SEPTEMBER 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Arizona Rep. Paul Goaar. Gosar continues to spew hate-filled, misinformed invective out into the public sphere. On his official government website, Gosar unspooled a conspiracy theory in which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen.Mark Milley knew there would be trouble at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and teamed up against Donald Trump to let it happen. Then he added, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”

According to Gosar, “General Milley, the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” is a “traitor” who has been “also secretly coordinating and sharing intelligence with the Chinese military.” It’s a lot of hooey to take in at once. Much of this is predicated on long debunked claims made by Donald Trump Jr. that Pelosi was the person who rejected the National Guard’s presence at the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6.

Gosar’s statements come shortly after disgraced former President Trump screamed a similar attack by way of his failing Truth social platform. He claimed that a purported call Milley had with Chinese officials on Jan. 6—in which the general reportedly reassured the Chinese government that the United States wasn’t being thrown into chaos—was ”an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling told CNN that Gosar’s and Trump’s statements concerning Milley were “disgusting,” and it showed how “deeply disturbed” the two men are. At the same time, Gosar being a disgusting and disturbed person is not new information. In fact, his own family has campaigned against him. Calling him a “trairor” and publicly demanded he be investigated for his part in facilitating the attempted coup on Jan. 6.

In contrast to traditional GOP support for the military, today’s party extremists with their racist slurs and seeming indifference to how a government shutdown (not to mention Tuberville’s bigoted war on military readiness) would harm our troops, demonstrates how much they’ve abandoned long-standing conservative principles. They’ve become the party of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, hate, intolerance, autocracy and. revenge. I shutter at where this might lead. Gosar for President in 2028?

AUGUST 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. The Florida Board of Education. The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards,, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6). This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And, in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people. Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black AND white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order, especially for a small part of the overall curriculum.

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.