@Pluto's Republic

agile mind, amiga, and order of magnitude beyond mine, so i'll need to respond more than once.

but first, how fascinating your take on 'Liberty' as the ease of Patenting while the industrial revolution was felt rumbling beneath the ground. 'wealth' without property ownership' which was, as i understand it, the basis of the US constitution's Rule of Law. and really, the first police were slave patrols to protect the owners' Property, and now in 2020 it's the same thing. (broken windows policing)

i think you're right as to so few ever having learned about First American genocide on turtle island, nor the genocide of slaves, or at least from the perspective of those on the receiving end. in our local public grade schools, the focus was always on 'those godless induns scalping and burning out 'Amerikan settlers who were looking for new homes' or close. our adopted Ute daughter had to sit thru shit like that. our adopted black/azteca son had to sit thru films showing 'black african children with flies crawling around their eyes they were so poor and unhealthy, etc.

mr. wd managed to do a Ute history class one year, i tackled a black history one, but mine was a flop as it was far too academic. i was permitted to put together a magnificent indigenous outside cultural fair at the grade school one year, featuring crafts, cooking, etc., but most teachers never let their students out the door to see it.

be back in a bit; i need some brekkie.

...when it came to dealing with inconvenient humans who created tiresome obstacles to our exceptional ambitions. The Founders could feel the rumblings of the bountiful Industrial Revolution beneath their feet — ready to burst forth. They began writing laws of ownership and property immediately.

Not many Americans realize that the US was once a real utopia — it was the only place on earth where a man could get a patent on any invention that he could imagine in his mind. This was the real birth of Capitalism and Equality. A good idea could make a US citizen enormously wealthy — even without owning or inheriting any property. This was the birth of "Liberty." It was a concept that could justify any action necessary to secure it.

This is what brought the settlers to America. Not "religious freedom," which was an early propaganda narrative. They came because Greed was next to Godliness. Now, fast-forward to the Pharmaceutical Empire that aspires to sell you the right to stay alive, if you can afford to pay the price.

The US Patent Act inspired the creation of the US Constitution. The first US Patent, numbered X000001 was granted on July 31, 1790. The patent was granted by George Washington. That's what Independence Day is really all about.

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This also hints at the big truth hidden inside the current Pandemic. What we thought was biological warfare is actually a Capitalist Revolution staged by America's Pharmaceutical Overlords. I saw it In detail today. This is what we are being prepared for — and it has been a long time coming. It's the Capitalist form of depopulation, yet it is so much more than that.

From your Essay:

The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.

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(I wonder how many sexes they had back in the olden days?)

It's always bothered me that there is so little history and discussion of the massive US genocide. No one ever talks about it. I'd wager that 85 percent of Americans have no higher-lobe consciousness of how genocide defines what we call 'American culture'. Most Americans will live their lives and die without ever understanding this important truth.

I discovered several years ago that the American genocide and its detailed history was widely studied in Europe. Adolf Hitler was said to be obsessed by this bold American achievement. He had a collection of histories and monographs on the topic, and was deeply inspired by how Americans freely applied a solution to a people problem that would have blocked their progress. Instead, Americans could actively shape their abundant new world to meet their exceptional needs. The story goes that Hitler was particularly interested in the logistics of how these young American Founders and their descendants disposed of a hundred million dead bodies. Hitler saw that their bold actions allowed Americans to launch themselves, untroubled and unencumbered, into the First Great Industrial Revolution.

Maga. Amirite?

It's alive and it's coming to a head.

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

appreciate your heart-and-soul piercing history by vignette, amiga. and yes, biden's racist history is pretty secret now because: obomba's shirt-tails.

if i might capsulize: what you learned that no matter how bright you were, you were white trash, not acceptable for learning how to change the system. but you were still treated better than the poor black kids.

and that's exactly what we're still seeing in Civil Rights 2020. not really the intersection of class and race/ethnicity (black, indigenous, latinos), but close enough. here in the 4-corners, it's fist american tribes who are the 'unworthy, lazy n*ggers', but i'm sad to say that some tribes not only look down on others, but also on blacks. our daughter's Ute, one of the lowliest tribes in the SW pecking order.

but jezum crow, this blew me away, and i'll never forget this as a mind-picture, Reverend Jane:

This was the home of all of our Civics courses, along with the Journalism elective which I took in the 8th grade, and all of our indoor suspensions, so just getting to Civics or Journalism class meant you basically had to run down shank alley. I never got cut but I was groped between the legs more than once just walking down crowded halls in that school before I learned some defense. I was 12.

i really have no idea how a Constitutional Convention of the people, by the people, and for the people might be established, nor who might establish how delegates to such a convention might be elected, but a bloke who'd called for one a dozen years ago at FDL was trounced with: "sure, them goddammed libertarians would get their noses udder the tent!", lol.

so i dunno about the elite ruling class, and how that might work, myself. no one with wealth over X can be a delegate?

I grew up in South Florida and with a single semester of high school excepted, went to the same school system throughout my childhood. That school system has been featured in a prominent school-to-prison pipeline documentary. My mother attended the same school system only 18 years before I went; when she went, those schools were still segregated by race. I was in like second grade when guys like Biden were taking the national stage and howling about bussing and I already thought they were stupid assholes.

One of the good things about my personal roll of the genetic dice is that almost all things academic come very easily to me and I have rarely worked for any grade in any subject. This meant that I was always sorted into whatever gifted/advanced/dorktrack classes the school had going on. In junior high school (the most like a prison out of all of the schools I attended) some of the classes were not on the gifted track and so the story we were told was that we were to be randomly sorted into these. They included homeroom, electives, and classes like PE and Civics.

We didn't have enough classrooms in the school to house our student body so we had this modular non-permanent building out behind the locker rooms called "the 6 pack" because it was broken up into six "rooms". This was the home of all of our Civics courses, along with the Journalism elective which I took in the 8th grade, and all of our indoor suspensions, so just getting to Civics or Journalism class meant you basically had to run down shank alley. I never got cut but I was groped between the legs more than once just walking down crowded halls in that school before I learned some defense. I was 12.

My 7th grade Civics teacher was perhaps the worst teacher I ever had. He taught us nothing. His demeanor was always as if he'd just woken up from sleeping 16 hours after a booze bender and then taken a Valium and gone to work. He wrote questions on the board, we were to copy those questions, and we were to remain silent while we opened our textbooks, found the answers to the questions, and wrote them down in complete sentences, then turned our papers in, and most importantly, remained silent. Sometimes we watched a movie. My classmates and I sometimes passed notes back and forth, and one time one of them set his desk on fire. That was Civics. We all learned more about the government from Schoolhouse Rock commercials.

About halfway through the year (savvy was a much lower roll for me on those damnable genetic dice lol) it finally occurred to me that exactly none of my gifted/advanced/dorktrack buddies were in this Civics class. And then it occurred to me that approximately 75% of them had been sorted into a Civics class with an excellent teacher, and the majority of the rest had that same excellent teacher during a different class period. And then I realized that ALL the poor white kids were in my Civics class where we were very specifically not being taught shit about how to work to improve anything through government channels. And I got super fuckin depressed because that was the time I realized how intentional it all was, and how all these teachers knew it was intentional, and how they were all lying to us while they were hobbling our socioeconomic class for life. They were fucking us over so hard, and we were still getting treated better, as a class, than the poor black kids.

Later in life I tried to fill in the gaps in my early education, but I never did run across what seemed to me to be a workable strategy for keeping the oligarchy or the assholes out of a Constitutional Convention. If anyone else has a good strategy for that, I'd love to read it.

*edited for typos

@Blue Republic

the project is to zinn's apparently great 'the Peoples History' book, either, but it's geared for educators, so there's that to consider. i wish i could have heard about it when i could still read dead tree.

i'll try to read your review of lundberg's book soonish, but i was tickled witless about the interviews. thanks for that. 'and we're teachers!' said the two... the others: 'er...1977?'

by the Zinn Education thing, but will check it out further.

The Rafael article: "Re-examining the Revolution" was definitely worthwhile, though, thanks for the heads-up.

Speaking of conceptions and misconceptions abut the War of Independence, Constitution and such, I'll make a recommendation of my own - Ferdinand Lundberg's 1980 work "Cracks in the Constitution". Lundberg deconstructs many of the myths about the Constitution - shows how it was authored by very different people, with profoundly different agendas than those who were signers of the Declaration of Independence, that in fact it amounted to a coup against the existing Confederation and was intended by its main authors to result in a society very much like Britain's, but without monarchy, nobility and established church. There would be a stratified society ruled be a small, propertied elite.

They had to include the Bill of Rights to get the thing ratified, but did so in the correct (as it turns out) belief that that would not really cramp their style in realizing a strong central government controlled by themselves.

Good, comprehensive, *long* review here

Hope you all had a good Cuatro de Julio

What young people know about the meaning of Independence Day: