Capitol Interest with PotomacWill

Manifest Destiny and the Fate of the Comanche

Stranger and more riveting than popular myth, Empire of the Summer Moon provides a corrective lens for our vision of how the West was won.

Ingeniously, this well-researched and imminently readable history develops the saga from the blood-curdling mid-19th century backstory of the birth of a “half breed” who becomes history’s most powerful Comanche War Chief to the last days of the frontier in which the once fierce warrior, Quanah Parker, becomes a movie actor, rancher, school board chairman, and friend of Teddy Roosevelt.

In the interim the reader learns how it happened that what had been a stone-age level hunter-gather society became a force able not only to prevent Spain and later Mexico from ever establishing more than a toehold north of the Rio Grande, but also to stave off—even roll back—for many years U.S. efforts to settle lands beyond the 98th meridian, the eastern flank of the Camoncheria, where what we think of as the Old West begins.

in the wild ride to the book’s denouement at the dawn of the 20th century, readers encounter an amazing variety of fascinating characters such as Quanah’s mother, Cynthia Anne Parker, the “White Squaw,” and Isa-tai, a magician/shaman whose claim of possessing a medicine that would make the Comanche impervious to bullets occasions a heart-renting tragedy of wishful thinking.

Another of the book’s fascinating story lines involves Ranald (Bad Hand) Mackenzie, the iconic Indian fighter and commander of a renowned regiment of Buffalo or Black Soldiers who eventually befriends War Chief Parker. Moreover, Civil War Generals. William Tecumseh Sherman and Philp Henry Sheridan figure in the narrative, as do Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland.

Remarkably, Chief Parker lived so close to our own timed that he came to own a car and had one of the first residential telephones in Oklahoma. My one quibble with the author is his occasional resort to such highly charged and imprecise terms as “low barbarians,” “pre-moral” and “civilized,” as they undermine his obviously concerted effort to present the unvarnished truth.

Hefner and the Runaway Bride; A Father’s Day Reflection

The abrupt and dismal end of Playboy Huge Hefner’s plan to marry a women 60 years his junior yesterday, the eve of Father’s Day in the U.S., reveals him as a tragic figure of a boy who, like Peter Pan, never wanted to grow up — and nearly succeeded.

Money, celebrity, and Viagra made possible his realization of the age-old boyhood dream of chucking civilization and its discontents for a pubescent life of pleasure.

The tragedy of it is that he appears to have realized too late that his life-long adolescence, has separated him from his cohort, rendering him a noxious, old weed in the garden of youthful delights.

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One Nation Rally—My best shot of the day: Rev. Jesse Jackson putting final touches on speech as Rainbow Coalition field director looks on. The Reverend, at about 7 a.m., was first platform speaker on the scene. He was not slated to speak until well after noon. The gathering crowd: http://j.mp/cTIaBL (vid)

People still coming when I left, but, using this picture taken shortly after noon, I would estimate crowd at ~100K, using people per square yard method.

One Nation Rally—Rev. Al Sharpton heads to podium with nod to shoutout from PotomacWill on steps above him.

Shooting from steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Live video @ 2pm unless developments warrant otherwise. Can you believe my camera position.

One Nation Rally—The noon day crowd. Mall is filling up. Huge crowd waiting at subway, I been told.

One Nation Rally—The stage is set for noon. UAW, Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO—labor—have put their shoulder to the wheel of logistics on this one and it shows.

One Nation Rally—Greeter directs early arrivals for noon center right rally.

The Colonized Mind At Work: Roots of Dinesh D’Souza’s Rage Against Obama

Dinesh D’Souza’s widely publicized hatchet job on President Barack Obama in Forbes magazine (September 27) proves the wisdom of the old adage that the opprobrium we heap on others is what we most fear and loath about ourselves.

According to D’Souza, President Obama, by virtue of his social origin, is not really a genuine American, but a stranger, a foreigner, an alien directed not by the American Dream but by the anachronistic anti-colonial beliefs of his “inebriated, philandering African father.”

“Here is a man,” D’Souza writes of the President, “who spent his formative years — the first 17 years of his life — off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.”

Ironically, D’Souza, whose parents hale from the tiny Indian state of Goa, which had been a Portuguese colony until its 1961 annexation, had spent his formative years on the Indian subcontinent, arriving in the U.S. when he, too, was 17.

Consistent with his family’s Goan origin and his Portuguese patronymic, D’Souza, in those days, was Catholic, as is common in Goa — a fact that loomed large in its annexation by India’s overwhelming Hindu and Muslim majority.

It hardly matters here whether D’Souza really is a scion of Goa’s Roman Catholic Brahmins, a high-status Hindu caste converted to Catholicism by Portuguese missionaries early in the 17th century or whether, in fact, he is a descendant of more recently Christianized Dalits, untouchables grateful for the bread and succor of the Catholic Church.

Either case would make this point: D’Souza, like the boogeyman he tries to make of Obama, was acculturated apart from the mainstream of his society, rendering him an alien, an outsider, a stranger in his own homeland.

Against that background, it can be seen that D’Souza’s intemperate attack on the elder Obama’s anti-colonial politics also is quite pathological. Throughout his life, he idolized, aped, and strove to join the ranks of the Western elites that had once reigned supreme over his homeland.

Moreover, D’Souza has long been a public apologist of colonialism. “The descendants of colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism had never happened,” D’Souza argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education many years before Obama’s rise to national prominence. Thus, at the personal level of D’Souza’s remarks, the late Obama’s anti-colonial politics doubtless represented a rebuke damning D’Souza’s entire course in life as that of an imperialist stooge.

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