is, frankly, rather awful. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by it all.
As much as I hate to admit it, the only way through it is to do exactly what my mother would tell me to do, “Turn off the TV and go outside and play”. So that’s what I did. I rode my bike.
Now what?
No, don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out. I know there’s plenty to do. I just have to pick something. I’ve got all day.
Funny you wrote about this:
I realized today
I’ve been “working” most of my life
to stay positive and fight for my dreams becoming realities
against all odds
against the norm and grain and what is
normal and “supposed” to be and be done
I let myself off “that hook”
others hung me from
Now I am free
all day and each moment
to create a life
whose foundation is joy
and grow, transform and inspire
all who watch
what was told to me as
no
to
yes
the perks of
COVID
for which I am great full
So informative and so good! ❤