Andrew
Schmookler: All right; so let's ask
ourselves -- let me get a little concrete -- this is hard, by the way, for me
Rob. This is just so big that it's kind
of hard to lay out - but let's just ask ourselves, "What are the terrible
things in American history?" Well, we've
got the enslavement of Africans - and all the stuff that went on around that -
which was a lot, just a whole lot, particularly in the South, but really all
over the country in some ways. And then
there is what we did to the Native Americans, both the way we stole their land,
and the way we broke their treaties, and the way we justified ourselves. And then there's taking the land from Mexico
and making them accept fifteen million dollars [$15M] with our guns pointed at
their head. What are the dark things in
American History? Well, those are some
of them. There is McCarthyism. There are the lynchings in the Jim Crow
South.
OK; then you ask, "What is it that made these things possible? How did the circumstance evolve, and how did
people's minds develop so that this kind of thing could happen?" Then you get into bigger patterns that
operate in the culture, and you see this dark, sick, and broken spirit moving
through the system, and then occasionally coming out in powerful form, like in
the 1850s, leading up to one catastrophe.
And then again, I think nothing like it until the past decade-plus, when
this thing has become so powerful, and it is as destructive as it can be.
You see this thing moving through history, and you can see that the
patterns are the same thing; like, you can see that Karl Rove, for example, in
the 2004 election, where he is representing an interest that is injuring the
people whose votes he is wooing. It's
exploiting them; it's taking money out of their pockets, making life harder for
them, and enriching their already fabulously rich allies. This is what they're doing.
And then, Karl Rove goes in there in the 2004 election, and he pulls
something off the shelf that I recognized, as somebody who has been studying
the Civil War, and been teaching the Civil War.
I recognized this as what they did in the Jim Crow South: take the powerful White man, con the
lower-down-in-the-hierarchy White man with the phony bargain that, "We are
together, we are White, and the danger to us comes from the people who are
not. They are the people we've got to
hold in check to protect white womanhood and whatever else."
So you get that pattern in the culture, and then all of a sudden, in
2004, Karl Rove reaches up to the shelf and pulls down this cultural pattern
that's moving through history over the generations, and he just changes a
couple of the cyphers. Instead of
protecting racial purity, he's going to protect sexual, moral purity, and he
brings people out (the same people he's exploiting), he brings them out to the
polls to support that, in order to turn back the people who are sexually
polluting us and turn back the people who stand for gay rights, and things like
that. Same con game! Just a change.
I've been watching how these patterns move through history, and I see
behind that something vast that we need to be able to see, and that is: in
History, there are separate forces that are contending with each other, over
time, as to which ones are going to shape the culture; whether it's going to be
shaped to serve life, or to destroy life.
Some times one is ascendant, and at other times, others. And it can be called "The Battle Between Good
and Evil." I feel like I need a lot of
pieces to put in place, but I feel like I see this clearly, and I hope I have
the stamina to lay it out.
Rob Kall: OK.
That's a really big picture. Now,
It think this ties in with thinking that you've been engaging in for a long
time, that is also part of your book, The Parable of the Tribes. You've put together a model that I think this
is based on. IS that correct?
Andrew
Schmookler: Well, what I've been doing so
far in this project is laying out piece by piece the pieces I know as sort of a
foundation, and T he Parable of Tribes is one of the foundations. It's a foundation, but it's only one of
several, and it doesn't get to the level I was just talking about, about
spirits or patterns and forces moving through history, and the battle between
good and evil being a meaningful way of understanding an actual phenomenon that
I hope I can show. Where were we going
there just then?
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