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Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce

Debunking revisionist history about Thanksgiving. Take the time to read it all, print it, and share it with your children no matter what age they are.

EDITORS NOTE: Due to the length of this article it has been presented here in three (3) parts. You may access the other pages by clicking the links at the bottom of this page or from the 'Related Links' section in the right column of the page.

http://www.sail1620.org/discover_feature_thanksgiving_on_the_net_roast_bull_with_cranberry_sauce_part_1.shtml

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 1

by Jeremy D. Bangs

Jeremy Bangs (Ph.D., Leiden University), a Fellow of the Pilgrim Society, is Director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, having previously been Visiting Curator of Manuscripts at Pilgrim Hall Museum, Chief Curator at Plimoth Plantation, and Curator of the Leiden Pilgrim Documents Center. Among his books are "Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat" (2004); "Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691" (2002); and "The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts" (3 vols, 1997-1999-2001), all published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He has written many articles about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, and is currently completing the manuscript of a book about the Pilgrims and Leiden. He was awarded the Distinguished Mayflower Scholarship Award by the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the Commonwealth of PA in 2001. Bangs is among a small, select number of historians of the Pilgrims (those who have no family relation to them whatsoever!). He has also published articles and books on Dutch history and art history of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, thinks not. She asks on the website "Common-Place" (in 2001) whether it's worth while "to plumb the bottom of it all - to determine, for example, [...] whether Plymouth's 'Pilgrims' were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes [i.e. United American Indians of New England]. [...] Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades? Combing period documents and archaeological evidence, we might peel away some of the myths [...] But to do so would be to miss a fundamental point of these holidays. [...] in this new millenium, these sacred secular rites are once again pressed into service - this time by new nations, with new visions of the present, to be reached through new versions of the past. In place of one origins myth, the inventors of Indigenous Peoples' Day [intended to replace Columbus Day] and the National Day of Mourning [intended to replace Thanksgiving Day] invoke another. One in which all Europeans were villains and all Natives, victims. One in which indigenous peoples knew neither strife nor war until the treachery of Columbus and his cultural heirs taught them to hate and fear. To ask whether this is true is to ask the wrong question. It's true to its purposes. Every bit as true, that is, as the stories some Americans in 1792 and 1863 told about the events of 1492 and 1621. And that's all it needs to be. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now."

"And that's all it needs to be"? I disagree. I think that anyone who wants to approach the question of Thanksgiving Day as a historian in the "ever changing Now" will need to ask "the wrong question" - what of all this is true?

Surveying more than two hundred websites that "correct" our assumptions about Thanksgiving, it's possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since internet sites often parrot each other. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Almost all of the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal, and otherwise not germane to the topic of what happened in 1621. With heavy self-importance they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once commonly taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight. The political posturing is pathetic.

Commonly the first point scored is that lots of people gave thanks before the Pilgrims did it in 1621. Local boosters in Virginia, Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land. Several sites claim that Indians had six thanksgivings every year; at least one says that every day, every act, every thought was carried out with thanksgiving by pre-contact Indians. (My thanksgiving is bigger than your thanksgiving?) Among many examples:

* http://www.new-life.net/thanks01.htm

* http://www.oyate.org/resources/shortthanks.html

The Text

Many sites point out in a rankly naive sort of way that only one brief documentary account records Plymouth Colony's 1621 harvest festivities, the specific descriptive words of Edward Winslow, while additional information can be derived from the seasonal comments of William Bradford, who mentioned that the Pilgrims ate turkey among other things. See, for example, Pilgrim Hall Museum's website, which is consistently informative and of high scholarly quality:

Reporting on the colonists' first year, Winslow wrote that wheat and Indian corn had grown well; the barley crop was "indifferently good"; but pease were "not worth the gathering." Winslow continues: "Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent foure men on fowling; so that we might after a more speciall manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They foure in one day killed as much fowle as, with a little help besid, served the company almost a weeke. At which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Armes, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deere, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine and others. And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time, with us, yet by goodnesse of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie."[1]

Governor William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, reported that fishing had been good all summer, and, in the fall, "begane to come in store of foule, as winter approached [...] And besides water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, etc."[2]

Archaeologist James Deetz made much of the fact that Winslow did not name the turkeys Bradford mentioned.

This startling revelation (that in this case one should ignore Bradford's general comments and suppose that Winslow was providing a complete menu listing) recurs in various websites, such as the 2002 article posted by the Christian Science Monitor.

More frequently repeated is Deetz's emphatic reminder that Winslow did not use the word "thanksgiving" - drawing the conclusion that therefore the 1621 event was not a thanksgiving but some sort of traditional English harvest festival he characterized as "secular."

I've discussed this oversimplification previously in an previous article.

Further, see "Re-bunking the Pilgrims" [subscribers]

On the one hand, whatever their folk customs may have been, harvest festivals in England with which the Pilgrims had been familiar were not "secular." (The Elizabethan and Jacobean-period Anglican Book of Common Prayer included an obligatory harvest thanksgiving prayer among the prayers whose use was increasingly enforced in the early seventeenth century.) On the other, Winslow's description includes biblical phrases referring to texts whose completion includes thanksgiving (particularly John 4:36 and Psalm 33). Winslow's contemporaries, unlike modern archaeologists, caught the meaning of the full texts to which he alluded. They knew their Bible.

But Deetz's assertion that there was no thanksgiving in 1621 is repeated in numerous websites. Often authors explain that what took place was so unlike later Puritan thanksgivings that it couldn't have been a true thanksgiving (usually citing, for the definition of what that would have been, William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), a book whose title alone seems to have inspired the common web article notion that in New England people fasted as an _expression of thanksgiving). For example, in "Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving,' Rick Shenkman announces that Thanksgiving was not about religion.

Had it been, he says, "the Pilgrims never would have invited the Indians to join them. Besides, the Pilgrims would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event. Indeed, what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival. Actual 'Thanksgivings' were religious affairs; everybody spent the day praying. Incidentally, these Pilgrim Thanksgivings occurred at different times of the year, not just in November."

Responding to this in reverse order: (1) that Thanksgivings were not limited to November does not mean that the first one held by the colonists in Plymouth (which incidentally was presumably in September or early October) was not a thanksgiving. (2) The modern idea that in a religious thanksgiving "everyone spent the day praying" is inconsistent with the only description of the specific activities of a definitely identified thanksgiving day in early Plymouth Colony - the thanksgiving held in Scituate in 1636 when a religious service was followed by feasting. (See my book The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), vol. 3, p. 513.) (3) That "what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival" (as if that meant it could not have been a thanksgiving) repeats Deetz's incorrect opinion that an English harvest festival was non-religious or even irreligious. (4) That the Pilgrims "would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event" presumes a narrow definition of what a true religious event was before arriving through circular argument at a denial that what the Pilgrims did was such an event, because it differed from the axiomatic definition. (Ever been to a midwestern church picnic? Did tossing horseshoes and playing softball make it non-religious?) (5) As is repeatedly demonstrated by the writings of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson, the Pilgrims attempted to pattern their religious activities according to biblical precedent. The precedent for a harvest festival was the Old Testament Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkoth (Deut. 16: 13-14). This harvest festival (as described in the 1560 Geneva translation of the Bible, used by the Pilgrims) was established to last "seuen daies, when thou hast gathered in thy corne, and thy wine. And thou shalt reioyce in thy feast, thou, and they sonne, and thy daughter, and thy servant, and thy maid, and the Levite and the stranger, and the fatherles, and the widow, that are within thy gates." The biblical injunction to include the "stranger" probably accounts for the Pilgrims' inviting their Native neighbors to rejoice with them, although Winslow does not explicitly say anything about invitation. Besides Sukkoth, the Pilgrims' experience of a Reformed Protestant thanksgiving every year in Leiden probably contributed to what they considered appropriate. Leiden's October 3 festivities commemorated the lifting of the Siege of Leiden in 1574, when half the town had died (an obvious parallel with the experience of the Pilgrims in the winter of 1620-21). Lasting ten days, the first Leiden event was a religious service of thanksgiving and prayer, followed by festivities that included meals, military exercises, games, and a free fair. To summarize, the common assumption that the Pilgrims' 1621 event should be judged against the forms taken by later Puritan thanksgivings - whether or not those are even correctly understood - overlooks the circumstance that the Pilgrims did not have those precedents when they attempted something new, intentionally based not on old English tradition but on biblical and Reformed example.

Shenkman has not invented these views. Attempts to be accurate frequently make the same assumptions. For example, the History Channel states that, "the colonists didn't even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast - dancing, singing secular songs, playing games - wouldn't have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds."

The identical text is copied without credit on the webpage of the International Student & Scholar Programs of Emory University:

It's worth pointing out that Winslow says nothing about "dancing, singing secular songs, [or] playing games." Those might be intended among Winslow's general term "recreations," but to specify and cite them as proof that the Pilgrims' day was "a secular celebration" is over-reaching.

Thanking Whom?

Assuming the nature of the festival was non-religious, some sites proclaim that there was a thanksgiving, but that the Pilgrims were not thanking God. Instead they were thanking the Indians for the help that had contributed to the colonists� survival during the first year. For example, "Rumela Web" says, "The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock held their Thanksgiving in 1621 as a three day 'thank you' celebration to the leaders of the Wampanoag Indian tribe and their families for teaching them the survival skills they needed to make it in the New World."

A site that provides Thanksgiving Day recipes and menus says, "The Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to a feast to thank them for all they had learned."

Another site [member account required] provides a psychological analysis: "Not only was this festival a way to thank the Wampanoag, but it also served to boost the morale of the remaining settlers."

Such redirection of the thanks is consistent with the modern assessment expressed in "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving," by James Loewen, "Settlement proceeded, not with God's help, but with the Indians'."

We think the Pilgrims should have thanked the Indians. Nonetheless, while most modern historians explain events without dependence on providential intervention, it is still inaccurate to bend the evidence to suggest that the Pilgrims' attitude was not predominantly providential, and did not result in thanks to God for help received from the Indians.

Bending evidence, plus inventing details found in no historical source, is not a monopoly of the secular interpretation. For example, Kathryn Capoccia's online Sunday School lesson, "American Thanksgiving Celebrations," displays an incredibly imaginative disregard for historical evidence:

"Two weeks before the celebration was to take place a proclamation was issued stating that a harvest festival was to be held, which would be preceded by a special religious service and would be open to both Separatist church members and nonmembers. Everyone was urged to publicly offer gratitude for God's provision. The invitation was also extended to chief Massasoit." [...] "In response to the invitation Massasoit appeared in camp with three braves. Two days later he was joined by ninety other braves who provided five deer, a flock of geese, fifteen swordfish and small sweet apples for the celebration. The ceremonies began on the last morning of the festival [sic] with a worship service led by Elder Brewster. Then ground sports, such as foot racing and wrestling were held, as well as knife throwing contests. The settlers demonstrated musket drilling and shot a cannon volley. Then the feasting began in mid-afternoon at the fort. Everyone was seated in the open at long tables. At the end of the meal the settlers toasted the Indians as friends. The adults exchanged gifts with each other: Massasoit was given a bolt of cloth by Bradford, the warriors received cooking pots and colored beads in strings. The Indians reciprocated with a beaver cloak for Bradford and several freshly killed deer that could be smoked and stored for winter. The Indians presented the children with lumps of candy made from sugar extracted from wild beet plants. When the ceremonies were completed Elder Brewster quoted the Bible as a benediction, 'I thank my God upon every remembrance of you'". This level of fabrication is rare. It recalls the oratory of a century ago, that inspired the balloon-pricking emotions of countless would-be debunkers.

Colored Clothes, No Buckled Hats! My Goodness!

Similarly disconnected from Winslow's version are the common corrections to misconceptions about Pilgrim costume. Numerous sites let us know that the Pilgrims did not always wear black, and some even assert excitedly that it is important that we know about this discovery.

Timothy Walch, writing for History News Services, says, "Finally, it's important to dispel one last Thanksgiving myth — that the Pilgrims dressed in black and white clothing, wore pointed hats and starched bonnets and favored buckles on their shoes. It's true that they dressed in black on Sundays; but on most days, including the first Thanksgiving, they dressed in white, beige, black, green and brown." Surprisingly, Walch talks about buckles on shoes, instead of the common cartoon iconography of buckles on hats (itself an anachronism derived from a brief fashion in the 1790's). While Walch's point about color in workday clothing is true, I'm not sure it can come as a surprise to very many people. Nowadays most illustrations show Pilgrims in multi-colored clothing, often using photographs of the colorful actors at Plimoth Plantation. Even children now in their thirties will have learned about the Pilgrims from pictures showing varie-colored clothing. It wasn't always that way (cheaper books once were restricted to monochrome illustrations), but none of the websites gives a good explanation of the origin of the stereotype - the error is paraded simply as yet another example of inherited ignorance.

Only one genuine portrait of a Pilgrim exists - that of Edward Winslow (now in Pilgrim Hall Museum). Painted in 1651 in London, where Winslow acted as a diplomat representing the interests of New England colonies before various government committees, it shows him dressed appropriately in the very expensive black formal wear that most Pilgrims could not afford. From his portrait, as well as from other 17th-century portraits (that tended to show rich people) history painters of the early 19th century derived some ideas of costume. But they did not restrict their research to portraits of the rich, they also looked at pictures of common people in Dutch genre paintings. In romantic visions of historical scenes, the 19th-century history painters showed Pilgrim leaders in black, but others in a variety of colors. None of the dozen or so history paintings on Pilgrim themes at Pilgrim Hall Museum (the foremost collection) shows the Pilgrims uniformly in black - most wear scarlet, russet, green, ochre, grey, blue, or brown.

However, 19th century Americans became familiar with the Pilgrims through black and white stereoptype engravings, not paintings. At the same time, black clothing had become cheaper to produce and was expected for Sunday-best attire, not just among the wealthy. It was easy to imagine that the Pilgrim leaders as seen in black-and-white engravings were dressed in a way that was nearly familiar.

And, yes, they did call themselves "Pilgrims."

Almost as frequent as remarks about the color of their clothes are the website assertions that these colonists did not call themselves "Pilgrims." James Loewen, in "The Truth About the First Thanksgiving," writes that "no one even called them 'Pilgrims' until the 1870s."

This sort of belief is derived from a common misconception that because the manuscript of William Bradford's journal "Of Plymouth Plantation" was lost from the late 18th until the mid 19th century, no one was familiar, until the rediscovery, with his famous phrase, "They knew they were Pilgrims." The discovery of that phrase is thought to have appealed strongly to the Victorian imagination and to have led to the term "Pilgrims" as a designation for the Plymouth colonists. Bradford, however, was not the first to apply the name in print to these colonists - that was Robert Cushman in 1622 (in the book now called Mourt's Relation). Bradford's own words were excerpted and published by Nathaniel Morton in New England's Memorial, first printed in 1669 (and reprinted in 1721, 1772, and twice in 1826). The term Pilgrim, never forgotten, was used repeatedly in the later 18th century and throughout the 19th century, at celebrations in Plymouth that attracted attention throughout New England if not farther. If Mr. Loewen thinks the word "Pilgrim" was not applied to these people before the 1870's, one wonders what he thinks the local worthies of Plymouth were doing when in 1820 they founded the Pilgrim Society.

The Plymouth colonists considered themselves and all other earnest Christians to be on an earthly pilgrimage to a heavenly goal. Most of them were serious about their faith and puzzled by the presence among them of a few who demonstratively were not. Referring to themselves in that context they used the New Testament image expressed in print by Robert Cushman in 1622: "But now we are all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners [...]" The full Bible citation, which these people knew and recognized as a text that gave re-assuring self-identification, was this (Hebrews 11:13-16, Geneva translation, 1560):

"All these dyed in the faith, and receiued not the promises, but sawe them a farre of[f], and beleued them, and receiued them thankefully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrimes on the earth. For they that say suche things, declare plainely that they seke a countrey. And if they had bene mindeful of that countrey, from whence they came out, they had leasure to haue returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heauenlie: wherefore God is not ashamed of them to be called their God: for he hathe prepared for them a citie."

The foregoing unifying phrase - strangers and pilgrims on the earth - is misunderstood as a dichotomy in George Willison's book Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynall & Hitchcock, 1945). Willison�s Hegelian analysis of Pilgrim history as a conflict between religious fanatics he calls "saints" and disinterested, economically motivated opponents to them, whom he identifies as "strangers," has become a rarely questioned presumed truth, never doubted on the internet. It is basic to Willison's dismissive interpretation of the Mayflower Compact as an instrument of minority control. For Willison, the dialectical tension was resolved by a happy synthesis that bore similarities to the democratic triumph of the American common man over tyranny at the end of World War II. Willison was speaking to people who saw themselves in his description of the Pilgrims, as people who "were valiantly engaged [...] in a desperate struggle for a better order of things, for a more generous measure of freedom for all men, for a higher and nobler conception of life based upon recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual." Stirring words, they introduce Willison�s description of the process of conflict that was for him the meaning of being a Pilgrim.

For the Pilgrims themselves, in specific contexts other identifying terms were useful. In their application to move to Leiden, they said they were members of the Christian Reformed religion - thus indicating that they were the sort of people Leiden wanted as immigrants. Distinguishing themselves from Puritans who stayed in the Church of England, they called themselves Separatists. In New England, for legal purposes connected with rights to distribution of the common property and land, the colonists referred to anyone who had arrived before the 1627 division as "Old Comers" or "First Comers." Their general self-identification, however, was "pilgrims" in the New Testament sense. Their first use of the term in America is seen in the name given the first child born in the colony - Peregrine White. "Peregrine" comes from the Latin peregrinus meaning "pilgrim" or "stranger."

[1]Mourt's Relation, published in cooperation with Plimoth Plantation by Applewood Books, Bedford MA, Edited by Dwight B. Heath from the original text of 1622 and copyright 1963 by Dwight B. Heath, p. 82.

[2]Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 by William Bradford. A new edition by Samuel Eliot Morison; First published Sept. 19, 1952; 21st printing Jan. 2001, p. 90.

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 2

The Fake Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1623

The invented secular harvest festival augmented by the redirection of thanks towards the Indians and the assertion that "Pilgrims" was a name not used by the colonists, has become widely accepted. What's to be done? Fake it! Instead of simply pointing out that this version of the past fails to account for the Pilgrims' habitual piety and is thoroughly inconsistent with the documentary evidence, someone has felt it necessary to invent a document that replaces the 1621 purported non-thanksgiving with a celebration that does include all the sentiments and specifications that Winslow's description lacks. Many websites whose authors would like to maintain an emphasis on the Pilgrims' religious attitudes to support their own, quite different convictions now tell a fake story instead.

The cute text, widely circulated on internet sites (or excerpted, for example), is: "William Bradford's Thanksgiving Proclamation (1623)

Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.

— William Bradford Ye Governor of Ye Colony"

["Ravages of the savages" indeed! Ye, ye, ye, ye!]

This is demonstrably spurious, as my friend Jim Baker pointed out in 1999. His remarks are repeated by various people - usually without credit to Baker - Dennis Rupert, for example.

The false proclamation does not appear in any 17th-century source - not in Bradford, not in Winslow, not in Morton's New England's Memorial, not anywhere. Internal evidence suggests it is a 20th-century fraud. No mention of Plymouth Rock exists before it was pointed out in the mid-18th century, and the term "great Father" (for God) is a 19th-century romantic quasi-Native term that Bradford never used in his acknowledged writings. There are further anachronisms. For example, in 1623 there was no pastor in Plymouth Colony. Pastor John Robinson was still in Leiden, so services were led by the deacon, Elder William Brewster. William Bradford never referred to himself as "your magistrate" in years when he was governor. Bradford dated documents "in the year of our Lord" - sometimes adding the year of the monarch's reign. He never referred to landing on Plymouth Rock (not even as "Pilgrim Rock") and certainly did not use it as a date-base. The Pilgrims did not imagine themselves as seeking "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience." They wanted freedom to worship according to their interpretation of biblical commands, which they thought was exclusively correct - and correct externally to any dictates of their own consciences. Finally, it's amusing that the 29th of November 1623 (Old Style) was not a Thursday but a Saturday (according to the tables in H. Grotefend's Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung des Deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (ed. Th. Ulrich, Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1960).

While it is often impossible to locate the ancient origin of such internet myths, this fraud is relatively recent. Samuel Eliot Morison was unaware of it when editing Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Knopf, 1952); Eugene Aubrey Stratton does not mention it in his Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986). I have not discovered whether it appears anywhere before it made its way into William J. Federer's America's God and Country: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppel, TX: Fame, 1994) and the source Federer gives - David Barton's The Myth of Separation (Aledo TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1991), p. 86. The text has been dropped from recent editions of Barton's book, but that doesn't put an end to repetition of the nonsense, especially on internet sites. A request to David Barton for information on this remains unanswered. On Barton's historical inventiveness, see:

Rob Boston, "Sects, Lies and Videotape: Who Is David Barton, And Why Is He Saying Such Awful Things About Separation of Church And State?" (Originally published in Church & State, 46, Nr. 4, April 1993, pp. 8-12).

Rob Boston, "David Barton's 'Christian Nation' Myth Factory Admits Its Products Have Been Defective." (Originally published in Church & State, 49, No. 7, July/August 1996, pp. 11-13).

Jim Allison, "An Index to Factual Information About David Barton And His Books".

Nicholas P. Miller, "Wallbuilders or Mythbuilders".

That people stressing the religious attitude of the Pilgrims use this invented 1623 "Thanksgiving Proclamation" is ironic. They might have been satisfied with the truth. The 1621 event did express the Pilgrims' religious attitude of thankfulness for God's providence and therefore should be adequate for their modern purposes. Moreover, in the summer of 1623 the Pilgrims held another special day of thanksgiving to God when they considered that their prayers for rain were answered, a drought ended, and their crops were saved. It wasn't in November and no stirring proclamation is preserved. Yet the "secular" interpretive ignorance that denies that the 1621 event was a thanksgiving had triumphed to the extent that someone from among the fundamentally disgruntled must have thought it clever to fight back. It is another question entirely, what the relation of the Pilgrims' religious attitude bears to modern understanding, that would make it urgent to use faked evidence to prove the Pilgrims were thanking God. Obviously the Pilgrims were religious - but what has this to do with anything other than an honest understanding of the past? Their religiosity scarcely provides support for any particular doctrinal viewpoint now; and no one is likely to become religious because it has been proven that the Pilgrims were.

Bartonis interest is to paint a picture of America as a particular sort of Christian nation since the beginning of its colonization. To make the Pilgrims even more religious than is indicated by their own words is dishonest. Removing the spurious quotation is a commendable step in the right direction. Considering that the Pilgrims interpreted their religion to mean that the Christian community bore responsibility to treat the Indians with respect and legal equality (see my book Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1699 (Boston: NEHGS, 2002)); noticing that the Pilgrims' laws proclaim that the community bore responsibility for the care of widows, orphans, the poor, and the infirm; and discovering that the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson argued in favor of cautious religious toleration and asserted that the church had no special authority over the magistrate, which he said was required to deal equitably with non-believers as well as believers, I'd be happy to see such Christian principles applied to modern America. Good luck to Mr. Barton and his colleagues in ensuring this happens!

The Libertarian's First Thanksgiving

Fred E. Foldvary has picked up the false 1623 date eagerly and given it a different twist. "The rains came and the harvest was saved. It is logical to surmise that the Pilgrims saw this as a sign that God blessed their new economic system, because Governor Bradford proclaimed November 29, 1623, as a Day of Thanksgiving." That's the opinion of Foldvary, Editor (1998) of The Progress Report and Lecturer in Economics, Santa Clara University.

So - the Pilgrims weren't thankful to God for a bounteous harvest as such, nor were they expressing gratitude to the Indians for help received. They were congratulating themselves on the discovery of the benefits of individualist capitalism!

The Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1999 published Richard J. Maybury's article "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax" (originally seen in The Free Market, November, 1985). Maybury (self-styled business and economic analyst) wants to correct our idealized view of the Pilgrims: "[T]he harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves." [...] "they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food." [...] "The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first 'Thanksgiving' was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men." Then it all changed: "in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines." [...] "Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful." [...] "Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them." So there you have it - neither God's providence nor helpful Indians, just materialistic private profit.

The theme recurs in numerous imitative articles online. In 2004, Gary M. Galles, professor of economics at Pepperdine University, ended his praise of Pilgrim property with a political admonition: "Though we have incomparably more than they did, we can learn much from their 'way of thanksgiving.' But we should also remember that our material blessings are the fruits of America's system of private-property rights and the liberties they ensure, including the freedom to choose our employment and spend money as we see fit. Those rights are under constant assault today, from limits on people's ability to contract as they wish, especially in labor relationships, to abuses of government's eminent domain." Robert Sheridan, who teaches constitutional law at the San Francisco Law School, quotes the full text (from the San Francisco Chronicle) and expertly dissects Galles' underlying assumptions about modern society, in his own article "Thanksgiving Nonsense and Propaganda".

A slightly abbreviated version of Galles' remarks is published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The Independent Institute's website has a similar article that was published for Thanksgiving in 2004 in the Charlotte Observer and in the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The economic incentives provided by private competitive markets where people are left free to make their own choices make bountiful feasts possible," says Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at San Jose State University. "That's the real lesson of Thanksgiving."

Elaborating on Maybury's view of Thanksgiving, Newsmax columnist Geoff Metcalf becomes even more definite: "[A]n economic system which grants the lazy and the shiftless some 'right' to prosper off the looted fruits of another man's labor, under the guise of enforced 'compassion,' will inevitably descend into envy, theft, squalor, and starvation. Though many would still incrementally impose on us some new variant of the 'noble socialist experiment,' this is still at heart a free country with a bedrock respect for the sanctity of private property - and a land bounteous precisely because it's free. It's for that we give thanks - the corn and beans and turkey serving as mere symbols of that true and underlying blessing - on the fourth Thursday of each November."

True history? Does it make any difference? As Kamensky says, "It's true to its purposes."

For the purposes of historical accuracy, nevertheless, I think it's worth mentioning that the Pilgrims' initial system of working the land by changing field assignments each year had nothing at all to do with socialism - it was the consequence of an early and unrestrained form of capitalism whereby the colony, its products, and the colonists' productive labor were absolutely and entirely mortgaged to the London investors, whose loans had to be paid off before any of the Pilgrim colonists could own free-hold property. The colony as a whole and its colonists were indentured. Their contract is now lost; probably it was among the missing first 338 pages of William Bradford's letter-book. The shift away from rotating field assignments did not result in private property, just a modification of the organization of the indentured labor. Private real property came for these colonists in 1627 when a small group among the colonists - the "Purchasers" - bought the debt and the responsibility to pay it off. A temporary monopoly on the fur trade was reserved to them as compensation for their higher personal responsibility and financial exposure.

A Cornucopia of Grievances

So if Thanksgiving was not about the discovery of private property's profitability, not about help offered to the colonists by the Wampanoag Indians, not about God's providence - what was it?

"The first day of thanksgiving took place in 1637 amidst the war against the Pequots. 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe were gathered for their annual green corn dance on what is now Groton, Connecticut. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded the camp and proceeded to shoot, stab, butcher and burn alive all 700 people. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a feast in celebration and the governor declared 'a day of thanksgiving.' In the ensuing madness of the Indian extermination, natives were scalped, burned, mutilated and sold into slavery, and a feast was held in celebration every time a successful massacre took place. The killing frenzy got so bad that even the Churches of Manhattan announced a day of 'thanksgiving' to celebrate victory over the 'heathen savages,' and many celebrated by kicking the severed heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls." So says Tristam Ahtone, at 13Moon.com. There were preliminary events before this celebration of atrocity, according to Ahtone. Although the 1621 harvest festival in Plymouth was not in his opinion a thanksgiving, he informs us that "Two years later the English invited a number of tribes to a feast 'symbolizing eternal friendship.' The English offered food and drink, and two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison." This echoes the words of James Loewen (quoted by Jackie Alan Giuliano in "Give Thanks - Un-Turkey Truths"): "The British offered a toast 'symbolizing eternal friendship,' whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison." Loewen places this event in Virginia.

Ahtone's remarks connecting the "First Thanksgiving" with the Pequot War are frequently copied or excerpted, with slight variations. Sometimes it's not Massachusetts Bay responsible, but the Pilgrims. "The next day, the English governor William Bradford declared 'a day of Thanksgiving', thanking God that they had eliminated the Indians, opening Pequot land for white settlement." That proclamation was repeated each year for the next century." This was posted by "Ecuanduero" on the Discovery Channel.com, in 2003.

William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians, A Hidden Heritage, writes that, "In 1637 Governor Bradford, who saw his colonists locked in mortal combat with dangerous Native Americans, ordered his militia to conduct a night attack on the sleeping men women and children of a Pequot Indian village. To Bradford, a devout Christian, the massacre was imbued with religious meaning."

Clearly we should realize that these people were not nice, but just exactly how bad? "Not even Charles Manson and Jim Jones combined could compare with that murderous Doomsday cult — the Pilgrims," says a website article called "The Pilgrims, Children of the Devil: Puritan Doomsday Cult Plunders Paradise." The site calls itself the Common Sense Almanac, Progressive Pages (and claims to be a project of the Center for Media and Democracy).

The story forms the foundation for stirring generalizations. "It is a serious mistake to practice holidays based on a false history," one site admonishes us. "The young people find out on their own that they are involved in a lie, and it makes them rage with fury and contempt. [...]It should surprise no one that after raising children honoring the memory of the Pilgrim fathers, that they grow up to hate freedom as much as the Forefathers did. It should surprise no one that a society that worships the Pilgrims — who ruthlessly scalped the Indians (teaching them how to do it), who indiscriminately torched Indian villages, and murdered their women, children and elders in the precursors of total war, and holocaust — should produce children who grow up to join street gangs, and who seek the experience of murdering other human beings for kicks."

The story told by Ahtone, Katz, and others is derived from a report that surfaced in the 1980's. "According to William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, the first official Thanksgiving Day commemorated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies. [...]"

This version in First Nations News is from an article by Karen Gullo that first appeared in Vegetarian Times, 1982. Newell's material is quoted over and over. Newell, who is described in one site as having degrees from two universities [wow! Fancy that!], was convinced about the solidity of his research: ""My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay." http://www.s6k.com/real/thankstaking.htm

What's not authentic is the claim that William Newell was head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, whose faculty cannot recall him at all. When the department was founded in 1971, Newell was 79 years old. See the letter by department chair Jocelyn Linnekin. And what is completely untrue is the idea that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony participated in the 1637 Pequot massacre. Although asked to send military assistance, the Plymouth court did not respond until two weeks after the slaughter had been carried out by a mixed force of soldiers from Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and the Narragansett tribe (no "Dutch and English mercenaries"). As Bradford himself reports, the Pilgrims were told their aid was too little, too late; they could stay home. (See my book,

Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat (Boston: NEHGS, 2004), pp. 164-168.)

Is this important? Or is the lie "true to its purposes"?

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 3

The National Day of Mourning

The purposes can best be understood as fitting in with the description of the Pilgrims that animates the so-called National Day of Mourning sponsored by the United American Indians of New England. "The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims)" [yes, that again] "did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod — before they even made it to Plymouth — was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians' winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry. [...] The first official "Day of Thanksgiving" was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who had gone to Mystic Connecticut to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men."

This characterization of the Pilgrims was written in 2003 by UAINE leaders Mahtowin Munro and Mooanum James, whose father Frank James (Wamsutta) made the 1970 protest speech that started the Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Wamsutta spoke out against decades of inequality in words historically vague and not entirely accurate. He clearly announced the continued presence of Wampanoag Indians to a society that he thought had too often treated them as bygone relics. But his measured anger at real injustice bore little of the demonizing divisiveness championed by UAINE in later years.

From the repetition of Mahtowin Munro's and Mooanum James' remarks in countless websites associated with Native American interests, it would appear that the Wampanoag tribes consider themselves best represented by the UAINE protests. The words of Russell Peters published by Pilgrim Hall Museum contradict this.

Russell Peters, A Wampanoag leader, died in 2002. Who was he? "Mr. Peters [M.A., Harvard] has been involved in Native American issues at a state, local and national level. He [was] the President of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1976 to 1984, a member of the Harvard Peabody Museum Native American Repatriation Committee, a member of the White House Conference on Federal Recognition in 1995 and 1996, a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, a board member of the Pilgrim Society, and the author of Wampanoags of Mashpee (Nimrod Press), Clambake (Lerner Publications), and Regalia (Sundance Press)." Russell Peters expressed regret at the deterioration of the social potential of the Day of Mourning. "While the day of mourning has served to focus attention on past injustice to the Native American cause, it has, in recent years, been orchestrated by a group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England. This group has tenuous ties to any of the local tribes, and is composed primarily of non-Indians. To date, they have refused several invitations to meet with the Wampanoag Indian tribal councils in Mashpee or in Gay Head. Once again, we, as Wampanoags, find our voices and concerns cast aside in the activities surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday in Plymouth, this time, ironically, by a group purporting to represent our interests."

The 1970 event at which Wamsutta spoke was organized by the American Indian Movement, whose leader Russell Means wrote, in his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread (with Marvin J. Wolf, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), "Americans today believe that Thanksgiving celebrates a bountiful harvest, but that is not so. By 1970, the Wampanoag had turned up a copy of a Thanksgiving proclamation made by the governor to the colony. The text revealed the ugly truth: After a colonial militia had returned from murdering the men, women, and children of an Indian village, the governor proclaimed a holiday and feast to give thanks for the massacre. He also encouraged other colonies to do likewise - in other words, every autumn after the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast. In November 1970, their descendants returned to Plymouth to publicize the true story of Thanksgiving and, along with about two hundred other Indians from around the country, to observe a national day of Indian mourning."

One of the odder results of the "Day of Mourning" is the appearance in a couple of Thanksgiving Day sermons of the unfounded claim that some Pilgrims considered having a day of mourning to commemorate those who had died the previous winter, but that instead they chose to thank God for their continued preservation. This colonization of the protest rhetoric can be seen at Presbyterian Warren [excerpted at] Trinity Sermons.

Genocide

That's a mild contrast to Mitchel Cohen's "Why I Hate Thanksgiving" (2003), now re-duplicated incessantly. "First, the genocide. Then the suppression of all discussion about it. What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this 'holyday' commemorates? [...] all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor. Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. [...] I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to [is] the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika � not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and ... they will be the new Indians." See, for some sanity, Guenter Lewy's "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?"

Mr. Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix," the national newspaper of the Greens/Greens Party USA. He's annoyed. (Who wouldn't be - loving nature and living in Brooklyn?) He's also a romantic with an ideal view of Natives living in a pristine environment, rather like the peaceful, ecologically wonderful place imagined by Plimoth Plantation's Anthony Pollard (known as Nanepashemet). "The Wampanoag way of life fostered a harmonious relationship between the People and their natural environment, both physical and spiritual. [...] fighting was just part of the search for harmony when conditions had become intolerable or justice was denied."

Lies My Teacher�s Telling Me Now

The annual clamor of the aggrieved finds significant expression in website materials aimed at providing school teachers with a balanced (meaning non-colonial) view of Thanksgiving. One of the most important and widely copied articles is an introduction to "Teaching About Thanksgiving" written by Chuck Larson of the Tacoma School District.

Originally issued in 1986 by the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Washington, "Teaching About Thanksgiving" is no longer available from that State. It continues to be distributed by the Fourth World Documentation Project and the Center for World Indigenous Studies, among others. I hope it has been withdrawn by the state in response to the withering criticism it received from Caleb Johnson, whose Mayflower topics website presents much documentary material about the Pilgrims.

"The author of the 'Fourth World Documentation Project' lesson plan on Thanksgiving, published all over the internet as well as distributed in printed form, claims to have a strong background in history," writes Johnson. "But nearly every sentence of the entire lesson plan has a significant factual error, or is simply story-telling (making up stories and details to fit within a set framework of given historical facts)." Johnson's detailed, devastating line-by-line corrections attracted the attention of the New York Times. I have seen only one website for teachers that carries the Larson material and that also includes a reference to Johnson's work, and then only as if to provide an alternative to the nonsense they continue to present as the main material. But Johnson definitively destroyed the credibility of the lesson plan - why keep on providing it? Are the lies true to some purpose?

Mentioning that Johnson's work is worth looking at is, nonetheless, at least more generous than the ad hominem attack on Johnson that was mounted by Jamie McKenzie of the Bellingham, Washington, School District.

McKenzie complained in 1996 that Caleb Johnson did not list his own academic credentials that would suggest his website should be considered authoritative. Johnson had, after all, cast doubt on the value of Larson's "strong background in history." McKenzie, on the other hand, did not take the time to compare Johnson's careful quotations of source materials with the slipshod work of his academically qualified colleague down in Tacoma. (Although Johnson's essays are typically not footnoted, having only a source list at the end, Johnson has taken the trouble to re-publish the texts of many of the original documents on his site.) But McKenzie's major complaint in 1996 was that the internet in general did not provide much information about Thanksgiving, and that scholars with credentials were not creating the sites. There's certainly more now, and some of it is provided by professors. If one has doubts about the professor of anthropology William B. Newell, who's been forgotten by the University of Connecticut, there's the University of Colorado's Professor of Ethnic Studies, Ward Churchill, asking us, "what is it we're supposed to be so thankful for? Does anyone really expect us to give thanks for the fact that soon after the Pilgrim Fathers regained their strength, they set out to dispossess and exterminate the very Indians who had fed them that first winter? Are we to express our gratitude for the colonists' 1637 massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, Conn., or their rhetoric justifying the butchery by comparing Indians to 'rats and mice and swarms of lice'"?

And there's the late Professor James Deetz, who thought Thanksgiving only became associated with the Pilgrims around 1900, evidently disregarding the implications of Winslow Homer's famous Thanksgiving Day illustrations in Harper's Weekly, Nov. 27, 1858, Dec. 1, 1860, Nov. 29, 1862, and Dec. 3, 1864, as well as Thomas Nast's "Thanksgiving Day, 1863" (published as a double-page center illustration in Harper's Weekly, Dec. 5, 1863). Nast includes a vignette in the lower right corner labelled "country," whose main praying figure is recognizably derived from the representation of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson in Robert Weir's painting "The Embarkation of the Pilgrims," completed in 1843 in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington.

Despite its filiopietistic motivations, the huge desert of misinformation has left Caleb Johnson's work as one of a small number of oases of calm study, equalling the level of the so-called Plymouth Colony Archive Project established by James Deetz, Patricia Scott Deetz, and Christopher Fennell (which, however, despite valuable information about the colony, says nothing significant about Thanksgiving).

McKenzie also objects to Johnson�s "failing to mention some of the information which other sites provide about the Pilgrims taking the Native American corn and digging up and taking things from grave sites." In fact, Johnson publishes all the evidence there is about those issues. Because no evidence supports the inflated claims, McKenzie thinks that the Pilgrims have been "sanitized."

Unsanitized would be the word for Brenda Francis's version. She says that she "read on Binghamton University's website that the Pilgrims were starving and even went so far to dig up some remains of the Wampanoag people and eat them as a means to survival."

This directly contradicts William Bradford, who, after repeating the second-hand rumor that some Spanish colonists had been reduced to eating "dogs, toads, and dead men," proclaims that "From these extremities the Lord in his goodness kept these his people [the Pilgrims], and in their great wants preserved both their lives and healths; let his name have the praise." (Bradford's History "Of Plimoth Plantation" (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1901), p. 165: [subscribers].

The Binghamton site that is Brenda Francis' source has a student newspaper article (Nov. 21, 2003) by Rachel Kalina, who relays that the "Pilgrims were able to survive their first winter partially because of guidance by the natives and because they dug up the deceased Wampanoags to eat the corn offerings in the graves." That's not quite the same as necro-cannibalism.

Quoting from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 91, the teacher of a course in "Debunking and Dissent" - Colby Glass of Palo Alto College (TX), maintains that "...the Pilgrims continued to rob graves for years."

There are three points of interest here: first, Winslow's description of examining graves (our only source of information) does not support these assertions; second, the corn found by the Pilgrims was not found in graves; third, I'm unaware of any evidence so far found to indicate that corn was included in graves on Cape Cod at all. Let alone that the Pilgrims were cannibals!

In the book now called Mourt's Relation, Edward Winslow wrote that the Pilgrims, exploring, found a path that took them to "certain heaps of sand, one whereof was covered with old mats, and had a wooden thing like a mortar whelmed on the top of it, and an earthen pot laid in a little hole at the end thereof. We, musing what it might be, digged and found a bow, and, as we thought, arrows, but they were rotten. We supposed there were many other things, but because we deemed them graves, we put in the bow again and made it up as it was, and left the rest untouched, because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres." Passing through several fields recently tended, they came upon a house, from which they removed a European ship's kettle. Next to the house was a heap of sand, which when excavated yielded two baskets filled with Indian corn. One contained thirty six ears, "some yellow, and some red, and others mixed with blue [...] The basket was round, and narrow at the top; it held about three or four bushels." Filling the kettle with loose corn, two of the Pilgrims suspended it on a stick and carried it away. The rest of the corn they re-buried. Two or three days later, they returned for the remaining corn, also finding and taking some beans and more corn, totaling around ten bushels. The following morning they found a much larger mound, covered with boards. It turned out to be the grave of a man with blond hair, whose shroud was a "sailor's canvas cassock" and who was wearing a "pair of cloth breeches." The body was accompanied by a "knife, a packneedle, and two or three iron things." Clearly this was the body of a European. An infant's body was buried together with this man. Reburying the bodies (as was customary in Europe), they continued to look for corn but found nothing else but graves, which, considering their desire not to "ransack their sepulchres," they presumably did not disturb once it was clear the mounds did not contain baskets of corn. Having learned to recognize graves, three days later the Pilgrims avoided disturbing a cemetery. They "found a burying place, one part whereof was encompassed with a large palisade, like a churchyard [...] Within it was full of graves [...] yet we digged none of them up, but only viewed them and went our way." Mourt's Relation (1622) has been republished numerous times. Caleb Johnson has made it available online at Mayflower History.com.

Winslow's words are our only evidence. Nothing impels us to doubt his information that the Pilgrims opened the grave of a European sailor and his child, reburying them after removing from the grave a few items that to a European would not have been considered grave offerings having any symbolic significance. The Pilgrims exhibited memorable sensitivity in refraining from disturbing Indian graves, once they learned to recognize them. They did not dig up graves in order to eat corn buried as grave offerings. There is no indication they removed corn from any graves. The corn was found in baskets whose shape when packed in earth would result in domed pit spaces. There is nothing to support the idea that corn was placed in graves as offerings, although small gifts of corn have been found in graves excavated by archaeologists working hundreds of miles away (the American southwest and Peru, for example).

The amount the Pilgrims found in storage baskets - two or three bushels in the first, and three or four in the second - is a large, bulky quantity. From 1986-1991, I was Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation. The collections at that time included all the archaeological material from excavations of burial sites in the Plymouth Colony area carried out by Harry Hornblower II and James Deetz, and others with whom they worked. I carried out a detailed examination of the thousands of items in the collections, specifically looking for corn - in hopes of having it studied scientifically so we could replicate the exact type of corn growing in the area in the early 17th century. Although some floral remains had been saved from excavations that included burial sites, there was no corn, not a single kernel. Had it been the practice to bury bushels of corn as grave offerings, surely there would have been some in the materials carefully excavated from these ten Native burials. There was nothing. Neither was any discovery of corn recorded in the careful notebooks kept by Hornblower (there were no Deetz notebooks present, and no published reports). This absence is consistent with the absence of corn among grave goods from several Cape Cod Native burials, recently transferred to Native authorities for reburial, from the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.

Throughout the accounts of these discoveries of storage baskets of Indian corn, Winslow repeats the intention to try to meet the Indian owners and negotiate repayment for the corn that had been taken That was an intention to provide compensation for what the Pilgrims understood would be considered theft if no payment were made. (During the first year, Pilgrims stole corn; Indians stole abandoned tools.) Establishing that neither side would steal from the other was an important part of early negotiation between them. Attempts to locate the specific owner of the corn were ultimately successful and repayment was made (see Pilgrim Edward Winslow, p. 36).

In "Deconstructing the Myths of 'The First Thanksgiving,'" Judy Dow and Beverly Slapin contradict the documentary evidence. They base their comments largely on information provided to them by Margaret Bruchac, an "Abanaki scholar" working in collaboration with Plimoth Plantation's Wampanoag Indian Program. "There is no record that restitution was ever made for the stolen corn, and the Wampanoag did not soon forget the colonists� ransacking of Indian graves, including that of Massasoit's mother."

One may surmise that Bruchac was confused in making the reference to the grave of Massasoit's mother, which is undocumented. Probably what is meant is the removal later of two bearskin rugs from over the grave of the mother of Chickatabut, sachem of the Massachusetts (see my book Indian Deeds, p. 13). It is meretriciously clever, nonetheless, to turn Winslow's statement of respect for the Indians and their graves into a pronouncement about the Wampanoags' long memory of "the colonists' ransacking of Indian graves." The up-to-date construction of "memory" and "oral history" to fit the needs of current political concerns is blatant.

Dow and Slapin end their deconstruction with the remark that "As currently celebrated in this country, "Thanksgiving" is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."

Alternatively, Russell Peters said, "The time is long overdue for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags to renew a meaningful dialogue about our past and look towards a more honest future."

Does it matter what of this is true? Was that the wrong question? Who do we want to be in the ever-changing Now? Intrepid demolishers of straw-man myths? Inventors of new myths to serve new political purposes? Historians?

#History #Thanksgiving #Religion #America

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7awlal3alm-blog · 5 years

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Life’s challenges force us to harden up. Relationships, work, children, family and finances all combine to put us under a lot of pressure and the way we are expected to deal with these is to develop resilience and to some extent indifference. We are required to be tough.

To teach our kids to be tough and with each blow life delivers to knock us down, we need to get up, dust ourselves off and pick up where we left off. The more times we start again, the colder and more jaded we become.

What you truly desire. Imagine what you could

Some people believe that showing tough love is an important way to ensure that their children are able to take care of themselves in the future. If you were the recipient of this approach on a regular basis, you might even believe that this has had a positive impact on your life.

Everyone’s parents criticize from time to time.

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Without injuring others or placing your own life in danger, it’s healthy to let go sometimes. You don’t have to be irresponsible to release responsibility and embrace freedom for a change. When life is becoming too burdensome and the weight of obligation and duty seems suffocating, do something that allows you to release yourself from what can feel like a prison.

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#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

If you want to take it to the next level and gauge subscriber sentiment, you could generate feedback by adding a simple “Did you find this email useful?” line in your footer that leads subscribers to a survey. Keep it short and concise though; you’re not after War and Peace.

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Most email service providers have inbuilt mobile optimized templates, but if yours doesn’t/you want something custom and have budget to spare, consider hiring an email marketing developer on Envato Studio or Upwork. Just ensure you do you research and ask for previous work examples before you hire.

Focus on process-oriented ideas

Did you grow up believing that your parent was physically or emotionally abusive to you because you deserved it? If so, you may still be justifying the terrible behavior of others at your own expense.

Get In Touch With Emotions

Discover how you really feel about things. It’s easier said than done. Instead of maintaining the status quo and keeping the peace.

Instead of following the herd and making the predictable and reliable decisions that you are expected to make, ask yourself.

What you truly desire. Imagine what you could accomplish, if failing wasn’t an option.If there was no fear of being judged and no adverse consequences.

If there was no fear of being judged and no adverse consequences reliable decisions.

Learning to acknowledge and express our emotions freely may seem like weakness in a culture that requires us to be tough, but in actual fact it takes a strength far more valuable and honorable than living in denial.

Use the “Spaced Repetition” technique

Try the “Pinch Yourself” hack

Schedule learning sessions before bedtime

Study the content, not the language

This technique was introduced by Maneesh Sethi, a frequent traveler who mastered four foreign languages as an adult. His approach was based on the fact that negative stimuli massively boost self-improvement.

Soft is the new hard

When you think that a situation requires you to be tough, to stiffen your upper lip and puff out your chest in the face of something difficult or even traumatic, consider if you have another option. Maybe for a change it’s time to wallow in the tragedy of your experience and really feel what it is to be human. Striving for mental toughness may close you off to a world of emotional development and progress that you may otherwise live through if you let yourself open up for a change.

Ways to beat stress at work

How you can use this for language learning?

Get a set of flashcards for memorizing vocabulary or grammar.

Master the hard pinch (it should be quite hard) to activate your body’s threat response.

Review a category of flash cards (such as adjectives or group of words). Don’t pinch yourself at this stage.

Review the same category, now adding the pinch for each vocabulary word. Spend some time studying the card before moving to the next one.

Softening your perspective towards yourself and others; allowing yourself to experience tenderness and nurturing instead may seem counterproductive, but in the long run, may reap more abundant rewards.

Tough is just bravado. Softening up is a new normal you should try.

You may feel sadness more intensely, or anger. Disappointment, fear, grief. The flip side is you may discover joy like you’ve never allowed yourself to feel before. You may laugh harder, feel more inspired, encounter wonder and awe at things you previously took for granted.

Organic touches and sleek minimalism find harmony in an upper west side apartment Life’s challenges force us to harden up. Relationships, work, children, family and finances all combine to put us under a lot of pressure and the way we are expected to deal with these is to develop resilience and to some extent indifference.

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xarciel · 6 years

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Why Megatron’s Redemption Arc Falls Flat - Part 2

So I realised as I was writing this that I have way too much to say for a single post. There’s a lot to unpack in the metatextual promotion of Megatron in s2 of MTMTE and LL, so instead of this being Part 2/2 as expected it will be Part 2/??. I’ll update the links at the bottom if/when more posts gets written.

Since his introduction to the crew at the beginning of Season 2 Megatron has fundamentally changed the way the ensemble cast interacted and resolved situations. This is to be expected, of course, since Megatron is a divisive, dynamic character, but the issue isn’t that this /has/ happened, but /how/ it has happened. Specifically, Megatron is positioned as the main protagonist in the ensemble, at the expense of other characters’ arcs.

To make Megatron sympathetic we see the same four steps used throughout the series: -> Raise an issue as something current Megatron cares about -> Retcon the issue through flashbacks as something that Megatron has always cared about -> Resolve the issue in the present, allowing Megatron to show off his ethical ways -> Refuse to acknowledge specific actions taken by Megatron during the war, and preceding the start of MTMTE

This is used in conjunction with positioning all those against Megatron’s rehabilitation as villains (Rodimus on Cybertron, Starscream at the trial, Getaway on the Lost Light and the DJD on Necroworld), ensuring that we get plenty of shots of Megs looking sad (I counted 42 in MTMTE, not including #50-55) and introducing new, even more heinous villains (the DJD) to undermine Megatron’s atrocities up to this point. We’re given extensive monologues from Megatron as his journey progresses, and when he does act in ways that undermine his redemption the story sweeps them under the rug, focussing on other more positive areas instead.

A simple example: Megatron hates mneumosurgery. He considers it a violation of the highest order, as no-one should be able to alter the mind or mental state of another without their permission. At the beginning of Season 2 however, he permanently activates Trailcutter’s FIM chip without his consent, and aside from a single line from Trailcutter this is never brought up again. This is, in fact, altering Trailcutter’s mental state without his permission, but because it’s not done in the same invasive way the narrative skips over the ethical ramification of Megatron’s actions, to focus on the positives they bring.

On the subject of mneumosurgery, this presents the perfect Raise, Retcon, Resolve method described above. Issue #28: Megatron’s hatred of mneumosurgery is Raised when Optimus offers using it as a way to expedite Megatron’s trial. Issue #34: Megatron’s hatred for mneumosurgery is Retconned to stem from a lobotomisation he was forced to undergo by the Functionists when he was still a miner. Issue #48: Rodimus orders Chromedome to use mneumosurgery to determine Atomizer’s guilt in the attack on Megatron - Megatron Resolves his status as the more moral of the pair by being against this use of mnuemosurgery. The Refuse step comes into play with one of Megatron’s schemes from #14 of Robots in Disguise, which takes place roughly 12 months before #28. This issue involves Megatron revealing that he has had Prowl under mind control via Bombshell for months, using him to grow Decepticon sympathy and having him commit atrocities as a Decepticon plant. Nowhere in MTMTE is this even vaguely referenced- pre-MTMTE Megatron is never reflected on within the text.

The fact that the narrative simultaneously punishes Rodimus and Optimus for committing morally questionable actions for good reasons means that Megatron is portrayed in a more positive light than his actions deserve. We are shown, and focus on, Megatron’s suffering from mneumosurgery - the more complex arguments from the practice are laid aside in search of a simple morality arc.

To help further develop sympathy for Megatron, the narrative introduces a new set of villains to replace and even outstrip the atrocities Megatron has committed in the past. This group, the DJD, commit heinous acts against established ensemble characters and their own faction for personal and professional pleasure, and are shown to be incalcitrant to change, even when negotiating with Megatron. Language used by Megatron to describe them repeatedly emphasises his opinion they are more morally corrupt than he ever was, calling them ‘the biggest monsters of all’ and ‘the dark side of the Decepticon cause’. This both distances Megatron from the DJD in the readers minds, and again reinforces the idea that Megatron is no longer the evil mastermind from previous arcs, furthering his redemption arc without any significant character growth on his end.

In the lead up to the Dying of the Light two issues are dedicated to recalling the specific atrocities committed by Tarn on Skids during the war, specifically to prime the audience for the DJD’s appearance as main villains in the finale. Simultaneously, Megatron is undergoing a vow of pacifism, using the four steps to invite audience sympathy and further drive a wedge between past Megatron and redeemed Megatron. Raise: #32 - Megatron talks with Ravage about how he is tired of fighting Retcon: #37 - Megatron the miner originally promoted ‘non-violent direct action’ Resolve: #49 - Megatron takes a vow of pacifism Refuse: Megatron the gladiator, the assassination of the Senate, literally anything from the last 4 million years

While undertaking this vow of pacifism, however, Megatron fails to consider the impact of it on those around him - specifically, by marking himself as a strict non-combatant, he refuses to provide back up to the LL crew in any situation they may need it. Compared with other pacifistic characters such as Ratchet and Rung, this simplistic ‘fighting is bad’ policy demonstrates how Megatron is rewarded within text without considering the issue on a complex level. He is granted moral superiority by simple virtue of refusing to fight, even if his decision may lead to preventable deaths. This view is ultimately self-centric - when compared to Drift’s arc and how he uses his skills to protect others as redemption for committing crimes against them in the first place, Megatron’s redemption is tea tray shallow.

The issues of how Megatron is positioned as sympathetic through framing those against his rehabilitation as antagonists is a post for another time (since this one’s already getting pretty long), but consider the following: from issue #28 to issue #49, there are 42 panels of Megatron looking sad. These panels come either as individual closeups, or panels where Megatron is in the mid-ground and additional body language as well as his face are used to convey his sadness. Once you remove the DJD and Scavengers issues, this is 15 issues, and roughly three panels per issue of Megatron looking sad. This strong emphasis on Megatron’s feelings, and specifically his negative emotions, are used to create sympathy for him by using basic story-telling techniques - to use an old fashioned term, Megatron is being Woobified.

Making Megatron into a ‘relatable’ character was not something that happened in MTMTE by accident. There was extensive planning on the story and art side to make sure that Megatron came across as sympathetic, even though through his actions Megatron never truly shows much evidence of redemption. The Dying of the Light and the Functionist Universe arcs are entire suitcases that still need unpacking here, but for now I’ll leave it with this: a redemption arc is a character making up for past mistakes - a process of self-reflection and action taken to make amends for things they’ve done in the past.

Where is it that we see Megatron making amends for those he’s hurt in the past?

[Link to Part 1]

A quick recap on Megatron (and his sad faces), issue by issue for those interested:

#28: Megatron argues that ‘tampering with someone’s head’ (accessing or altering their mental state) is the one place he will not go. Rodimus tells him he deserves to die for his crimes, and we get 3 panels of Megs looking sad. LL members graffiti his door and Whirl attacks him. Megatron tells Whirl that Whirl is only alive due to Megs’ mercy because of their interactions 4 million years ago.

#29: Flashback to the trial: Starscream says Megatron deserves pity - 3 panels of Megs looking sad. Megatron permanently enables Trailbreaker’s FIM chip without his consent (thereby altering his mental state).

#30: More flashbacks to the trial - Megs gives his statement, manipulates the trial using a legal loophole to avoid judgement and issues a public renouncement of the Decepticons (under duress by Optimus) - 8 panels of Megs looking sad.

#31: Megs is accused of being responsible for crew members disappearing - 3 panels of Megs looking sad. When Nightbeat works out the cause Megatron berates him and blames the disappearances on Nightbeat for not being faster, even though knowing the cause could not have prevented it.

#32: Megatron is accused of killing crew members as the corpses bear wounds from a fusion cannon - he agrees to stay stationary while the others investigate further. We learn Megatron destroyed his signature weapon (under duress from Optimus). Megatron discusses his change of heart with Ravage, describes the DJD as ‘the biggest monsters of all’. Speaks of how old and tired he feels - 7 panels of Megs looking sad.

#33: the team wants to save a planet from destruction, Megatron says it’s not worth it because the planet doesn’t contain Cybertronians. Skids confronts him on his xenophobic views. 2 panels of Megs looking sad. Megatron reveals he can help the team as a last resort. Convinces Ravage to remain on the LL by arguing that he has seen ‘the dark side’ of the Decepticon cause. #34: Flashback to Megatron’s beginnings as a miner on Tarn. Foundation of Towards Peace and the Decepticon manifesto are retconned to being about equality only, and contain no xenophobia. Megatron loses his friend Terminus and is lobotimised by a mneumosurgeon - 6 panels of Megs looking sad.

#35: Megatron loots Trailcutter’s forcefield generator from his corpse. 2 panels of Megs looking sad. Megatron further distances himself from the DJD when Rodimus comes to see him, and the discussion of Megatron’s connection with the DJD is swept under the rug by the next plot thread. Megatron’s role in Trailcutter’s death is never revisited.

#36: Megatron speaks to Orion Pax from 4 million years ago about his moral dilemma - 2 panels of Megs looking sad.

#37: Flashback to the bar fight that got Megatron arrested - this fight is retconned to be caused by the modern day LL crew. Megatron’s manifesto is retconned to originally be about non violent direct action, with Impactor the one who dragged Megatron into the bar fight that gets him arrested.

#38: Megatron attacks Perceptor and demands to be sent through time. Magnus brings him under control. Megatron warps his behaviour from attacking to ‘remonstrating’ and offers no apology for it. The LL crew discovers how much the universe would have benefited from Megatron’s death and tries to enact it, but are betrayed by Whirl’s hatred of Functionism - 4 panels of Megs looking sad.

#39: The DJD find out about Megatron’s renouncement of the Decepticons and decide to continue their work regardless.

#40: Megatron is tricked by Ratchet into giving a poetry reading at ‘Visages’ which nobody attends. Megatron steals one of the time briefcases, which Rodimus and Perceptor are destroying.

#43: Megatron’s intuitive human avatar wields a Decepticon cane, which he discards when he realises its existence. 1 panel of Megs looking sadly at his old age in a mirror.

#44: Megatron agrees to detouring the ship to Necroworld as a way to postpone the search for the Knights. Megatron finds his field of death flowers while a monologue from the Necrobot about how all Cybertronians are killers is superimposed on the page. 1 panel of Megs looking sad.

#47: Megatron wakes up to find Tailgate beside him with mneunosurgeon needles on his fingers. He grabs Tailgate by the head. Cyclonus enters to this scene and attacks Megatron, leaving him with a dent in his head and a hole in his chest.

#48: Megatron apologises to Cyclonus, says he was not going to hurt Tailgate. The ethical question of Rodimus instructing Chromedome to probe Atomizer’s mind is called into question by Cyclonus and Megatron. Flashbacks to Skids time on Grindcore, where Tarn is the principle villain.

#49: Megatron refuses to fire on Sunder, even as he attacks the entire crew of the LL, states he is now a pacifist. Megatron attempts to persuade Rung to continue in his role, attempting to sweep Rung’s mistakes under the rug. We witness the full horror of Grindcore as Tarn’s pet project.

[Issues #50 onwards coming when I get around to it]

#tfrants #mtmte #lost light #maccadam

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smashmusicideas · 7 years

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Smash Bros. Ideas, Vol. II

Hello. Generally, I go by Wolfman, or Wolfman Jew on the internet. Back in 2014, I started this Tumblr by discussing ideas for possible music that could be used in what was, at the time, the next Super Smash Bros. That led to a sizable project the next year where I looked at possible DLC characters in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS & Wii U, a project which then led to my joining the Nintendo themed news and criticism site Source Gaming while abandoning my blog here. I’ve felt bad about that, and the new announcement of a new Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo Switch feels like the ideal opportunity to come back.

I’ll be doing one post a day to discuss, well, anything, really. I want to get back into daily writing projects, but I’m not quite sure if any specific direction works for me. So instead, this will just be me shooting the breeze about Smash Bros. a little each day. This post will be a collection of this. I’ll link to it with each post I write, and I’ll try to keep this as a daily affair. If people would be interested in me talking about other stuff - the chances of their favorite characters, what kinds of stages would be best - I’d love to hear any suggestions.

March 9: So, How ‘Bout that first Trailer?

March 10: Smash, the Switch, and the Current Nintendo Landscape

March 11: The Value of a Newcomer’s Surprise

March 12: On New Modes Smash for Switch Might Have

March 13: The Ways We Talk About Newcomers

March 14: The Rorschach Test

March 15: an Indie Character in Smash

March 16: What About Stages?

March 17: The Prediction Dance

March 18: New Pokémon

March 19: Bringing Back Stuff from Smash for 3DS

March 20: An Ode to the Cracker Launcher

March 21: Putting the “New” in Newcomer

March 22: Introducing the “Smash Chart”

March 23: the Smash Invitational

March 24: The Smash Chart and Newcomers

March 25: Newcomers by Console

March 26: the Wii Shop Channel

March 27: Another Way to Look at Newcomers

March 28: Stages by Console

March 29: Items by Console

March 30: Let’s Get Some More Victory Jingles!

March 31: An Apology for Lateness

April 1: An Ode to the Assist Trophy

April 2: Smash’s Music and Me

April 3: The Tether Recovery, and Semi-Unique Techniques

April 4: Stages for Older Games

April 5: Looking at the DLC Costumes

April 6: An Idea for a New Mechanic

April 7: Possible New Items

April 8: The Difficulty of Keeping These Up

April 9: The Hype Cycle

April 10: Spinoffs

April 11: Where Are the Obviously Fake Rumors?

April 12: Who’s Your Favorite Possible Newcomer?

April 13: Laboman, and Toys in Smash

April 14: What Was Your First “WOW!” Moment with Smash?

April 15: The Smash (64) Box Art

April 16: The Eras of Smash

April 17: Disliking Characters

April 18: A Smash Spinoff?

April 19: On Villains

April 20: What Makes a Newcomer “Plausible”

April 21: A Deeper Dive into “Relevance”

April 22: A Deeper Dive into “Distinctiveness”

April 23: A Deeper Dive into “Personality”

April 24: My One Beef with Sakurai

April 25: the Future of “All Star” Characters

April 26: The List of Prospective “All-Stars”

April 27: Cores, Cores, Cores

April 28: Gimmick Music Tracks

April 29: “Accept the Mystery”

April 30: Organic Custom Moves

May 1: New Artistic Styles

May 2: The Smash Knockoffs

May 3: The Trickle of News

May 4: Sakurai’s Love of Star Wars

May 5: Two Guest Fighters from the Same Series

May 6: Enjoyably Useless Mechanics

May 7: My Favorite Smash 64 Character

May 8: My Favorite Melee Characters

May 9: My Favorite Brawl Characters

May 10: My Favorite Smash for 3DS / Wii U Characters

May 11: Checking In with Where We Are

May 12: The Potential of Spears

May 13: the Potential of Axes (and Hammers)

May 14: the Potential of Claws

May 15: the Return of the Fake Leaks

May 16: The Potential of Flails

May 17: The Potential of Whips

May 18: “Character-Driven Series”

May 19: In Defense of Smash’s Worst Stage

May 20: Buffing Franchises

May 21: “Deserves’ Got Nothing to Do With It”

May 22: “Deserving” Through Sales

May 23: “Deserving” Through Acclaim

May 24: Gliding

May 25: When the Games You Don’t Like Show Up in Smash

May 26: Retro Possibles

May 27: My New Favorite Ridiculous Rumor

May 28: The “Familiar” Type of Retro Character

May 29: The “Foundational” Kind of Retro Character

May 30: Eevee’s Prospective Chances

May 31: Moving into June

June 1: Decidueye and Mimikyu

June 2: Heavy Hitters?

June 3: Side Discussions Before E3

June 4: New “Kinds” of Levels

June 5: The Burnout

June 6: Why Snake Matters

June 7: Going through the Smash E3 Trailers

June 8: Why amiibo Don’t (and Do) Matter in Smash Predictions

June 9: “Sakurai the Troll”

June 10: Smash Trailers Going Forward

June 11: Tomorrow, Frustration, and the Direct

June 12: The Sakurai Special

June 13: When It’s Great to Feel Wrong, Smash Bros. Ultimate Edition

June 14: From Where New Echo Fighters Might Draw

June 15: The Expansion of Alternate Outfits

June 16: So…What Do We Do Next?

June 17: A New Way We May Approach Newcomers

June 18: Smash Website Design, and the Curse of “Slots”

June 19: One Fun Easter Egg in the Smash Presentation

June 20: Waluigi, Sakurai, and the People for Whom Smash is Made

June 21: On Ridley’s Size and Shape

June 22: The Best of Both Worlds

June 23: The (Currently) Missing Stages

June 24: When Sakurai Hides Information

June 25: How the Ultimate Trailer Works So Well

June 26: Takin’ a Break!

June 29: This was Never a Given

July 2: Sakurai and “Never”

July 3: Mario, the Center of Smash

July 4: The Importance of Air Ride

July 5: Please, Let’s Not Talk about Ultimate DLC Right Now

July 6: What I Consider “Plausible” for Ultimate by this Point

July 8: Smash Bros. and Fire Emblem

July 12: Fighter 01 - Mario

July 14: Fighter 02 - Donkey Kong

July 15: Fighter 03 - Link

July 17: Fighter 04 - Samus

July 19: Fighter 05 - Yoshi

July 22: Fighter 06 - Kirby

July 23: Fighter 07 - Fox

July 24: Fighter 08 - Pikachu

July 27: Fighter 09 - Luigi

July 29: Fighter 10 - Ness

July 31: Fighter 11 - Captain Falcon

August 1: Fighter 12 - Jigglypuff

August 3: Fighter 13 - Peach

August 5: Fighter 13ᵋ - Daisy

August 7: Fighter 14 - Bowser

August 8: Oh, That Direct

August 11: Fighter 04ᵋ - Dark Samus

August 13: A Semi-Coherent Rant About the Yellow and Purple Chairs

August 14: Fighter 15 - Ice Climbers

August 15: Fighter 16 - Sheik

August 16: Fighter 17 - Zelda

August 18: Fighter 18 - Dr. Mario

August 19: Fighter 19 - Pichu

August 22: Fighter 20 - Falco

August 25: Fighter 21 - Marth

August 26: Fighter 21ᵋ - Lucina

August 28: One Hundred Days

August 29: Fighter 22 - Young Link

August 31: Fighter 23 - Ganondorf

September 2: Fighter 24 - Mewtwo

September 3: Fighter 25 - Roy

September 4: Fighter 25ᵋ - Chrom

September 6: Fighter 26 - Mr. Game & Watch

September 7: Fighter 27 - Meta Knight

September 9: Fighter 28 - Pit

September 11: Fighter 28ᵋ - Dark Pit

September 12: Fighter 29 - Zero Suit Samus

September 13: Well, that Direct was Pretty Fun

September 14: Fighter 30 - Wario

September 16: Fighter 31 - Snake

September 18: Fighter 32 - Ike

September 19: Fighters 33 - 35 - Pokémon Trainer

September 20: Fighter 36 - Diddy Kong

September 21: Fighter 37 - Lucas

September 23: Fighter 38 - Sonic

September 25: Fighter 39 - King Dedede

September 26: Fighter 40 - Olimar

September 27: Fighter 41 - Lucario

September 28: Fighter 42 - R.O.B.

October 1: Fighter 43 - Toon Link

October 2: Fighter 44 - Wolf

October 3: Fighter 45 - Villager

October 4: Fighter 46 - Mega Man

October 6: Fighter 47 - Wii Fit Trainer

October 7: Fighter 48 - Rosalina & Luma

October 9: Fighter 49 - Little Mac

October 10: Fighter 50 - Greninja

October 11: Fighters 51 - 53 - Mii Fighters

October 12: Fighter 54 - Palutena

October 14: Fighter 55 - Pac-Man

October 16: Fighter 56 - Robin

October 17: Fighter 57 - Shulk

October 18: Fighter 58 - Bowser Jr.

October 19: Fighter 59 - Duck Hunt

October 20: Fighter 60 - Ryu

October 23: Fighter 61 - Cloud

October 24: Fighter 62 - Corrin

October 25: Fighter 63 - Bayonetta

October 27: Fighter 64 - Inkling

October 28: Fighter 65 - Ridley

October 30: Fighter 66 - Simon

October 31: Fighter 66ᵋ - Richter

November 1: The Surprise

November 2: Fighter 60ᵋ - Ken

November 3: Fighter 67 - King K. Rool

November 6: Fighter 68 - Isabelle

November 7: Fighter 69 - Incineroar

November 8: Fighter 70 - Piranha Plant

November 9: Smashing the Wait: The Good Place

November 10: Yes, NOW Let’s Talk about Ultimate DLC (Part 1)

November 11: On Non-Gaming Characters

November 13: Smash DLC Part 2: the Goals

November 14: Smashing the Wait: Gravity Falls

November 15: On Assist Trophies as Playable Characters

November 17: That Music

November 18: Future Guest Series

November 20: Master Hand and the World of Toys

November 22: Smash Stuff for which I’m Thankful

November 24: How Has Adding Newcomers Changed?

November 28: DLC Part 3: the Upcoming Games

November 29: My Philosophy

November 30: Smashing the Wait: Rocky & Bullwinkle

December 4: So, What Comes Next for Smash?

December 5: Summing Up This Journey

December 7: The Future

December 9: DLC Part 3: What Reggie Said

Also, in the interest of Shameless Self-Promotion, here’s my profile for Source Gaming, and my current project on the best game music by year.

2017 in Gaming: the Best Scores

2016 in Gaming: the Best Scores

2015 in Gaming: the Best Scores

2014 in Gaming: the Best Scores

#Super Smash Bros #Smash Bros #Switch #nintendo #collection

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vanherndon · 4 years

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Your Investment in Christ: How Invested Are You?

This is the sermon that I wrote and preached on October 4, 2020.

Your Investment in Christ: How Invested Are You?

Introduction:

Welcome to the Dover church of Christ. It is good to see you all.

If you turn on the tv or look on social media then you will find an immense buffet of issues to provoke the emotions, causes to pick up the banner of and march in support of, either metaphorically or in actuality.

We are constantly bombarded with worldly topics that compete for our attention and for our effort.

So today, I would like to raise the question, when it comes to your investment in Christ, how invested are you?

For those of you familiar with my chosen vocation outside the church, rest assured that this sermon is not alluding to that vocation nor is it an advertisement.

The idea of investment lends itself well to our topic today because there are certain similarities that an investment metaphor can easily explain or guide our understanding. Indeed, the Bible itself uses the idea of investment in exploring the practice of our faith.

There are two applications that I am attempting to make with our discussion today. If you have yet to become a Christian, then it is my goal concerning you to provide you with scriptural ideas to consider in your decision to become a Christian. Make no mistake, it is not my intent to arm you with an excuse so as you can continue in your path of being a sinner alien to the body of Christ, for the Bible says in Acts 17:30 "Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent,...” My goal for you today is to make sure that when you do come to the decision to obey the Gospel of Christ that you have at the very least began a proper examination of the cost that is attributed to being a disciple of Christ, and in so doing, when hard times come, your chances of stumbling or faltering in the faith are as small as possible because we have helped you set the proper expectations.

If you are here today and you are a member of the Body of Christ, then I hope that our discussion will provoke you to examine yourself and determine how you measure up to the Word of God. Even the finest sailors of times of old had to turn to the sky and measure their position in relation to the stars and if found off course, make the appropriate adjustments. The wind and the current of the sea affected the direction of their journey requiring frequent examination of their course. The same holds true for us in our faith as Christians. The winds and currents of the world are constantly working against us and we need frequent examination and possibly course correction. I have heard it said and have repeated it before in front of you that “Sin is a slippery slope.” Therefore, we should always be diligent in where we place our next step.

Count the cost:

The first example of examining our investment in Christ that we shall look at is found in Luke 14:25-34 where we read...

Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. "And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. "For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has [enough] to finish [it]-- "lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see [it] begin to mock him, "saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' "Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? "Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. "So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple. "Salt [is] good; but if the salt has lost its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?

We find here that Jesus is traveling towards Jerusalem and he is being followed by a large group of people. This group of people had developed the notion that Jesus was here on Earth to establish an earthly kingdom, an idea still promoted by some to this day. They expected to benefit from this earthly kingdom with no change on their part, specifically no inward change of life. Jesus then offers correction to their thinking. He tells them to consider the cost of being His disciple and gives examples of what they can expect.

Let us first look at where our Lord asks the question, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost” and also when he asks, “Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?”

Much like with investments of a financial nature, the investment in Christ requires you to sit and examine what must you give up in order to have more in the future. There is what is called an opportunity cost. What must I sacrifice in order to have this other? We will explore the opportunity costs that a Christian can expect in our next point in greater detail in our next point. For our purposes considering this point, there are things that we must give up today in our service to the Lord so that we can prosper in the future, naturally, I speak of Heaven. Farming is, in a sense, an investment. Time, money, and effort are put into growing a crop. It is a labor of love, culminating in the harvest.

It is the same for Christians in that the Word is planted within us. We grow and we help others grow. We tend our own soil as well as cultivate the word in others.

Let us now look at some of the Costs of being a disciple of Christ.

Deny yourself

Luke 14:27 in our text, that we have looked at, says, “And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” Further in Matthew 16:24-26 we read...

[Mat 16:24-26 NKJV] Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Finally, a third verse that I want to examine when we discuss what the cost of being a follower of Christ is Matthew 6:33 where we read "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”

To be a true follower of Christ, we must deny ourselves as Matthew 16:24 instructs and we must take up and bear our cross as Matthew 16:24 and Luke 14:27 both say. We must also put God and his righteousness first in our lives as we are taught in Matthew 6:33.

In our original scripture in Luke 14:26, we read where the Lord says that to be a disciple of Christ, we must “hate” his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

What is being taught here? What does it mean to hate? The Bible uses the word hate often to mean that we must love something less. So the lesson being taught here is that we are to place the Lord above our earthly father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even our own lives. This is in agreement with Matthew 6:33 where we are to seek FIRST the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

There are those that do not believe in the Bible. There are those that have been pulled astray from the Word or prevented from a true and accurate understanding of God’s Word. These people may even be people that we care for dearly and are close to. My favorite and maybe too often quoted verse says you shall love your neighbor as yourself, but not before it first tells us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

We are to put God first. We are to love those around us, but God always takes precedent. Situations may arise where those close to us question what God has said, but we must never falter or fail to say what God says. We must rightly divide the word as the Bible instructs and we must be ready to give a defense. Understand, we are called to obey the Gospel of Christ and to teach others the same. We are then called to win souls. We are not called to win arguments. Galatians 5:22-24 reads, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those [who are] Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

To summarize that point, Love those around us, but by all means, love God more, give him the higher position which he is entitled to, and when disagreements arise, diligent practice the qualities that God’s Word calls the Fruits of The Spirit is needed.

To be a child of God will cost time and effort to learn the Truth

Proverbs 23:23 tells us to Buy the truth, and do not sell [it], [Also] wisdom and instruction and understanding.

Romans 1:16 reads “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.”

James 1:21 says ”Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

In Acts 17:11-12 we find “These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily [to find out] whether these things were so. Therefore many of them believed, and also not a few of the Greeks, prominent women as well as men.”

Finally, in John 8:32 we are given the verse that inspired our Set Free program "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

All of these passages refer to the need to study and know the word of God.

When I am concerned about my health, I consult a doctor or other medical professional. I do not want a doctor that didn't take his or her study seriously. There is an old joke that asks “What do you call a person that graduated last in the medical school class?” The answer is “doctor.” There was a time that I chuckled at that joke but as I grow older and find myself needing the service of a Doctor more frequently, I find less and less humor in that particular joke.

When you have a legal matter, you consult a lawyer. You want a lawyer that knows the law. A lawyer that does not know the law is good for a laugh on occasion as long as he or she is not your lawyer. A lawyer who is lacking in study is certainly a bane of a judge's existence.

If we can look at these two earthly examples of professionals in whom we place our trust and desire that they are of the utmost competence. Why then do we neglect to grow ourselves as the only professional that is responsible for understanding God’s will and how to live in a manner according to that will. The only person responsible for you realizing an eternal home in Heaven with our Father is you. You expect a well-trained doctor or lawyer, but how many do not place the same expectations on themselves concerning their salvation? It costs time and effort to learn God’s word.

To be a Christian, one must repent. In Luke 13:3 we find, "I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” What does it mean to repent?

Let us again consider Matthew 16:24-26

We must give up the pleasure of sin. Sin is man’s greatest problem in that they separate us from God. The problem is further compounded in that sin can be attractive, fun, enjoyable, at least in the short-term. As we have read, we must give up our carnal desires, we must focus on that which is spiritual. We must, as the text says, take up our cross and follow Christ. What does it mean to take up our cross? The cross was the horrific execution tool in crucifixion. To take up your cross means that you must be willing to suffer and even die for the cause of Christ. We have tremendous liberties that we enjoy here in this great country. We are able to enjoy the freedom to worship openly, which is not the case for all Christians.

I want to stop here and relate a video that I saw the other day. It was of a preacher on stage talking about his experiences as a missionary in China. I am sure that you are at least somewhat familiar with how communist states like China have exhibited various levels of hostility towards the Christian faith.

The speaker begins explaining that he was in China to teach twenty-two Christian leaders from the Hunan Province. These twenty-two people rode a bus for thirteen hours to get to the hotel or apartment where classes were being held. Upon arrival, they had to enter the building and take the elevator two by two so as not to draw suspicion or interest as a large group.

When they arrive at the room, there is not enough seating for twenty-two people so most sit on the floor. Since such opportunities are limited, instruction and teaching start at eight AM and continues to five PM to make the most of the time they have and they did this for three days on this occasion.

The instructor that is relaying this story asks his students, “What happens if we are caught?” They reply that he would be deported within twenty-four hours and they would go to prison for three years. He then asked them, “how many of you here had been to prison?” Out of the twenty-two present, eighteen raised their hands.

As they began their study, the preacher hands out the Bibles that he had which was not enough for everyone and so seven people went without. He instructed them to turn to 2 Peter chapter 1 and as he watched most turn the scripture, he saw one woman hand her Bible to another student. As they continued in their study, he understood why the woman handed her Bible off because she quoted the entire chapter from memory. The preacher was very surprised and delighted and he asked her where she had memorized the Bible, she told him it was in prison and she jokingly said that you had a lot of free time in prison to do so. He then asked, “But don’t they confiscate the Bible?” She confirmed that they did. So he then asked how is it that you have something from which to study?” She told him that visitors would smuggle in scraps of paper with scripture written on it and that they would study from that. “Wouldn’t the paper be confiscated if found?” he then asked.

Absolutely, which is why you memorize it as quickly as you can, because they may be able to take the word from your hand, but they cannot take it from your heart.

At the conclusion of the three days as the preacher was finishing class, he asked them how best can I remember you in my prayers after I return home. They answered by explaining that they would appreciate it if he would pray they would be just like the Americans since they can meet freely.

He told him that he could not do that. Of course, this caused much surprise. He explained to them that they traveled on a less than ideal bus thirteen hours to come to study the word of God, whereas most Americans wouldn’t travel greater than an hour. He continued by saying that they sat through class for eight hours a day for three days straight while most Americans get antsy after forty minutes. The time they spent there was while sitting on a hard floor, while most Americans have padded pews. They sat on the floor for eight hours while having no air conditioning. Most Americans wouldn't have come back for a second or third day.

He concluded by explaining that the average American family has between two and three Bibles and they have dust on them while the Chinese were so hungry for the word of God that they studied pieces of paper and memorized the word. He explained to them that while he certainly had the opportunity to study and worship freely, that in every other manner, he would pray that Americans become like them. Take a moment to consider the cost these people face and the energy and enthusiasm with which they face it.

Consider also that prison is one of the more docile costs a Christian may face compared to other atrocities committed against Christians in other lands. As you are doing so, be thankful that the costs you face to be or become a Christian are not so drastic.

When we repent, we must also give up our ways for God’s ways

[Isa 55:7-9 NKJV] 7 Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the LORD, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon. 8 "For My thoughts [are] not your thoughts, Nor [are] your ways My ways," says the LORD. 9 "For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Are we more worried about our feelings than our faith?

Are we more concerned with our rights than our righteousness?

If someone was to take a look at your social media posts, would they determine your political affiliation before they ascertain that you are a Christian? Another cost in becoming a Christian is as we have previously discussed, YOU MUST PUT GOD FIRST.

That means that sometimes it will cost you in not winning an argument, it may mean that your feelings get hurt, it can mean that you feel your rights are infringed. GOD COMES FIRST.

If you're worried about your feelings, think about the feelings Christ experienced in the Garden of Gethsemane. The stress he felt to the point of sweating drops of blood. Think about his feelings when he found his disciples sleeping when he had asked them to watch with him. God created man in his own image and every man has a soul that God hopes to see make it to Heaven and you should to. That takes priority over your feelings.

If you are worried about winning arguments, then you are flailing at your duty to win souls, because every person that you can offer you a disagreement, again has a soul that you should want to see spend eternity with God in Heaven.

If you are worried about your rights, think about our Lord’s rights as they falsely accused him the night before he died, offered up false witnesses, and illegally tried him on six different occasions during the night. His rights were forfeit so that ultimately you might know a home with him in Heaven.

We must count the cost, we must deny ourselves and we must do it God’s way.

So in considering the similarities of investments to the practice of our faith, again, we must count the cost, deny ourselves today for tomorrow, and finally, we must stick to the plan.

Biblically speaking, we must remain faithful unto the point of death. We read in Revelation 2:10 "...Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.

We must finish what we started. We first gather the information on what it is going to take and then we continue until completion, which for the Christian is either the day your soul leaves your body in the event of physical death or the day the Lord returns for those still living as such time. Counting the cost sets the proper expectations for denying yourself and arms you with the ability to remain faithful. In our text from Luke 14, speaks of the folly of the unfinished tower in the form of wasted time, money, and effort. Our Lord speaks of the defeat of the King that goes to war without counting the cost.

Understand, it is best for every person to obey the Gospel because there is no other to cure the disease of sin than by accessing the redeeming blood of Christ. Counting the cost is not an excuse to not obey, but a way to help you remain faithful until death. Not counting the cost will make you more likely to become discouraged and fall away. If you fall away, you will be lost until you return home and the longer you are gone the harder the journey to return home, not because of anything God has done, but by the hardening of your heart and the temptations of the world. Not only will you be lost, but you are opening the door of opportunity for the world to speak evil of the faith. Not only have you harmed yourself, but you have damaged the influence of the church to save other souls. We read in 2 Peter 2:11-12 “Beloved, I beg [you] as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by [your] good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation.”

Count the cost, Deny yourself, and be faithful unto death. How invested are you? Have you counted the cost, Have you lost sight of the cost? Has something come along that has distracted from following the plan?

There is one cost that I have saved until the end of today. To be a disciple of Christ, you must do whatever is necessary to be buried with Christ in the waters of baptism. When Christ went to John the Baptist to be baptized, he left Galilee and traveled to the Jordan River, a distance of some sixty miles. The Ethiopian Eunuch immediately stopped his journey home to be baptized in Acts chapter 8. We are buried with Christ in baptism and we arise a new creature in Christ having put off the old man of sin. If you have counted the cost but have yet to invest yourself further, I ask you today to take the next step.

If you have obeyed the Gospel of Christ culminating in your baptism, but you have become drawn from the plan as I stated above, Won’t you come home?

Whatever your need, we stand ready to assist as together we stand and sing.

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gplewis · 4 years

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becoming the irresponsible creative men in Paris

I’m another man with great urge to disobey and rebel who has D.H Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in his veins, standing on the heights naked with gibberish in his mouth pulling out his entrails for the crowd, laughing, not afraid to die, daring death to come and get him in plain sight of all the cameras and typists that would report it and circulate the news on Twitter all day tomorrow...and then, like Shakespeare predicted of the blathering idiot, he would be heard from no more, though I may echo in the canyon of memory and silence for a while, like other men before me...Borges, Poe...names can be named, but who pays for the time? Time is expensive; the only time that counts is when you are lost in your passion, swimming on the endless velvet sea, pawing for a handgrip that never comes, a baby in the middle of the night with no skills or clarity, just raw longing with only such a small ...outward burst, such a thin channel, narrow passageway and media with which to cut and grab the world ~ oh, passion with nowhere to go! It goes here

now, dare I overwrite everything below? Is this really my best? Oh, what I ask you to read is always moveable, always an ocean, I’m always giving

PIVOTING TO WRITE ABOUT THE WRITER not a memoir, but an explanation of form: a man who explains too much, talks too much, has so much to say (so, any man?) yes, every man over, say, age 32, anyone who makes it to 33 but of course this is just my junk from this year and it will belong to next year’s “last year’s language” soon enough: the years pile up and don’t stop their onslaught, old age is a massacre for a man or a nation ~ and so what matters is later today and tonight: being present. And whether there’s love or not ~ of course, one learns love is not something you have but something you do, and furthermore, something you are...yet we are all separate and we all have to come back to each other every day.

I’m currently besotted with a crush. I could tell any number of individuals 1:1 but I’m not that self-indulgent or dramatic anymore; I more facilitate a conversation between my present and my past, starring me, the facilitator *and* me, the old voices. This is a full-time job, being me isn’t as hard as it used to be, it just takes a lot of leaning in and a lot of faith and I cannot be comforted in this endeavor to bear my inner voice, bring it out and find a way to not have to do other work to support myself; I am wretched and stubborn and it’s my own damn fault, yet this is the weight I bear ~ I have to keep writing things that represent the inner turmoil (aren’t I tired of it? Haven’t I grown up?)

I refuse and resist editing, and it’s often said one goes kicking and screaming into one’s destiny — surely I’m in the passage now, between worlds, shuttled and bobbled between past and future, suspended in a glass sphere, a crystal teardrop, betting on beauty and truth and honesty which makes me the enemy of society which organizes itself about money, pride, fear and privacy — oh, I am the clear voice of what’s wrong but every frequency is filled with that voice: every channel we turn to is some injustice demanding the funds (time, treasure, attention, patience, inclusion in your catalog of images and care) to be righted. Oh, the endless feed of representations of real wrongs to right! One can always write about real things that are wrong — this is just a journal, something I have to get over; paying attention is electricity for me and now I’m writing that which I’m not proud of; at least no one reads me closely enough to be exhausted by me; they’d just put me down; scrolling and surfing is it’s own pleasure, it almost doesn’t matter what the content is. Oh, the reading wars...surely the problem is always those in power and the silence they don’t take, the way they fill their bandwidth with meetings and the wrong kinds of reading and attendance ~ oh, if only we could schedule those in power! If only we had control!

This is a little drunken rant that’s not that interesting, but it’s the necessary crap to slough off in order to get to what you might say. Unfortunately I can’t take you all the way; surely this (all) could have been edited by someone who wasn’t me; maybe it’s my fate to be in that nightmare where your legs don’t work but you’ve turned to run and began to push ~ or when you’re half-asleep dozing on a couch in a dream and you wish to wake yourself but can’t; you’re stuck on snooze, you see what’s coming for you but you can’t thrash yourself and awaken to your power; your power is asleep and you can’t claim it.

At least I’d never have the gall to say any of this is interesting, yet here I am posting it — but anything I post, anything anyone could post, is only a negative image of what he is really becoming. Reality becomes this thing nobody can touch; all we have is the distant glance in silence; all I have is my inner voice, watching video you posted, hoping to be seen, and now I’m seeing you, but I can’t quench you; we must hold ourselves — oh how sad, my loneliness has to learn to honor yours. Or maybe I’m wrong and we never need to say any of these things. Is this ridiculous? I’m a man

good for me, I could be a leading figure for young men who wanted to be rich and famous in the media world and I am here to tell you it’s empty: you’ll still be stuck with your experience of the me I have been. This is literature! This is what all men will be forever! Being done isn’t the point; feeling good is the point. The work is going well because the ecstatic, drug-high sensation I get (like the floor beneath my body has fallen away and I’m in free-fall suspended

...perhaps I’m here to show us the benefits of floating — however, I see my task ahead is to change the world into a place where there exists the patience to read my works and curations — the work is good but the reader gets further away. Busy. There’s not enough meat on the bones here, doesn’t lead one quickly enough to profit and safety...maybe I’m only for men who’ve graduated, maybe I’m an invitation to the other side — and of course it doesn’t matter if I know the truth or write it plainly, if no one reads it...perhaps all I’ve written to this date is the feral scream from the man who wants an editor or COO who loves him and has a vision for him. No, that’s not it...there are just many ways to edit and there is no official “final version” of any “book” I would want to spend my time trumpeting...I want to be free of the noise of necessary promotion and follow-through in the workaday world (see how I want to win here but also be gone? Surely this is the dream of management, algorithms, laws ~ someone else can do the boring work of maintenance while we are free to go off and discover; someone else can do what’s expected — there do exist people who don’t want to think for themselves...but maybe I am beckoning them out of robot and into fullness and flesh

he just keeps going like that all day...they’ll say. Oh to be talked about! And it’s not for my ego’s sake; it’s that the eyeball inside me that sees all and talks to me won’t leave me alone; I suppose if I really wanted to be saved, I would send you this and ask you to read; of course, by writing, I invent the me who will stand up tomorrow and feel good about what he’s written and might even point to it —

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swirlingdisobedience · 5 years

Text

Scores

Based on excerpts from the text: Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness By Hendrik Folkerts.

“To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and its systems of knowledge to a language that produces description, transmission, and signification, in order to be read, enacted, or executed in whatever form desirable.”

Exercise:

Make a score of your performance

think of:

1. Acts / scenes / chapters - how do the following take part in these and where?:

2. Characters

3. Movements

4. Outfits

5. Sound / video - amplified voice? lights?

6. Props - are they activated? How do these move or change?

Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew, Treatise (1963–67), EP 7560, musical score (excerpt), assigned 1970 to Peters Edition Limited, London

English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973[full citation needed] in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music". (wikipedia)

“Cardew’s method was premised on a dissolution of the hierarchies and boundaries between composer and interpreter, as well as between performers active in different fields of performance, from music to visual art. The Scratch Orchestra had no fixed leader or conductor; rather, everyone was equally involved and implicated in the enactment of the score. The orchestra consisted of both musicians and nonmusicians acting as one “assembly” in a collective state of continuous training and research. The name of the orchestra refers to each member notating their accompaniments (understood as “music that allows a solo”) in a musician’s scratch book, in whatever notational language they see fit: “verbal, graphic, musical, collage, etc.,” as Cardew put it in his “constitution” for the group.”

Scratch Orchestra link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-4yl3Zvdo&feature=emb_title

youtube

Treatise (1963–67), Musical score.

“The show, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà (Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Study Center in 2008), reversed the conventional understanding of a score as an abstract representation of tone, taking instead as their starting point Cage’s contrary notion of the score as a representation of action with a unique and unpredictable result. The score is a generator of an action, they wrote, “to be performed, the outcome of which is unknown, and an end result that can never be repeated.”3 This view adheres to a typical chronology in which the score precedes the live enactment, standing as a precursor for a future iteration. The “unknown outcome” indicates the importance of chance and singularity assigned to the enactment of the score (particularly with respect to Cage), claiming it as the site of origin and performance as the site of singular presence, effect, and changeability.” (...) In the case of the Scratch Orchestra, its political dimensions include the democratic way its members developed a language for the score, in which they took a written instruction by Cardew and each developed it into myriad methods and forms of notation.”

Jani Christou

Greek composer.

Strychnine Lady (1967)

This work belongs to Christou’s last compositional period, during which he experimented with a personal art form that involves stage performance, mythical archetypes, dramatic elements and avant-garde materials and means. At this time, he also introduced new concepts, such as metapraxis and protoperformance, in order to engage with elements of the unconscious, influenced, in particular, by the field of analytical psychology as shaped by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875–1961). (From: https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149/367)

Strichnine Lady Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVSTUR6uBSI

Epicycle, 1968.

“The score for his late piece Epicycle (1968) includes both written instructions and drawn images that describe how to spatialize and time the performance, all of which lead to the execution of a “continuum”—that is, a continuous space for performance that participants could step in and out of and where, potentially, every observer could be cast as a performer”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuPHwdazjSs

(...) The interpreter becomes as much the “author” of the score or composition as the composer, if not more so, and the prevalent dialectics of origin(al) and result should be abandoned. Through the transaction of interpretation and subsequent execution (or in the case of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, the fabrication of score within a collective), the score becomes part of its own iteration. Within the language systems that are produced, the relationship between score and performance evolves as interdependent, and meaning is produced through a process of transaction, iteration, and repetition, akin to the notion of iterability that Jacques Derrida discusses in “Signature Event Context.”

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. (wikipedia)

4′33′’ - Silent piece

youtube

Fontana Mix, 1958

«Fontana Mix» consists of a total of 20 pages of graphic materials: ten pages covered with six curved lines each, and ten sheets of transparent film covered with randomly-placed points. In accordance with a specific system, and using the intersecting points of a raster screen, two of the pages produce connecting lines and measurements that can be freely assigned to musical occurrences such as volume, tone color, and pitch. The interpreter no longer finds a score in the customary sense, but rather a treatment manual for the notation of a composition.

________________________________

“(...) the score can easily remain within the autonomy of its own materiality, but it may also manifest as or lead to the production of another object or live enactment, sketched out by the parameters of the score’s language.”

Greta Bratescu

Atelierul—scenariul (The Studio—the film script) (1978), charcoal, colored pencil, and pastel on paper, 89.5 x 116.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Script developed for the performance film The Studio (1978)

“The script for The Studio, which consists of written instructions accompanied by miniature drawings of Brătescu’s studio, invokes this space as a stage that is literally inscribed with the actions of the artist: lie down, wake up, walk around, sit, lie down, etc. In the film, the transition between the first two scenes (“The Sleep” and “The Awakening”) and the third sequence (“The Game”) marks the passage from Brătescu’s purely private experience—sleeping and awakening, unaware of any external presence—to a situation in which the artist is conscious of the camera’s gaze and starts to perform. Brătescu is both the subject that performs and the object that is observed by herself as the one operating the camera; her studio is both a private and a public space. The script for The Studio is an important interlocutor between the subjectivity and objectivity that is enacted in the simultaneously private and public atmosphere of the artist’s studio. The figures she draws to represent herself in the score, abstractions of her own body, constitute a rudimentary style of self-portraiture. The text that accompanies and is superimposed on these drawings, in turn, references the actions of her body that manifest in the space of the studio as well as on film. The score highlights Brătescu’s role as author, interpreter, actor, and spectator in her work as it moves between self-portraiture, auto-instruction, and enactment. “

Film Still from The Studio, 1978.

“(...) operations of chance, the relationship between language (as score) and event, and what Lucy Lippard described as the “dematerialization of the art object” in the American art context of the 1960s and 1970s: The curators’ selections included Yoko Ono’s instructional scores, Ian Wilson and Robert Barry’s conversation pieces, and Lawrence Weiner’s instructions for wall drawings, to name a few examples. Lippard’s notion of the dematerialized encompasses a wide range of media in which “the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary” and that “stress the acceptively open-ended.”

Yoko Ono

Instructional Scores

Conversation Piece, an event score from Grapefruit, 1964.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a painter, sculptor, medallist, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. (wikipedia)

Score for Action with Transmitter (Felt) Receiver in the Mountains, 1973

Fluxus

Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth century art movement.

Fluxus played an important role in opening up the definitions of what art can be. It has profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s, which has seen a diverse range of art forms and approaches existing and flourishing side-by-side.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.

Many key avant-garde artists in the 60s took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus)

Intentionally uncategorizable, Fluxus projects were wide-ranging and often multidisciplinary, humorous, and based in everyday, inexpensive materials and experiences—including everything from breathing to answering the telephone. When asked to define Fluxus, Maciunas would often respond by playing recordings of barking dogs and honking geese, perhaps confounding his questioner but also demonstrating the experimentation and embrace of absurdity at its core. Performances—which Fluxus artists called “Events,” in order to distinguish them fromHappenings and other forms of performance-based art—were a significant part of the movement. These were largely based on sets of written instructions, called “scores,” referencing the fact that they were derived from musical compositions. Following a score would result in an action, event, performance, or one of the many other kinds of experiences that were generated out of this vibrant movement. (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fluxus-movement-art-museums-galleries)

Fluxus scores

In many ways, most Fluxus ‘scores’ (for music or other kinds of performance and/or composition) are fairly legible as scripts for performance/enactment; i.e. the text comes first and the performance after (if at all). Certainly, one of the interventions (and charms) of Fluxus scores were the openness of the scores, where interpretation and chance were much more important than following the letter of the law, as one might in traditional sheet music, for example. As such, reading Fluxus scores as performance texts allows us to see how writing can activate art/life works that writing cannot contain or control. (https://jacket2.org/commentary/how-make-us-flux-scoresscriptsinstructions)

Toshi Ichiyanagi. Music for Electric Metronome. 1960 (Fluxus Edition announced 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 11 3/16 x 15 3/16″ (28.4 x 38.5 cm)

Yasunao Tone. Anagram for Strings. 1961 (Fluxus Edition released 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 8 1/4 x 11 11/16 (21 x 29.6 cm)

“While these scores can be enacted, their producers considered them stand-alone art objects and often exhibited them in galleries to be experienced for their visual qualities, for example in Tokyo’s Minami Gallery, where the 1962 Exhibition of World Graphic Scores introduced works by Fluxus artists George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and La Monte Young to a Japanese audience.” (https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/12/21/exhibiting-fluxus-keeping-score-in-tokyo-1955-1970-a-new-avant-garde/)

(...)

To wade into the muddy waters of the score as an “original,” it is key to look more closely at the score’s relationship to temporality and chronology. In the traditional musicological sense, the score acts as a precursor to an event. Each live enactment can be traced back to the score as a kind of “core material,” so that in the score future performances—and thus temporalities—are latent. Additionally, a score can emerge from a live iteration, or, at the least, may be adapted according to it. Though highly unstable in terms of representation, the score has a documentary aspect—and in turn becomes a forecast of future performances—thus further augmenting the complex multi-chronicities that the score conjures.

José Maceda

Filipino composer José Maceda. Trained as a concert pianist in the 1930s and later obtaining degrees in musicology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology in the United States, Maceda started composing his major works in the 1960s.

(...) Maceda’s lifelong endeavor (he died in 2004): a dissimulation of the cultural hegemony of Occidental music and its core principles of logic and causality in favor of researching a set of values indigenous to the eco-social relations, oral and mystical traditions, production of musical instruments from natural materials, and concepts of time in Southeast Asian culture26—in short, a decolonization of Filipino music and its forms of notation in the context of Southeast Asia.

One of Maceda’s most ambitious works, entitled Ugnayan (Correlation, 1974), is a composition of Filipino village music that was scored and recorded on twenty channels that were then broadcast simultaneously on twenty of Manila’s radio stations. Hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents gathered in public spaces with portable transistor radios to listen to the different tracks created for each station, with the citizenry collectively assembling the composition in a massive public ritual of converging indigenous history, time, and space in the urban fabric.

-----

“Performance, as an act that exists momentarily, has been generally discussed within an archival logic that privileges materiality over immateriality, celebrating its ephemerality, impermanence, and ontological unicity—“performance’s being … becomes itself through disappearance,” as Peggy Phelan initially put it.32 In his catalogue essay for the 1998 exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Paul Schimmel even goes so far to say that performance is constituted by a drive towards destruction, marking an “underlying darkness” in performative work that is informed by a seemingly Freudian death drive.33 The definition of performance as that which cannot remain and thus “disappears” relies on a rationale that considers performance as antithetical to history, memory, and the archive, an unjust fate it shares with other immaterial practices, such as oral histories, storytelling, and gestural practices, that are also always incomplete, always reconstructive, and thus escape lineage to a singular original.”

“Under this new understanding of the archive as including the corporeal, the body is no longer the object on which a choreographic notational device is projected. The flesh becomes the score, the muscle, and the tissue—the languages through which a work is interpreted, transmitted, embodied, and then performed. This paradigm defies an understanding of the archive as an architecture of objects or documents and opens up ways to think about it anew, as reflecting movement and sound, bodies and waves, time and variations. Within this archive structure, the flesh is activated as a “physicalized relational field of interaction, intensities, techniques, histories, traces, and relicts of experienced information … with its own history and genealogy,” as Van Imschoot argues.38 This position paves the way for a different understanding of the score, away from the terms of a material object to something that can be held in the human body, or, at the very least, exists always in connection with embodiment through enactment.”

Katalin Ladik

From the late 1960s on Ladik started to publish her poems and, subsequently, to perform and record them as speech acts. During these performances, which often included music and choreographed movement, she transformed the language of her written poetry, which necessarily adhered to a linguistic system of regulation. Vowel prolongation, repetition of consonants, words that seem to come from her gut, her throat, her mouth; such techniques became an early repertoire that was often performed as a shamanistic ritual, enacting the poems through the artist’s body, as an extension of her voice and her language. Sentences became embodiments, words produced their meaning through ritualized gestures, letters were spat out or swallowed—a corporeal manifestation of language.

UFO Party, 1969.

Pauline Oliveros

1932-2016 Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She founded "Deep Listening ®," which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. (https://paulineoliveros.us/about.html)

sonic meditations (1974)

Published in 1974, Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations is one of the most seminal, if not under-recognized, works in late 20th century avant-garde musical thought. Within it, the grande-dame of American Minimalism not only departs from standard musical notation, but with the entire conception of where music grows from, and how it can be realized. Her focus lies on the cognition of sound – largely through the practice of meditation, and group participation. She highlights the virtues of meditation for making sounds, imagining sounds, listening to, and remember sounds, and sets into action twelve text scores to help practitioners realize these new relationships. Sonic Meditations is as much a workshop for use, as it is a series of pieces. (https://blogthehum.com/2016/09/13/pauline-oliveros-sonic-meditations-1974-the-complete-text-and-scores/)

Guillermo Galindo

(b. 1960, Mexico City) is an experimental composer, sonic architect and performance artist.

Score for War Map (2017)

Acrylic on polyester military blanket 152.4 × 208.3 cm (detail)

In War Map, Galindo uses a military-green blanket as the substrate for a printed composition drawn from collaged and overlayed representations of immigration patterns as digitally mapped on the website Lucify.com. The blanket was donated by Mr. Kurt Heldmann, who works in the reception camp for refugees in Calden, Germany. By combining the visual languages of maps and graphs; musical notation; and more organic, natural motifs suggesting proliferation and motion, the artist skillfully demonstrates that these strategies for visually representing movement through time and space have much in common, and that all movements — even tragic or difficult migrations of people — can be represented such that their own subtle rhythms and musicality are revealed. Galindo describes the digital representations of migration patterns as “surprisingly archaeological” in their look, yielding the sense of a surreal, Borgesian map, and explains that he manipulated the work’s various shades of blue in an effort to mimic the Aegean Sea. (http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)

Score for We All Have a Place at the Table (2017)

Acrylic on cotton tablecloth 54.2 × 157.5 cm (detail)

His third work, We All Have a Place at the Table, is printed on a found tablecloth that still bears stains from meals at the refugee camp. All of the abstract patterns and shapes printed upon its surface were derived from the modest but sophisticated embroidery that already adorned the tablecloth – a simple pattern of repeated small modules whose uncanny resemblance to systems of notation and representation used in music or mathematics appealed immediately to the artist.

(http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

I came of political age during the debate over the Iraq War. The soundtrack to my sophomore year of high school was Nelly and incessant chatter about weapons of mass destruction. The fate of countries and reputations hung on facts — or the administration’s reasonable facsimiles of them, anyhow — and what counted as proof (like, for instance, whether those little ole WMDs existed). By the time I headed to college, the countries and reputations were well on their way to being destroyed. Bad policy and poor reasoning were slowly killing a presidency, so I watched as the self-serious young men of politics’ next generation tried to correct for those mistakes. They read The New Republic and joined the campus Federalist Society, where they debated abstract topics and drank whiskey out of cut-glass tumblers their mothers bought them at Bed Bath & Beyond. Bush’s failures suggested that you had to have a detailed game plan for the country if you ran for office. The triumph of Barack Obama, meticulous professor, seemed to prove this.

At least until the 2016 primaries. On the Republican side, Donald Trump’s grasp of policy details seemed limited, yet he blew his competition out of the water. His big ideas about changing trade dynamics, banning Muslims and building a wall — and the bombastic, broad-strokes style in which he delivered them — swayed Republican voters primed for action after eight years of Obama. The Democratic contest was more policy-conscious, but Bernie Sanders caught flak from Hillary Clinton and her supporters for plans they thought were implausible, like free college and single-payer healthcare.

Thus far, the politics of the 2018 midterms and the looming 2020 presidential primary are filled with some of the same big ideas. The hang-up that many Democrats had about a lack of detail — “Anytime someone tells you it’s free, read the fine print,” Clinton said of Sanders’s free college plan in 2016 — has fallen somewhat by the wayside. Sanders introduced a free college bill last year that was supported by Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, two likely 2020 presidential contenders, while a federal jobs guarantee has now been embraced by Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, other likely 2020 candidates.

The universe of the politically possible seems to be expanding. The shift is happening on the right and the left, each end of the spectrum opening their windows wider, though on opposite ends of the house. Some people are waiting for a cross breeze that might never come, but there’s an unmistakable joy just to have the house aired out.

Voters’ increasing tribalism might be fueling this era of big ideas. According to Pew data from March, Americans increasingly prefer politicians who won’t compromise on their positions. In 2018, 53 percent preferred politicians who stuck to their guns, a radical change from 2017, when only 39 percent said they felt the same. Republican respondents to the Pew survey have long displayed this aversion to compromise, but 2018 seemed to mark a transition point for Democrats: In July 2017, 69 percent said they liked politicians who compromised, but in 2018, only 46 percent said the same. That data might indicate that politicians need to worry more about upholding ideological purity — promoting those big ideas — than they have in the past. That may mean that the accountability pressure has changed from the practical to the ideological, though it’s not clear how voters will feel if a lack of compromise also leads to a lack of, well, actually getting things done.

Most of the Republican Party’s shift appears to be related to what’s seen as acceptable in public life and leadership. A recent Pew survey showed that most of the president’s supporters prefer his approach to the job of the presidency over his actual policies.

Democratic voters have become a disillusioned bunch; 68 percent say that significant changes are needed to the design and structure of government itself. The party, meanwhile, has struggled to solidify its fundamental identity in the post-2016 universe. In this uncertain climate, rising Democratic stars have trafficked in the new currency of institution-shifting proposals.

First there was the Sanders single-payer health care bill of 2017, which most of the probable 2020 presidential primary contenders signed onto. It promises more generous coverage than nearly any other country with a single-payer system — Canada and the Netherlands included — but health care policy expert Sarah Kliff at left-leaning site Vox wrote that the Sanders bill “provides no information on how it would finance such a generous health care system. … This is a crucial part of any health care plan, and in the Sanders proposal, it is notably absent.” (A recent study found that the plan would cost the government $33 trillion, though Sanders said the same study showed that his proposal would actually save $2 trillion in overall health care spending.) The cost details here could be crucial to winning over Americans who are not a part of the Democratic base, but for now the push is to show a glimpse of a possible future to those already ideologically inclined to seek a change.

Perhaps the most galvanizing issue of the last few months for Democrats has been the movement to eliminate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a reaction in large part to the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the underdog winner of a Democratic congressional primary, picked up the “abolish ICE” mantle as she rocketed to political stardom. Just days after Ocasio-Cortez’s win, Gillibrand said that she too would get rid of ICE, and Warren soon hopped on the bandwagon. Harris stopped short of calling for the agency’s demise, but said, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.”

The calls to get rid of the agency have proved compelling to many Americans horrified by the administration’s brutal approach to asylum-seekers, but the root causes of the deportations have been little addressed. Immigrants continue to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law under an executive order issued by Trump, and if the agency were dismantled, it’s unclear what would replace it, if anything, or whether redistributing its duties would result in any change in policy. Democrats like Cecilia Muñoz, who was the head of Obama’s White House Domestic Policy council, are concerned by the lack of nuance in these calls. She told Slate, “I think we need to be willing to address how do we think immigration enforcement should be conducted, what’s a way to do that, that actually values people’s lives and their civil rights. The abolish ICE argument doesn’t touch those questions, and I think that’s a mistake.”

Muñoz’s warning echoes Clinton in her post-campaign memoir, “What Happened.” “I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government,” she wrote. Clinton was unsparing in her critique of Sanders’s primary platform — he “didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law” — and yet she seemed a little wistful that she didn’t go further in deviating from the slate of policies she thought were possible. “I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot.” (When Sanders dropped out, Clinton adopted a version of a free college plan that the head of education policy at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said would be “a financial disaster.”)

Details, it turns out, are tiresome — they slow things down and draw you into the weeds, in part to discover how things might work in the realm of the actual, not the theoretical. And it’s hard to say whether the big ideas of today will eventually win over much of the country or drive a wedge deeper into it. It’s a thrilling gamble that the Democrats in particular are taking, one that has the potential to pay huge political dividends.

It’s also a rare moment in American history we’re living though. “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States,” Alexander de Tocqueville wrote in 1835. Perhaps that sentiment is dated, but it’s also true that we don’t have a reputation for being particularly contemplative. The historical success of the American experiment has made us ideologically complacent at times. Perhaps justifiably so, perhaps not.

But as the nation grasps onto audacious new ideas that say something is radically wrong with our present system, it makes a person wonder what the next political moment will be like, 10 or 15 years down the road. We might be hurtling towards a comedown, a wise-up or an actual paradigm shift, one that Baby Boomers, clutching at their Woodstock photos, will turn green with envy over. In the end, today’s policy details might be inconsequential compared to the real project of democratizing ideas in America. Perhaps what’s happening now proves that the direction of the country isn’t just in the hands of the boys of the Federalist Society and The New Republic. Its course might be more broadly determined.

Or we might learn that not very much has changed at all.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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broaku-blog · 4 years

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lifeofamastersstudent · 4 years

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Literature Review | Metaphorically Speaking

By Elianna Mayer Penkar | MA Graphic Design, UCA

Introduction

Metaphor is a literary device that is being effectively used in visual communication to express ideas and promote products. As a visual communicator who likes semiotics, I am interested in the relationship between semiotics and metaphors. This study shows a departure from symbolism into the world of metaphors. It also dives into the ‘concept of self’ and how metaphors can be used as an aid to express intangible aspects of oneself.

Since ‘metaphors’ is such a broad concept, this report involves a study of different perspectives. It has been important to review different material in order to have a project that is effectively situated in the context that best captures both, my personal thoughts and the facts.

In this review, I put forward many arguments and statements by famous authors in order to answer arising questions. I’ve referenced the book ‘Sign image and symbol ‘ on multiple occasions, which has helped me to come up with many questions. This literature review also showcases an attempt to understand the relationship between multiple concepts that may influence the project. For example, the relationship between ambiguity and vagueness, as a response for the project. Considering the famous words said by Marshall McLuhan, “Medium is the message”, the lines between the concept and the outcome have been blurred.

Sign, Symbol & Metaphor

Semiotics is defined as a study of signs and symbols. It also studies their usage and interpretation in society. According to Lawrence K.Frank in the book Sign, Image and Symbol by Gyorgy Kepes,“Symbols of all kinds may be highly ambiguous because each individual has learned to recognise and to use these symbols in his own idiomatic way, imputing meanings and colouring these symbols with feelings and sometimes with strong emotional reactions which may warp and distort them and seriously interfere with communication, as in the use of verbal and written symbols. This ambiguity as well as the highly diversified use of symbols have been increased by the entrance into one cultural group of individuals deriving from another ethnic cultural group, who may learn to use the language of their adopted country and to interpret its varied symbols with meanings and feelings that may vary widely from the originally established patterns for the use of these symbols.” (1966:09)

Later in the same argument, Lawrence K.Frank quotes Cassirer’s words,”Symbols - in the proper sense of this term - cannot be reduced to mere signs. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse : a signal is a part of the physical world of being; a symbol is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are operators, symbols are designators.” (1966:03)

Interestingly, Author Sean Hall states that,” Signs are important because they can mean something other than themselves.” (2007:05)

From these arguments, we can deduce that even symbols can be tainted with a personal perspective. And the interpretation of signs and symbols may or may not be as accurate as intended by the creator.

Metaphors can be studied under semiotics as they are commonly used ‘signifiers’. What sets metaphors apart from signs is that a metaphor can be a sign, but not all signs are metaphors. However it is interesting to understand what makes signs metaphorical.

According to Sean Hall, “ Strange similes and bizarre metaphors, clever metonyms and genuine ironies, little lies and genuine impossibilities, unusual depictions and curious representations are all of interest to those who study semiotics because they allow us to say what we mean in a non-literal way. These non-literal forms of meaning enable us to make the familiar seem unfamiliar and the unfamiliar seem familiar.” (2007:33)

Introduction to Metaphors

Metaphor is a literary device. We construct our language with words, but we use metaphors to creatively communicate concepts and ideas. It is about taking an idea out of its original context and placing it in a new environment where it creates a new understanding of the subject.

In the book This means this, This means that, author Sean Hall explains that,“Metaphors are often at their most interesting when they link something familiar with something unfamiliar.” (2007:38)

Most people believe that metaphors are strictly used in literature. But artists have been drawn to metaphors for a long time. With the rise of the visually driven generation, metaphors have become a prominent weapon used in advertising and design.

Metaphors we live by

Metaphors are not only used as a creative form of communication, but they also have their roots in the fundamental structures of language. In the book metaphors we live by,author George Lakoff and Mark Johnson state, “ Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language.”(2003:03) But they counteract this statement with an argument. They believe that metaphors are not just a part of language but also of thought and action. What this means is that not only do we use metaphors as a communication device but also understand concepts in terms of metaphors. For example, we take the statement argument is war. This statement is a conceptual metaphor. We notice multiple common usages in our language that support this statement, eg; He attacked every weak point in my argument, his criticisms were right on target, I demolished his argument, I’ve never won an argument with him, If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out. (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, 2003:05)

Based on the book metaphors we live by, I deduce that there are some metaphors, we do live by. We base our decisions on such metaphors. These metaphors act as idioms / phrases that one draws from when in need of advice. For example, bigger is better. It is clear from this example that metaphors can influence our response to the world around us. (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, 2003:22)

I am beginning to question the role of metaphors that have not been integrated in our language strongly, but which still leave room for interpretation depending on the context they are used in, the creative use of metaphors that can still be metaphors we choose to live by.

A Question of Perception

The interesting thing about metaphors is that the very same element can mean a very different thing in another statement. The element viewed under a different light, communicates in a variety of ways. One could say that it is dependant on how the creator of the metaphor perceives the object and his perception guides the metaphor.

In Gyorgy Kepes book Sign, Image and Symbol, Rudolf Arnheim makes the following statement, “Perception is a mechanical copy of what the outer world contains and that memory simply preserves such a copy faithfully. The mind, it is said, can cut pieces from the cloth of memory, leaving the cloth itself unchanged.” (1966:64)

Thus, I believe that people tell their own version of stories based on their warped perception of things.

The Self Concept

Speaking about perception, one of the biggest concepts that revolve around the idea of perception is the idea of the self. People are complicated creatures that process experiences and events under the tag ‘self identity’. As opposed to the physical attributes of the person, the self concept focuses on the internal attributes that are intangible.These attributes are not always seen and the idea of oneself exists within the mind of the person.

According to Saul McLeod, in his article about Self Concept published by Simply Psychology,” The term self-concept is a general term used to refer to how someone thinks about, evaluates or perceives themselves. To be aware of oneself is to have a concept of oneself.” (2008)

In the same article, Saul McLeod talks about the other definitions of Self concept. He talks about Baumeister (1999) providing a subsequent self concept definition,"The individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person's attributes and who and what the self is”. He also talks about Carl Rogers (1959) who believes that there are three different elements to the self concept; self Image, self worth and the ideal self. Self image is how you see yourself. Self worth is how much you value yourself and ideal self is how you wish you were. (2008)

Metaphors are a wonderful way to depict the intangible aspects of what we believe our selves to be. Dismissing physical features, cultural history and separating ourselves from our physical bodies - we are the stories we tell ourselves.

20 Statement test

The Twenty statement test was created by Kuhn and Thomas McPartland in 1954 in order to assess self - concept. The basic structure of this test is to answer the question ‘who am I” with twenty different answers. This exercises is meant to bring up components of an individuals identity. It is said that the statements usually fall under four categories; physical attributes, social roles, styles of behaviour and personality traits as well as abstract - information does not provide accurate details about the person. (Saul McLeod , 2008)

It is believed that Kuhn’s greatest contribution to social psychology was the development of this idea of the core self. Kuhn believed that the self was significant because it

highlighted each individual’s perception of themselves, which would showcase their behaviour patterns.

As an experiment, I took the 20 statement test and then tried to create metaphorical statements that don’t fall under any of the predefined categories mentioned above. For example, ‘I am a passing cloud on a sunny day’ or ‘I am an ocean holding onto shores’. Although these statements give insight into my identity, they are better descriptors of a state of mind than that of a personality. You can argue that states of mind keep changing but I believe that a state of mind can also have influence over personality changes.

Other Key Concepts

Ambiguity & Vagueness

In her thesis project, Cathy Gale states that, “Ambiguity can arise from indecision, unintended confusion or as the intentional evocation of several meanings in the same image, object, situation or idea. Intentional ambiguity enables multiple interpretations of a message, increasing richness of meaning, while adding pleasure through uncertainty and surprise. In disciplines such as literature and fine art, ambiguity is perceived as not only desirable, but inherent to the value of the work of art or idea, and its interpretation in the mind of the viewer. Yet, the possibilities of ambiguity remain under-explored in graphic design, a discipline predominantly (conventionally) concerned with the clear communication of a message.” (2015:00)

Ambiguity and Vagueness can be misunderstood as the same thing. Vagueness is communicating without clarity. Whereas, ambiguity leaves room for interpretation.

Objects (Association & Sentiment)

Metaphors can often involve a comparison between objects. I put forward two different artistic views on objects. In the book Evocative Objects, author Sherry Turkle has compiled essays about people’s sentimental attachment to objects. In most cases the writers develop a strong attachment to simple objects in their environment and describe metaphorical relations between the object and the person, and how they both are alike.

Evaluating the podcast - Everything is Alive, where the writers have created stories about objects that seem to be full of life and stories, I can say that there are metaphors found in the many qualities that an object possesses.

There’s a possibility for both association and sentiment towards an object to overlap.

Metaphor as a tool for learning

Dmunger, in his article Brains can tell the difference between metaphor and irony states that, “When you use a metaphor to link two ideas together, you are combining elements that have little or no logical connection. By breaking the rules of logic in this way, metaphors can open up the creative side of the brain – the part that is stimulated by images, ideas, and concepts.” (2007)

It is clear that metaphors are excellent tools to explain concepts and ideas. I think that it could be a powerful tool to understand the psychology of mental health patients. It can also be a great aid to discover underlying thoughts and acceptance of the many human experiences.

In the section ’20 statement test’, I mentioned how some created statements are a state of mind. And how states of mind can influence personality changes. I think this argument can be used as a tool for unlearning and learning in many mental health spaces.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I’d like to say that this study has touched base upon a variety of perspectives and the review has helped to stitch the many thoughts and concepts together. As human beings constantly trying to find meaning in the things around us. One of the things we most care about is finding meaning within ourselves. This sense of identity helps us to function and adds meaning to our lives. It is difficult to explain the intangible and unseen aspects of ourselves, especially when what we most want - is to be seen for more than our physical attributes. In this expression of self, we find many psychological benefits. Metaphors test us to see a simple thing in terms of the world around us, in the smallest of places and in the strangest of ways. Thus, metaphors are a beautiful way to learn about others and ourselves. The world inside our head is as vast and fascinating as the world on the outside.

List of References

Primary Source

Kepes.G (1966) Sign, Image and Symbol. London : Studio Vista Ltd

Hall.S (2007) This means this, this means that. London : Laurence King Publishing Ltd

Lakoff. G & Johnson. M (2003) Metaphors we live by. London : The University of Chicago Press

McLeod.S (2008) Self Concept. At https://www.simplypsychology.org/self-concept.html (Accessed 27/03/2020)

Secondary Source

Baumeister (1999) The self in social psychology.Philadelphia, PA:Psychology Press

Rogers.C (1959) A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client- entered framework. In (ed) S.Koch, Psychology: A study of a science.Vol 3:Formulations of the person and the social context.New York:McGraw Hill

Dmunger (2007) Brains can tell the difference between metaphor and irony. At https://scienceblogs.com/ cognitivedaily/2007/01/22/brains-can-tell-the-difference (Accessed 26/04/2020)

Gale. C (2015) A Practice-Based Evaluation of Ambiguity in Graphic Design, Embodied in the Multiplicities of X.[PhD Thesis] University of Brighton

Turkle. S (2007) Evocative objects. London, MIT Press

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the-world-in-the-eyes-of-guoguo · 4 years

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More than 200,000 diagnosed in the US! The inability of the United States to respond to the epidemic: On the decline of monopoly capitalism!

The wave of new crown epidemics is sweeping across the world, and the status of epidemic prevention and control has become increasingly severe. At present, 932,605 cases have been confirmed and 46,413 deaths have been accumulated worldwide. Among them, 213,372 cases were diagnosed in the United States, of which 200141 cases were confirmed, a total of 8474 cases were cured, and a total of 4,757 cases died. The United States has become the world's largest epidemic, and has caused deeper economic and social crises under the serial effects of the epidemic. The United States is experiencing an unprecedented Great Depression after World War II. Throughout the United States, the crisis caused by the epidemic has shown a trend of multi-point outbreaks and has gradually increased, and has not stayed in the initial budding stage. Since the White House signed the third round of the US $ 2 trillion stimulus bill on March 27, the stagnant US economy has not improved accordingly. On March 31, the world's stock market ended in the first quarter. The downturn in the US stock market has not shown a favorable trend. After experiencing 4 rare plunges and fuses in March, the Dow fell 13.74%, the S & P 500 index fell 12.51%, and the Nasdaq fell 10.12%. Both were the worst monthly performance since the 2008 financial crisis. Among them, the Dow fell more than 23% in the quarter, and experienced a crisis of decline that had never occurred in 33 years. Facing the crazy impact of the epidemic on the stock market, Buffett, the god of stocks, took a cool breath: "I have never seen this situation after 89 years of living." The frantic epidemic is not limited to putting pressure on the US stock market, and has further undermined US economic development. The White House has given up on the idea of lifting the anti-epidemic ban on commercial and civilian activities on March 30, and no longer believes that the United States can restore its economy before Easter. The White House extended this time to April 30, which means that most industries in the United States will continue to stagnate in April. Such a strict ban will inevitably lead to more companies falling into crisis and collapse, and when this situation becomes the norm, the economic loss of the entire United States will be inestimable. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen said that due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, the U.S. economy has fallen sharply and is "very likely to fall into a sustained recession." This economic crisis is different from any previous crisis, and no economic expert can predict its severity, because when it ends depends on the epidemic situation and not on the corresponding economic measures taken by the United States. Prevention and control of the outbreak has caused American companies to become inoperable, which has led to layoffs and bankruptcies. The United States now has the largest batch of unemployed teams in history. The US Department of Labor announced on the 26th that the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits for the first time reached 3.283 million, a record high. As of the 31st, 1.6 million unemployed people had appeared in California alone, and within a day, 150,000 people in the state had applied for unemployment benefits. A New York Times article on March 31, in a single sentence, showed the mood of Americans receiving unemployment benefits-"I never thought I would need this". The governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland a few days ago predicted that with the severe economic slowdown during the pandemic virus pandemic, the unemployment rate in the United States will be as high as 10% or more. Whether this number will continue to increase in the later period depends on the development of the epidemic. The United States is the world's most powerful superpower in the world. It is a "lighthouse of freedom", it has the world's most advanced technology, and it continues to shine like a dazzling star. Over the past 100 years, countless entrepreneurs and scientists have come to the United States. Numerous immigrants have clung to the "American Dream" in order to lead the world. In this fertile land, countless people once believed that “hard work pays off”, countless people have adhered to the American faith of “unity as one” to create miracles, and countless people have for many years been self-sufficient I am deeply proud of the United States. However, all this will disappear forever with this epidemic. Americans who were once proud were forced to struggle to acknowledge the reality of unemployment and poverty. In order to get loans, livelihoods, children ... they had to apply for unemployment benefits with tears and shame, and they had to let go of "nearly religious" "Religious beliefs", hovering on the death line, they no longer think that those who "must seek relief" are "not working hard enough by themselves." Traditional American thinking has been challenged, and a large number of unemployed have been forced to reassess "belief in themselves and their country." The economic crisis is further destroying American faith and triggering a more dangerous crisis of thought. The poverty and chaos that once occurred in the third world countries are almost impossible to appear in the United States. The collapse of the stock market, the unemployment caused by the market downturn, the ideological and social crisis have hit the United States continuously, and the collapse of the medical system, the continuous shortage of medical and health resources, and the dismissal of medical personnel by major hospitals due to the leak of the new crown epidemic are even deeper. Deeply stimulate the nerves of Americans. According to a number of US hospitals, more and more patients are flocking to hospitals across the United States, and hospitals simply cannot cope. According to statistics, medical institutions in the United States are now preparing 100,000 body bags to deal with death cases. How many people in the United States have died of new coronary pneumonia? The possible answer is shuddering. In addition, the United States suffered heavy losses in the oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, international suspicions caused by the unfavorable robbery of supplies in the United States, and the mysterious closure of the United States White Pulmonary Disease and Fort Derrick Biological Research Base triggered multiple parties against the United States and New Crown Pneumonia The suspicion of contact, and the Chinese side's restrictions on the export of materials caused serious pressure on the US medical supplies ... Internal and external problems are gradually weakening the US side and destroying the international credibility of the United States. We can't help but ask, what happened in the United States? This needs to start with the American social and economic system. The United States is a country with a capitalist system, but it is not created in the same way as other countries-it is a man-made country, composed of 13 former British colonies through the War of Independence. Since the founding of the nation in 1776, it has not only inherited the European ideology and culture, but also was influenced by the idea of enlightenment. At the same time, it has also become a place of practice for Puritanism in Christian Protestantism. This is a country with a very complex ideological foundation and historical culture. Its national beliefs are social contracts and freedom and democracy. American pride comes from this. Because there was no power in the former colonies, Americans resent government intervention and even said that they were giving them the necessary social benefits. Americans are self-reliant and rigorous and conservative, and will not modify their laws at will according to social conditions. This determines that major US crises are often self-limiting-but this time the self-limiting is broken. Because of American monopoly capitalism. Since the 20th century, the development of capitalism has reached the middle and late stages. Capital concentration has led to a monopoly trend in many countries. In order to avoid market imbalances, state monopoly capitalism has emerged in the United States. The United States has experienced two world wars, and the origin of state monopoly capitalism has directly contributed to American prosperity. After the First World War, the United States changed from a debtor country to a creditor country, and the economy showed a "prosperous" scene. The economic crisis finally broke out after such a false economic collapse, and it soon swept the entire capitalist world. As a result of the Hoover Administration's "laissez-faire" policy, the economic crisis in the United States is even more harmful. After Roosevelt came to power in 1933, he began to implement the "New Deal", strengthened state intervention in the economy, and created a new model of state intervention in the economy. State monopoly capitalism began to emerge. After the Second World War, western countries began to pursue state intervention in the economy. The state's macroeconomic control of the economy promoted the further development of capitalism and made the US state monopoly capitalism rapidly mature. Therefore, we can see that in the past economic crises, the federal government and the Federal Reserve could quickly reach an agreement. The Federal Government ordered the release of water, and the Fed quickly released water to revive the market economy. The Black Monday in 1987, the 1990 recession, the Internet crisis in 2001, and the financial crisis in 2008, until now the U.S. economic collapse in 2020, the Fed has "saved" the market the next time. But can this solve the US economic crisis? The answer is of course not. Although state monopoly capitalism can alleviate the economic crisis and promote the development of production through its macro-control, it can also alleviate the contradiction between production and consumption to a certain extent. But the biggest problem of state monopoly capitalism is inactivation, and its end result is economic stagnation caused by forcible "blood transfusion". The US economic system places great emphasis on the role of market forces in promoting economic development, and believes that national macro-control can only play a secondary role in economic development. This also makes today's "water release" seem somewhat ineffective and cannot alleviate the dry state of the US market. A patient's heart beats, stops and beats, what will his physical condition look like? The United States is equivalent to such a patient. Its own capital has long been attributed to the capital giant in the long-term development, and the market has a stagnant crisis. This time the new crown epidemic seemed to be tailor-made for it, hitting the fragile American manufacturing industry. Therefore, under the dual pressure of shutdown and production and social crisis, the US market was severely short of commodities, and the market circulation chain broke down. The epidemic will also extend the shutdown of the United States for another month. The United States today is like a severely ill patient under the torture of both electric shock and disease. Its monopoly capitalism has entered a period of decline after more than two hundred years of development, and is simply unable to withstand the rampant bombardment of the epidemic. The economic lifeline of the entire society has been unable to repair itself, the heart has long been inactivated, and it has been forced to receive all kinds of electric shocks from the federal economic stimulus. After the capital entered the market, there was no commodity returning to Wall Street quickly, repeating a vicious circle. Wall Street is like a black hole that is always filled with dissatisfaction, carrying the growing fear of 300 million Americans. The whole world can hear the respite and heartbreaking cough of the American economy, which shows the inevitable decline of monopoly capitalism. Regarding the disadvantages and inevitable consequences of monopoly capitalism, Uncle Guo will continue to analyze. Lao Tie, what do you think of the US rescue market? Welcome to comment below! Uncle Guo will continue to pay attention to the situation in various countries under the epidemic. If you like it, please follow the wave of collection ~

#us #trump

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iol247 · 5 years

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“Saint” Mandela? Not So Fast!

President Barack Obama has compared him to George Washington. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews heralded him as “perhaps the world’s greatest hero.”

The Las Vegas Guardian Express dispensed with the “perhaps,” declaring in headline: “Nelson Mandela World’s Greatest Hero.”

Others have christened him “the greatest man of the 20th century.” Many revere him as “the savior” of South Africa. School children worldwide read books, write essays and sing songs about him, and watch movies extolling his virtues and heroic accomplishments.

As we write, the 94-year-old Mandela has been hovering near death for days, the subject of hourly news updates and the beneficiary of tearful prayer vigils worldwide. With the announcement of his death, the eulogies will soon be sounding and in his honor innumerable streets, highways, schools, stadiums, parks, and public buildings will be renamed.

For the past three decades, Nelson Mandela has been swathed in global media adulation unlike any other human being in history. No pope, president, king, war hero, movie star, or rock star can boast of having been the beneficiary of such undiluted, unalloyed, and unbroken acclaim. It is common for totalitarian dictators to employ their state-controlled media to create a worshipful cult of personality about themselves — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung — but outside of their countries there are usually journalists and media organs that will report their crimes, failings, and misdeeds. Mandela has not had to worry about dirty laundry; he is the first individual to achieve a near-universal cult of personality on the global level, thanks entirely to the unparalleled glorification campaign bestowed upon him by the major media in the United States and Europe.

As we reported in 1990 regarding his world tour that year, following his release from prison, his media saturation coverage (and infatuation coverage) was unprecedented — and has not been matched by anyone since. He has received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union, and numerous other honors from countries, universities, and institutions.

What is it about Nelson Mandela the man that justifies this global adoration? To be sure, his mien contributes; he is tall, dignified, and statesman-like in appearance, gracious in public speech, and grandfatherly in tone. He does not exude the radical, self-promotional hucksterism of, say, Al Sharpton, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or the ANC’s current head, Jacob Zuma. And, yes, he served many years in prison, but not merely for opposing injustice and racism, as his legions of hagiographers would have us believe. He was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC), an organization designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department and many governments and intelligence agencies. He was also a co-founder of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), a militant terrorist group within a terrorist group. He was tried and convicted for his terrorist and subversive activities within those organizations (more on which in a moment).

Countless thousands of genuine prisoners of conscience, who have never done anything more “criminal” than praying, or speaking out against tyranny, are languishing in prisons all across the planet without so much as a peep of protest from the legions of Mandela worshipers and his chorus of media promoters. How many of those praising Mandela as the world’s moral compass have ever heard of Ignatius Cardinal Kung, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanghai, who was imprisoned in Communist China for 33 years, most of it overlapping the same period in which Mandela was in prison? Cardinal Kung’s heroic incarceration was in many ways more severe than that faced by Mandela, but no media love-fest awaited him when he was released in 1988. Ditto for Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a black Cuban physician who was released from Fidel Castro’s prison system in 2011 after brutal captivity for the “crime” of criticizing the island’s communist regime. But did Nelson Mandela chastise his comrades in Beijing and Havana when he visited there, or did he bring up the plight of the countless political and religious prisoners in their gulags? If so, there is no public record of it, though there is plenty on record of him praising those oppressive regimes.

Mandela: Communist, Terrorist, Liar

This leads us directly to one of the most important issues concerning Nelson Mandela: Was he a Communist with a capital “C,” meaning a disciplined member of the Communist Party, which, in this case means the South African Communist Party (SACP)? In the 1958 treason trial, Nelson Mandela denied being a member of the SACP, a denial he has repeated many times since, and has maintained to the end. His defenders fall into two general categories on this issue, those who believe his denial and those who say, in effect, “So what? What does it matter if he was/is a Communist?”

Those who say they believe his denial must ignore an overwhelming mountain of evidence to the contrary, much of which has been available for decades and much which has only recently come to light from: previously unavailable SACP records; government archives of Communist countries; memoirs and biographies of, and interviews with, SACP and ANC members of the period.

Those who say “So what?” to the question of Mandela’s membership in the SACP must ignore the well established facts that show:

• The SACP was, and remains, a hardcore Marxist-Leninist organization in which all members must pledge unquestioned obedience to the will of the Party, as determined by its Central Committee;

• The SACP took its direction from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and, as such, was an agent of a hostile foreign power;

• SACP members, including Mandela, secretly took control of the ANC, pushing aside and sabotaging ANC leaders committed to reform and change through peaceful, political means;

• ANC and its terrorist arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was also controlled by the SACP, were trained in Soviet Russia and Red China, or in Communist “Frontline States” — Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe — by Soviet, Chinese, East German, Cuban, Czech, and other Communist instructors;

• The SACP-controlled ANC and MK exploited the conditions of apartheid, racism and colonialism not to help South African blacks, but to further the objectives of the Soviet Union and the world Communist conspiracy;

• The SACP-controlled ANC and MK used the Communist-provided training and arms to direct their terror, torture, and murder against South Africa’s black majority even more often than against the white minority;

• If Mandela was not only a Communist Party member, but also a top SACP leader — which the evidence irresistibly shows he was — then he is not only a colossal and persistent liar, but he is all the more culpable in the innumerable acts of terror, torture, and murder committed by ANC mobs and MK cadres over the past several decades;

• Mandela has bequeathed South Africa a one-party state ruled by the increasingly tyrannical and kleptocratic ANC/SACP, which is leading the country down the path toward economic destruction, record-level violent crime, chaos, and genocide.

The coming wave of terror and genocide

The last point mentioned above is especially relevant, since the ostensible purpose of the ANC/SACP revolution was to ameliorate the plight of the disadvantaged black population. Instead, they are transforming what was by far the most prosperous state in Africa (and the one to which black Africans were fleeing to escape Red/black oppression, despite South Africa’s apartheid system then in place) into a corrupt despotism with: squashing of dissent; looting of the treasury by top government officials; sky-high unemployment; increasing poverty and homelessness; some of the world’s highest rates of murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, car-jacking; and the world’s highest HIV/AIDS infection rates.

Resolving the issue of Mandela’s role in the SACP is all the more important when viewed in its proper historical context, which is in the context of the Cold War and the Soviet’s aggressive campaigns in the Third World through “wars of national liberation.” During that period the Communists were killing tens of millions of their own subjects in what Professor R. J. Rummel calls “democide,” or mass murder by government.

Dr. Rummel, who has painstakingly catalogued the top 15 of the mega-murderer regimes, puts the number of their victims during the 20th century at a conservative estimate of more than 151 million — and that was only up to 1987. The vast majority of those were slaughtered by Communist regimes that claimed to be the forces of “liberation.” A significant portion of that slaughter took place in Africa by those same forces of liberation. And it hasn’t ended. In fact, as we have reported, the stark ominous signs, as cited by genocide experts, are that the ANC is preparing to unleash a Communist-style genocide campaign in the “Rainbow Nation” against the remaining white population (see here and here) that will surely also be directed against Indians, Chinese, and millions of blacks.

The genocide campaign against white South Africans has already been underway for several years, but has not yet reached the all-out intensity of the slaughter stages witnessed in Rwanda, Burundi, or Sierra Leone. But that time may be coming soon, and if it does, Nelson Mandela will have helped to launch it. Chilling video footage of Mandela singing an ANC/MK genocide song about killing whites belies the sainted image.

Similarly, in another stunning video, which has since been removed from YouTube for violating its “hate speech” policy, Mandela’s longtime comrade in the ANC and the SACP (and current president of South Africa) Jacob Zuma, sings “Kill the Boer,” meaning kill the white farmer. Even more chilling than the words of the murderous song is the near frenzied behavior it stirs up in many of the assembled mob members. This is clearly incitement to genocide by the top members of South Africa’s ANC ruling regime, the same individuals who incessantly pose as peace advocates. (See both of the videos imbedded at the bottom of this article.)

Yet, the "hate speech" police in our media, who are quick to pounce on any real or fabricated racial or "homophobic" gaffe by politicians, celebrities, or common citizens, have hypocritically ignored the Mandela/Zuma genocide endorsements — or have attempted to exonerate them of any malice with lame excuses about the songs being mere cultural/political slogans.

But with the fires, violence, and chaos already burning in South Africa, these actions by the ANC's most revered leaders are pouring gasoline on the fire. They are stoking a genocidal inferno. We have already seen what this will look like and it is horrible beyond the ability of words to convey. Videos of the ANC’s “necklacing” torture/executions have documented the kind of grotesque “justice” that is meted out by the comrades and minions of Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma. In this unutterably vicious method of terror/murder the victim is seized by a howling mob, beaten, stabbed, stoned, and then, while still alive, has a tire soaked in petrol placed around his/her neck and set ablaze. It can take agonizing minutes for the unfortunate victim to die. (See videos of necklacing here and here.)

Hundreds of victims, the vast majority of whom were black, were killed this way by ANC-led lynch mobs. Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Mandela, was caught on video infamously shouting to a huge mob: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country!" Despite this and the fact that she was convicted in court in the torture/murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and found by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be guilty in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of numerous men, women, and children, Winnie Mandela is free as a bird and still sits on the ANC’s Executive Committee. If Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma have any “moral authority,” it has not evidenced itself in the form of condemning and removing this murderess from the ANC’s highest body.

Necklacing is one of the ANC’s enduring “gifts” to humanity; it has been exported to Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mexico, and many other countries. And, over the past couple of years, many news stories from South Africa report on its revival there.

Overwhelming evidence: guilty beyond reasonable doubt

The evidence that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party is so enormous that we will be able to detail only a tiny fraction of it. Dr. Henry R. Pike solidly established the record on this matter in 1985 with his 600-page monumental work, A History of Communism in South Africa, which is massively documented with many photographs and reproductions of official court records and SACP, ANC, and MK documents.

Important new evidence has been made available since 2012, with the publication of historian Stephen Ellis’ extraordinary book, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990. Dr. Ellis, a professor based at the Free University of Amsterdam is no conservative and no apologist for apartheid; he is a former researcher for Amnesty International and was a researcher on the Mandela-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In fact, he seems to bend over backwards to put the best slant possible on Mandela’s SACP involvement. Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves — and they are damning. (For articles on and reviews of Dr. Ellis’ book see The New American here and The Telegraph (U.K.) here. A lengthy abstract of an article by Ellis surveying much of the material in External Mission is available here.

In addition, we now have many admissions against interest from interviews and articles over the past decade in the official Communist Party press and in the books and articles of Vladimir Shubin, a Soviet official who was stationed in South Africa for many years and played a key role in the Kremlin’s policies vis a vis South Africa and, more specifically, its aid to and direction of the SACP and the ANC.

In his book, ANC: A View from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye, 1999), although Shubin is careful to still put the Kremlin spin on his revelations, he nonetheless confirms much of what anti-communist critics had long claimed (and which the so-called intellectuals and media mavens had long scorned), as well as providing details not previously in the public domain.

Here is a brief sampling of the mountainous record documenting Mandela’s long, conspiratorial role in the South African Communist Party:

• Among the evidence uncovered recently by Prof. Ellis are the official minutes of a secret 1982 SACP meeting at which veteran Party leader John Pule Motshabi explains to the comrades that Mandela has been a (secret) SACP member for two decades;

• Rowley Israel Arenstein, a lawyer and leading SACP member since the 1930s, said that Mandela was chosen by the SACP to create Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and Mandela was the SACP’s main instrument in “hijacking” the ANC and marginalizing its longtime leader and president Albert Lithuli, an opponent of the SACP’s program of “liberation” through armed struggle.

• During the Rivonia Trial (October 1963-June 1964), Bruno Motolo, a black member of SACP, ANC and MK, provided devastating testimony of Mandela’s involvement in all three groups. Despite death threats, he later provided even more details in his memoir, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The Road to the Left;

• Other prominent SACP members that have publicly identified Mandela as a fellow Communist include Paul Trewhela,3 Joe Matthews, Hilda Bernstein and Brian Bunting;

• Paul Trewhela, an SACP member who was imprisoned (1964-1967) for his communist activities, and more recently assisted Prof. Ellis in his research in the archives of the Stasi (the KGB’s East German subsidiary), has said: “Mandela was indeed a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.”

• During the Rivonia Trial, more than 10 documents in Mandela’s handwriting were introduced into evidence, totaling hundreds of pages. One, entitled, “How to be a good communist,” stated: “Under communist rule, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey… In our country the struggle of the oppressed masses is led by the South African Communist Party and inspired by its policies.” He also wrote: “The people of South Africa, led by the South African Communist Party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism.”

• Mandela’s Rivonia documents also declared that “traitors and informers should be ruthlessly eliminated,” and he recommended “cutting off their noses” — among other barbarities — a tactic he had adopted from Algeria’s communist FLN terrorists and which he put into practice by MK;

• Mandela did not deny writing the damning material, but merely attempted to explain it away by claiming they were notes he had taken down for study purposes;

• A Rivonia trial surprise witness was Gerard Ludi, a top SACP member who was actually an infiltrator, Agent Q-018, for the Special Branch of the South African Police. Ludi provided detailed incriminatory evidence on the SACP’s leadership and illegal activities. He identified Mandela as “a top man in the central committee of the underground communist party.” Subsequent revelations have proven the reliability of Ludi’s testimony.

• In the category of a picture being worth a thousand words, one of the most striking images of Mandela is of him standing beneath a giant Communist hammer and sickle symbol (photo at left), side-by-side with Joe Slovo, top leader of the SACP — with both men delivering the communist clenched fist salute. Mandela declared: “I salute the South African Communist Party for its sterling contribution to the struggle for democracy.” It is worthy of note that this occurred not once, but many times, as Mandela and Slovo toured South Africa;

• Comrade Slovo, a Lithuanian-born Communist and a colonel in the Soviet KGB, was for decades one of Mandela’s closest associates in the SACP, ANC, and MK;

• Slovo himself stated, in his 1986 propaganda article, "The Sabotage Campaign": “To constitute the High Command [of Umkhonto we Sizwe] the ANC appointed Mandela and the Party appointed me.” Since Mandela was himself a secret top member of the Party, this constitutes a admission that the SACP appointed and thereby controlled MK from the start.

So, Nelson Mandela was not only a SACP member, but a top Communist at that, a member of the ruling Central Committee. And not only that, but he was selected by his fellow top Communists to be the key Red who would launch the Kremlin-approved, Soviet-backed terror war against the South African government.

The ANC had begun as a non-communist organization, and, as a broad-based mass organization, always had many non-communist and anti-communist members. However, they were no match for the rigidly disciplined and conspiratorial SACP, which quickly infiltrated and took control. “The first real alliance between the ANC and the communists,” Dr. Pike wrote, “dates back to 1928, when E.J. Khalile, the ANC general-secretary, was elected to the SACP’s central committee. From this time onward, the alliance continued.” Albeit the alliance went through rocky periods when the non-communists tried to extricate themselves from the communist grip; but they never succeeded.

The new colonial masters: Moscow, Beijing, Havana

Here is a small sampling of the overwhelming evidence of the SACP’s ties to Moscow and Beijing and SACP’s decisive control over the ANC and MK:

• In 1960, top members of the SACP went to Moscow and Beijing for aid. In Beijing they met personally with dictator Mao Zedong and Den Xiaoping, Mao’s assistant and eventual successor. It was only with the blessings of the Kremlin and Mao that the SACP-led ANC launched their armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The meetings with Mao and Deng had not been public knowledge until revealed by Dr. Ellis’ research;

• Bartholomew Hlapane, a former member of the SACP Central Committee, testified in court: “All policy-making in the ANC was first discussed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.” He also stated: “Umkhonto we Sizwe’s policy was formulated by the communist party and the organization received its instructions from this party.” For this and other testimony Hlapane and his wife were brutally murdered and their daughter shot and left paralyzed;

• In 1982, Jorge da Costa, a personal friend of Joe Slovo and the head of security for Communist Mozambique’s dictator Samora Machel, defected to South Africa, bringing irrefutable proof of the Soviet/SACP/ANC connection. Regarding the SACP’s Slovo, da Costa said: “There is no doubt in my mind that Slovo is behind every operation launched by the ANC against South Africa. He has a brilliant mind and is one of the best-informed people about this country.”;

• SACP general secretary Joe Slovo, a KGB colonel, was in regular touch with fellow KGB agents, such as Vasily Solodovnikov, the Russian ambassador to Zambia, through which Moscow directives were channeled to the SACP/ANC/MK;

• The World Peace Council, a KGB-directed international communist front organization has been one of the ANC’s most durable allies and can claim much of the credit for organizing the decades-long “Free Mandela” media campaign that resulted in his release from prison;

• In his 2003 memoir, Nothing But the Truth: Behind the ANC’s Struggle Politics, SACP leader Benjamin Turok recalled “how easy it was for a small group like ours to exert much influence in the mass movement without giving away our existence.”

• In They Were Part of Us and We Were Part of Them: The ANC in Mozambique from 1976 to 1990, published in 2008, veteran ANC members reminisce on their experience. Among the many nuggets is an interview with Franny Rabkin and Ronnie Ntuli which contains this admission: Franny: “For us: We were Communists, and we were ANC.” Ronnie: “And so was everyone else.”

• Soviet official Vladimir Shubin wrote: “The Russian press has calculated that from 1963-1991, 1,501 ANC activists were trained in Soviet military institutions.” Thousands more were trained in the Frontline States. Communist veteran Gerald Horne, stated in Political Affairs, the official journal of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA): “There can be no doubt that the direct involvement of Soviet officers helped to raise the level of combat readiness of ANC armed units and, especially, of the organizers of the armed underground.”

• Mandela passed on control over the ANC and South Africa to Thabo Mbeki, his longtime comrade and a “former” SACP member. Mbeki subsequently lost out in a power struggle with another Mandela comrade and prison mate, Jacob Zuma, also a “former” SACP member, who is accelerating the ANC’s destructive policies as the current president of South Africa.

• Zuma has continued the Tripartite Alliance, the formal agreement among the ANC, SACP and COSATU, which guarantees that the SACP and the Communist-dominated COSATU will back the ANC as the Communist-run front group that runs South Africa.

• In 1998, at age 80, Mandela married for the third time, to Graca Machel, the widow of Mandela’s longtime ally, Samora Machel, the ruthless Communist dictator of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Graca was a longtime member of FRELIMO, the communist terrorist organization run by her husband that took control of Mozambique in 1975. For more than a decade, she was a partner in Samora Machel’s vicious reign of murder and torture of men, women, and children, including even many of his FRELIMO comrades whom he turned against.

Media propagandists unfazed by the evidence

Again, we have barely scratched the surface. But the enormity of the damning evidence notwithstanding, the doyens of the Establishment chattering classes continue to sing the same pro-ANC, pro-Mandela rhapsodies and offer the same lame excuses. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor and the Times’ former bureau chief in Johannesburg, attempts to dismiss the communist commitment of SACP members with the assertion that “Most [SACP] members weren’t all that Communist.” Yes, goes the argument, they were merely a bunch of African nationalists dressing up their rhetoric with some Marxist ideology for effect. That was the argument Keller, the Times and their ilk would drag out time after time during the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s whenever a startling new revelation threatened to make it obvious that the ANC were not freedom fighters but instead a bunch of Kremlin-backed, bloodthirsty, communist thugs. South African author Rian Malan takes Keller to task, pointing out that among the many SACP veterans refuting Keller’s claim is Hilda Bernstein, friend of Slovo and wife of SACP Central Committee member Rusty Bernstein. “Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists,” she said in a 2004 interview. “Anything the Soviets did was right. They were very, very pro-Soviet.”

But Keller is unmoved. In a reply to letters to the editor from Malan and former SACP member Paul Trewhala, he dismisses their evidence and that of Prof. Ellis, saying he disagrees “that the alliance with the Communists damns the ANC as a Stalinist front. That is simply Red-baiting nonsense.”

It is virtually axiomatic that no matter how iron-clad the evidence presented, MSM “journalists” such as Keller will see any charges of communist conspiracy as “Red-baiting” and “McCarthyism.” And, conversely, no matter how contrived, flimsy and false the charges by leftists and communists against conservatives, anti-communists, pro-lifers, Christians, Tea Partiers, Birchers, military veterans, etc., the Kellers of the Fourth Estate will rush to give these smears credence. (See here, here, here, and here.)

We witnessed this dynamic in action in South Africa with a cruel vengeance during the 1960s-'90s, as the MSM joined the Communist press, not only in their glorification of the ANC, but also in viciously attacking (or completely ignoring) the moderate South African black leaders, many of whom had far larger constituencies and more legitimate claims to moral authority than Mandela and his ANC comrades. Those moderate leaders included: Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Bethelezi, who is also head of the Inkatha Freedom Party; Tomsanqa Linda, former mayor of Ibhayi township (photo at right); Nelson Botile, former Mayor of Soweto; Bishop Lekganyane of the Zionist Christian Church; Bishop Isaac Mokoena, leader of the Reformed Independent Church Association, which claims a membership of four and one-half million members; Dr. Elijah Maswanganyi — and many others. Chances are good you never heard of any of them, or that you only heard nasty, negative things about them. But that wasn’t a matter of mere chance; it was according to a plan that was to insure that no serious challengers to Mandela and the ANC/SACP leadership would come to the fore. That same plan continues in place, guaranteeing that the thugs and thieves who are Mandela’s ANC heirs will remain in charge of South Africa.

Unsung Hero, Genuine Freedom Fighter: Tomsanqa Linda pictured on U.S. Speaking tour. Despite serious dangers to himself and his family, Tomsanqa Linda, the mayor of Ibhayi Township (population 400,000) and president of the Eastern Province Council Association (representing 74 townships with a total population of nearly 14 million) came to America in 1990 for a national speaking and media tour to expose Nelson Mandela and the ANC. In city after city, he preceded by two or three days Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour. Although he was ignored by the national media, he reached millions of Americans with his powerful message through local television and radio news programs and talk shows. He was sponsored on this important national tour by The John Birch Society.

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Update: After Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, both the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress acknowledged in official statements that Mandela was a high-level member of the South African Communist Party. For an updated article about this admission after decades of denial, click here.

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