of mule dung and ash

LAND GRAB: The disenfranchisement of a people.

“My heart is filled with joy when I see you here, as the brooks fill with water when the snows melt in the spring; and I feel glad, as the ponies do when the fresh grass starts in the beginning of the year. My people have never first drawn a bow or gun against whites. There has been trouble on the line between us, and my young men have danced the war dance. But it was not begun by us. It was you who sent out the first soldier and we who sent out the second. The blue dressed soldiers and the Utes came out from the night when it was dark and still, and for campfires they lit our lodges. Instead of hunting game, they killed my braves, and the warriors of the tribe cut their hair for the dead. So it was in Texas. They made sorrow come in our camps, and we went out like the buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked. When we found them we killed them and their scalps hang in our lodges.

The Comanche are not weak and blind, like pups or a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried and our women laughed. But there are things which you have said which I do not like. They are not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them I lived happily.”

These words were spoken in 1867 by the Chief Paruasemena (Young Bear) of the Yamparikas Comanche at the Medicine Lodge Treaty negotiations. There were three treaties signed at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and all were abysmal failures. [i]

Settlers, the United States military and the tribes all failed to honor a number of articles in the treaties. The agreements were caught up in a bitter dispute between the House of Representatives and the Senate over which body had control of treaty making with the Nations. Then as now, politics was the fly in the ointment. Unresolved acrimony and political posturing spelled an end to treaty attempts after 1870. It also disrupted promised appropriations and rations for reservations. This made a bad situation worse as the rations were wholly inadequate in the first place. The result was famine and sickness for the natives on the reservations. Discontented young men left the reservation with their families, returning to the old way of raiding settlements, both out of anger for the dishonesty of the government’s agents, and to alleviate their starving conditions. It wasn’t long before the wars reached fevered pitch.

The previous brief history describes the beginning of the end of the story. The origin of the story harkens from prehistoric times. Abundant evidence has been unearthed suggesting that primitive human society existed on the American continents for some 12 millennia, but with their origins remaining somewhat a mystery. [ii]

Evidence of these peoples has been found in scattered locations across the North American Great Plains. For several years, we called these natives the Clovis people. The first and most abundant evidence was discovered near that New Mexico city. We have since determined that there were three separate and unrelated DNA lines that appeared on these continents within a few thousand years of each other. They were of different blood lines, but all were foot nomads. It was the Clovis bloodline that was ancestor to the Shoshonean nations, from which the Comanche are descendant.

The early nomads were hunters who ventured onto the plains in search of large game. They hunted mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, elk, bear and primitive horses. After about 3,000 years, the focus shifted to the early bison, predecessor of the buffalo. The people migrated in search of game but returned every year to traditional, high ground locations to prepare for the coming winter. These traditional camps and the artifacts found there produced much of our knowledge about this people.

This lifestyle continued in one form or another for centuries, but then along came the European invasion.

It started with the Spanish, followed soon afterwards with the French, Dutch and English. The western march of settlements brought strangers with strange customs into regular contact with native tribes. Many of the tribes and bands were friendly to the newcomers, receiving the new settlers with good grace and offering trade. Others resisted contact and simply moved further west. The Euro-Christian concept of Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act of 1862 provided false justification for settlers to push further west, creating more competition for finite lands and game, creating tension between the settlers and the Natives.

Many treaties were signed in futile efforts to assuage conflict, promising land, rations and peace, but the treaties were almost never honored. The Christian concept of manifest destiny manifested only as bigotry in these situations, and the natives were treated as savages. The natives responded in kind.

The Comanche tribe provided one of the main sources of resistance. Famous for their horsemanship and ferocity, the roving Comanche bands became notorious for raids on homesteads and towns, and for kidnapping settler women and children. The most famous of these was Cynthia Parker, mother of Quanah Parker.

This resistance served only to heighten tensions between the settlers and the natives. With the outbreak of the Civil War, some Indian tribes attempted to align themselves with what they believed would be the winning side. In the case of the Comanche, that side was the Confederacy. When the war ended with the Greycoats losers, the Comanche were brought to Fort Smith in Arkansas and made to swear loyalty to the United States Government.

The humiliation did not long last, and soon came a resurgence of the Comanche as rulers of the plain. They spread out over large expanses, taking what they had learned from the white man and expanding their influence both militarily and economically. They battled their enemies with diplomacy and with violence, determined to maintain power in their areas of control. In the Treaty of Little Arkansas in 1865, the tribe was awarded a large piece of land spanning parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Some parts of this region, known as Comancheria, later became part of the reservation system.

The tribe continued their raids, and soon the United States Government took action. The Comanche Campaign is a term used by the Government to describe the organized effort to drive the Comanche off their land. The Comanche redoubled their resistance in a series of violent clashes with the settlers between 1867 and 1875.

The Government was intent on taking the land it had granted by treaty just a few years earlier. In 1871, Col. Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, was given command of the Fourth Cavalry Regiment and sent to Texas with orders to force the Comanche onto the reservation. Over the next few years, using large bodies of troops, Mackenzie engaged in dozens of skirmishes with the Comanche in the area known as the Llano Estacado. [iii]

In the early morning hours of Monday, September 28, 1874, in a deep Red River canyon in the Texas Panhandle, 400 troops led by Mackenzie attacked a still sleeping camp of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne. The women and children not killed in the initial attack retreated up the canyon while the men engaged the soldiers allowing their families to escape. The engagement lasted for hours, and by noon the surviving natives had escaped, leaving lodges, horses, and supplies gathered for the coming winter behind. Mackenzie ordered the lodges burned and the supplies destroyed. Next, he slaughtered 1,048 horses leaving the natives afoot. Without horses, shelter, or food, the natives faced a killing winter. [iv] A few at a time the beaten natives straggled into the reservation rather than face certain death.

The Palo Duro Canyon fight was the largest engagement in the Red River Wars. It marked the end of the Southern Plains Indians' military resistance. The once proud Comanche surrendered, their chiefs imprisoned and the people forcibly resettled onto reservation.

A proud people was dispossessed of land that had been their ancestral birthright for over 12,000 years. To this day locals visit the Palo Duro to collect meal from the decomposed bones of the horses and mules, most of them oblivious to the history upon which they stand.

Or how an otherwise intelligent segment of American society has swallowed hook... line and sinker

Our Founders intent was to create a society based on their personal belief that human happiness was intimately connected with personal freedom… and joined at the hip with personal responsibility. Thus we find as the basis of our Constitution the “twin pillars” of limited government and the protection of individual rights. This author is fond of our Founders’ work, which would make me a classic liberal. The authors of our Constitution were called liberals. Folks just like them in Continental Europe are still called liberal. Over here we're often called “libtard” and “socialist”.

It is just unfortunate that the definitions of some words change across educational and political spectra to end up meaning whatever uninformed folk want them to mean… kinda like what they do with the Qur’an or the Bible.  

In this country to be known as liberal is to be branded with a sinful belief in big government and the welfare state… while folks calling themselves libertarian tend to claim the mantle of what was classically known as liberalism… and they do so with a distinctly draconian twist.

In fairness, the other political descriptors have suffered similar meaning morphing. Neither “conservative” nor “liberal” mean what they once meant. But It isn't those “wings” this author wishes to chap. The deluded neo-libertarian is in my sights tonight.

From this author’s perspective, contemporary libertarianism (neo-libertarianism) is a pie-in-the-sky hallucination of a thankfully tiny segment of the population that they should be allowed unfettered individualism even at the expense of our others... and even though the blood, sweat and tears of those very others helped pave the way for our deluded neo-lib to get where he wants to go and gain whatever he wants to get without having to pay his share of societal maintenance. 

It doesn't matter to the neo-con that the contribution of civil society in the form of taxes paid have funded the paved roads, water and sewer systems, public safety, health and education… because we knew those things would bring benefit and progress to our society.

These things don't matter to our neo-con, because yes indeed… he certainly *did* build it himself… and by gawd his kids have already graduated so why should he have to pay taxes to school those grubby urchins churned out by the dozens on the other side of the tracks?

Hell! That’s socialism!

Unfortunately, this *is* modern libertarianism… or more accurately… neo-libertarianism. These selfish fools strive so mightily to take on the mantle of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Morris and Henry, yet they haven't a clue as to just how offensive that idea would be to those men. 

Our neo-cons know not what they do and certainly don’t know what they are saying. They want so badly to keep what they've got that that they are willing to sacrifice the future of society and even that of their children. They expend copious fallacies in their quixotic effort to justify nothing less than base selfishness.

The inverse of neo-libertarianism is classic libertarianism… which actually agrees with our neo-con in the belief that every individual has the right to live life in any way they choose up to certain limits. But depending on which of the various definitions to which you subscribe, that pretty much is where the comparison diverges. 

Unlike the neo-con, the classic libertarian cares for the safety and security of society and of the individuals from which that society is composed. A classic libertarian would be willing to defend the right to life, liberty, and property-rights for all individuals. The classic libertarian recognizes the need for a government to protect and provide security of society, while interfering in individual liberties to the least extent possible. The classic libertarian has no argument with a government established “safety net” for folks falling on hard times under circumstances not of their own making... because they recognize that society is composed of individuals and that at any given time it might be them needing that safety net.

The classic libertarian recognizes the need for the rule of law yet feels that individuals should be allowed the freedom of opportunity, and allowed to form relationships without the interference of law.  They wish the law to confine the use of force by the government to very narrow structures, as it might be when wielded against miscreants who have themselves employed force… as in the case of murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, fraud and a few other cases.

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Lets look at a few “dictionary” definitions of libertarianism…

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

'The heart of liberalism is the absence of coercion by others; consequently, the liberal state's commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification.'

The Libertarian Reader edited by David Boaz (Free Press, 1997)

'It is easier to define libertarian ideas than to agree on a proper name for those ideas. The advocacy of individual liberty against state power has gone by many names over the century . . . In the first years of the 19th century the term liberalism came into widespread use in France and Spain and it soon spread, but by the end of that century the meaning had undergone a remarkable change. From the leave us alone philosophy, it had come to stand for advocacy of substantial government intervention in the marketplace. Eventually people began to call the philosophy of individual rights, free markets and limited government - the philosophies of Locke, Smith and Jefferson - classical liberalism.

For classical liberals, liberty and private property are intimately related. From the eighteenth century up to today, classical liberals have insisted that an economic system based on private property is uniquely consistent with individual liberty, allowing each to live their life - including employing their labour and their capital - as they see fit.'

What it means to be a Libertarian by Charles Murray (Broadway Books, 1997)

'The American Founders created a society based on the belief that human happiness is intimately connected with personal freedom and responsibility. The twin pillars of the system they created were limits on the power of the central government and protection of individual rights . . . We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government.
The correct word for my view of the world is liberal. "Liberal" is the simplest Anglicization of the Latin liber, and freedom is what classical liberalism is all about. The writers of the nineteenth century who expounded on this view were called liberals. In Continental Europe they still are . . . . But the words mean what people think they mean, and in the United States the unmodified term liberal now refers to the politics of an expansive government and the welfare state. The contemporary alternative is libertarian . . .'

Social Justice: Fraud or Fair Go? edited by Marlene Goldsmith, chapter by Andrew Norton (Menzies Research Centre, 1998)

'Classical liberals have a strong commitment to individual freedom. This commitment has, I believe, two sources. First there is commitment to freedom as an intrinsic value, as something important in itself. One idea here, an idea that finds support in the psychological literature, is that well-being is associated with a sense of being in control of one's life. Being coerced to do something, even if it is something you would do anyway if you had a choice, is bad for your well-being.

The second source of classical liberalism's commitment to individual freedom comes from its recognition of freedom as an instrumental value, as a value that leads to well being even if it does not of itself provide it. This is mostly an argument about institutions, and especially the claim that the market, a device which coordinates action by facilitating voluntary interaction, has enormous power to enhance well-being. ...'

On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism by Norman Barry (Macmillan, 1986)

'The classical liberals, from Hume and Smith through to Hayek, are concerned with the construction of a social order in which individual liberty can be maximized; social order and liberty do indeed develop conterminously. Principles and processes emerge (almost accidentally) from individual action but the individual is never abstracted from social processes, whether as a rights-bearer or, even, as a utility-bearer.'

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (Penguin Books, 1981)

'Our society is what we make it. We can shape our institutions. Physical and human characteristics limit the alternatives available to us. But none prevent us, if we will, from building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and not letting it become our master.'

- - -

Pretty much a scatter shot of definitions speaking to just how difficult it is to pin political or philosophical labels on others. In the end it comes down to a great debate much like the contest between the philosophies of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine… between the politics of progress and that of conservation... with neither fully addressing the real threats faced by our society.

But it is probably too late in the progress of this nation to turn our sights on the real threat, regardless of political bent. Our thoroughly liberal Founders, particularly Jefferson, were never so confused. They knew exactly from whence the biggest threat to our society would come. Their fears and predictions have materialized, and just as they feared, American society is suffering dramatically because of it.

Our modern neo-con is the real life… in your face representation of that fear.