This was my favorite part of the hour plus babbling of revisionist history and other fairy tales, last night:
Our American Ancestors sailed across the perilous ocean to build a new life on a new continent. And they had no planes! No jets! Just wooden boats. It was amazing! They braved the freezing winters, crossed the raging rivers, scaled the rocky peaks, saying hello to both moose and squirrel; they trekked the dangerous forests where they met Yogi and boo-boo and spoke to the Yo-semites., These pioneers didn't have money, they didn't have fame–they weren't like me, given everything in life and yet continuing to steal from others in order to carry on family tradition, but they had each other. They loved their families, they loved their country, and they loved their God! Your God? Not so much.
And they were looking for new opportunities here, and if that meant killing the native people, or creating a system of slavery, or importing cheap labor from Ireland and China and abusing those immigrants, then by God they were up to it!
When opportunity beckoned, they picked up their Bibles, carefully holding them upside down, they packed up their belongings, guns and ammo first, no masks, they climbed into covered wagons, built right here in America, most of them in Detroit, and set out West for the next adventure in fighting a war with Mexico, in order to preserve the slavery they brought with them from Lousiana, Mississippi, and Georgia and Alabama. Ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, the Lone Ranger, but not Tonto, farmers and settlers, like on Green Acres and Pettycoat Junction, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, and bigots of all ages – they pressed on past the Mississippi to stake a claim in the Wild Frontier, made wilder by their wanton shooting of all of the bison, and their constant war with the Plains Native Peoples, then later the Southwest Native Americans. They brought their diseases, alcohol, and filthy ways and used those handy Bibles to justify their acts of ethnic cleansing, raping and pillaging.
Legends were born – Wyatt Earp, who was an itinerant saloonkeeper, gambler, lawman, gunslinger, and confidence man but was perhaps best known for his involvement in a single gunfight at the O.K. Corral; Annie Oakley, a nasty woman with a gun fixation, Davy Crockett, who abandoned the United States hoping to get rich quick by joining other illegals and invading northern Mexico, then dying like a loser at the Alamo; and Buffalo Bill, a circus performer and self-promoter, who sought fame and fortune by exploiting animals and circulating myths regarding his and other exploits and who had his Army medal of honor stripped from him posthumously. Of course, almost all of their legendary status was created and then written to sell newspapers, but who cares?
Ah, yes...great people. Many fine people.