April 15, 2022
Cathedral City, California
In my ongoing critiques of the United States, I am, as you can imagine, always on the lookout for validation from outside my own perspective. Recently I read a quote from W. E. B. DuBois, one of the more insightful scholars and commentators on the state of the country, particularly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of race relations. It had to do with the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," in which a young man was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 for breaking that state's law against the teaching of evolution in public schools. By way of commentary, DuBois said, "Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional. The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land."
To be sure, "hilarious and sarcastic Europe," for its part, is certainly not free from its own monumental ignorance and self-centeredness. Each of the powerful nations of western Europe, in particular, has its own utterly unselfconscious sense of exceptionalism that tends to edge out any introspection regarding its own faults and quirks. The phrase "my shit doesn't stink" comes to mind. A look at the haphazard and often unsuccessful individual national European approaches to the Covid pandemic should tell us something about that, and if we need to look further, there's the whole disastrous history of the 20th century, and for that matter, many earlier centuries. And, after all, from what part of the world did the United States inherit its narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and pure hypocrisy, if not from those countries in particular? And who were France, Spain, and Britain rooting for during the Civil War, for their own selfish capitalistic reasons? (Hint: not the North.)
But back to evolution. In the 1920s, with universal public education only recently having been adopted, state by state, some states were at pains to keep their public school children from being taught anything other than that the world was created in six days, about 6000 years ago. (God, being a regular hard-working dude like us, needed to rest for a day after all that heavy-duty creating, and thereby set the precedent for the six-day work week, which lasted all the way into the 20th century. What he did the next week, of course, was to begin fucking with human kind in his sadistic anal way. And just for shits and giggles, for his own cosmic amusement, he faked the dinosaur evidence, the carbon dating, the geology, and everything else. I mean, he's God, right?) Back in the 1600s, one British "scholar," the Anglican prelate Bishop James Ussher, even figured out that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC. As good a time to create a planet as any other, I guess. Although this view of creation is still adhered to by an uncomfortably large number of evangelical Christians, and by certain ultra-conservative Jewish and Muslim folks, by the 1920s it was pretty much done for elsewhere in the western world, probably not long after Darwin and his predecessors put a fine point on the subject, though some countries were slow to catch up. Hence the DuBois reference to "hilarious and sarcastic Europe"--not that Europe wouldn't have found other things in the U.S. about which to be sarcastic. In any case, the Scopes trial served to shine a bright light on the subject, and in its aftermath the trend that led to several state bans on the teaching of evolution in public schools began to lose steam (although bans on teaching evolution remained in effect in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee until 1970, and such bans have had a small resurgence in the logic-forsaken 21st century). But in general, the idea sort of faded for the simple reason that dinosaurs have proved to be fun and exciting for school kids and adults alike, even more so than a couple of naked people eating fruit in a garden, as titillating as that might be in the short run.
Today, a century after Scopes, the U.S is engaged in another paroxysm of denial of the facts, as we are so wont to do. In this instance, and almost in the same way as some states sought to withhold and deny the facts of evolution, several states are busy struggling with a matter much less removed in time than the creation of the earth. It is the creation of the racist society in which we all live. Therefore, as recently as last week I read that the governor of South Dakota has by executive fiat forbidden the public schools to teach anything that would make modern-day students feel somehow bad about their ancestors' misdeeds, particularly, in the case of South Dakota, with respect to Indians, but also with respect to other nonwhites. Notice that the students the law intends to protect are the precious young white kids, lest they grow up feeling somehow less confident that they are the rightful rulers of this land. Elsewhere in the country the same thoughtful restraint is being put on the teaching of how, from its first invasion by the Spanish onward through the occupation of various parts of it by the French and the British, this continent and its adjacent islands have been subjected to the systematic annihilation, subjugation, and enslavement of the native populations, as well as by the use of millions of Africans, forcibly imported and bred to be used as slave labor.
And regarding the post-colonial period of the country, and particularly the post-Civil War period, some states enjoy restraining the teaching of anything critical about the horrors of slavery and the stubborn resistance of the South to Reconstruction, as well as the imposition of the oppressive post-Reconstruction system of apartheid which lasted at least until the 1960s, and the lingering institutional white supremacist bent of the powers that be in this country, including most conspicuously the increasingly fascist-style behavior of local police forces all over the country, where the nationwide motto has become "If they're Black, shoot 'em if they stand, and shoot 'em if they run."
Also, to its eternal credit as a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, many of this country's states are now attempting, at the public school level, to curb the recognition of anything other than traditional heteronormative sexuality. Elsewhere in the news, in our systematic attempt to oppress women (so self-righteously condemned by us when it occurs, as it surely does, in various Islamic countries), a large portion of the country is busy reinstating statewide bans on abortion, in anticipation of a decision by the Supreme Court to greatly curb its legal use.
Certainly, some of our policies of oppression, such as wiping out the Indians and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been carried on by the federal government acting on behalf of us all. But in the main there is one strong common thread running through all these retrograde ideas, from slavery through the banning of the teaching of evolution up to the present-day attempts to oppress minorities, women, and gender-nonconforming folks. And that is that we as a country are consistently impeded from progress because of the powers and desires of certain of our individual states. The federal Supreme Court legalized abortion fifty years ago, but it is because of pressures from particular states, and the ignorant folks in them, that the issue is once again before this currently conservative high court. How that will play out remains to be seen, but it ain't looking good.
As I have opined in previous posts in other contexts, it is the rights of individual states to decide what is good and right for them, rather than the federal government, that underlies many of the evils with which we live in this country. It strengthens the parochial backwardness of shithole places like Idaho, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, and gives them and other underpopulated states a disproportionate representation in the Senate, thus holding many progressive federal initiatives hostage to the minority. And when it comes to presidential elections, that tyranny of the few over the many comes out even more starkly. With our winner-take-all state-by-state system of electoral votes (based on popular representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, but also including two free extras for each state's Senators), as opposed to a straight national popular vote, these smaller states are able to secure the victories of Republicans in spite of the fact that more voters wanted the Democrat to win. This has happened twice in the last quarter century.
Except insofar as certain states (like California) are able to exercise more progressive policies than even the federal government is willing to do, often dragging the federal government into a more reasonable stance, the "states rights" governance of the country has been disastrous. It led to the Civil War, and even in the aftermath of the South's loss, to the institutionalization of horrible suppression of Blacks. (That's not to say that northern states haven't exercised their share of systematic de facto oppression.) Today, and for some time previously, the term "state's rights" has simply been code for policies of discrimination and outright stupidity. I can't think of a single instance where anything good was done in the U.S. in the name of state's rights.
The policy of state's rights was a dubious expedient for the sake of holding the country together when it began by allowing smaller or less populated states to have an equal voice in the Senate with the giant colonies of New York and Virginia. This equal representation of each state in the Senate has proved, over and over, to be the tail that has wagged the national dog. It was the southern Senators who created the idea of the filibuster, requiring a supermajority of Senate votes to pass a great deal of legislation that had been passed by a simple majority in the House of Representatives. This was done specifically to block civil rights legislation, but the practice persists to this day, preventing the current razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate from getting a hell of lot done unless the matter before them is almost entirely uncontroversial (such as condemning the Russians).
But it wasn't just the Senate that was affected by the policy of state's rights. The committee that wrote the U.S. Constitution was presented with a dilemma from the very beginning, namely, whether or not to include slaves in the population count for purposes of proportional representation in the lower chamber. This shouldn't have been a dilemma at all, since the slaves were not legally entitled to any representation. Some northerners quite logically said that since slaves had no status as humans, and were really just chattel, they should not be counted. After all, they argued, we're not allowed to count our livestock. Others, in particular men in the slave-holding states, thought that all slaves should be counted, so they could get more Congressmen, and hence more power, in the House of Representatives, particularly since in some of the original states the number of slaves exceeded the number of white people. This notion was sort of odd, as I said, since the slaves weren't treated like human beings, except insofar as they could communicate as humans, and could be impregnated by both fellow slaves and white men alike. (Indians, by the way, didn't count at all, since they were considered separate nations, albeit nations that the U.S. could manipulate at will.) Finally a compromise was reached whereby three-fifths of slaves were allowed to be counted toward the populations of the slave-holding states. Modern-day people decry this compromise because it devaluated the humanity of slaves by forty percent, but in reality the humanity of enslaved people was already devaluated by one hundred percent, and allowing any proportional representation of slaves, even fractional, only enhanced the power of the slave states at the ultimate expense of both the enslaved people and the free states. And the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the 14th and 15th), establishing the full recognition of former slaves as citizens and allowing their men to vote, only gave African Americans a brief moment of enfranchisement, before the white South once more prevented them from voting for another hundred years, but this time with the advantage of being able to count all of the former slaves for purposes of political representation, while providing no effective representation for Blacks at all. Pretty sweet deal. The North, by giving up on Reconstruction, had effectively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Finally, with all this in mind, let's return to the original gravamen of this posting, namely, the banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools. It is no coincidence that the states which disallowed teaching of evolution, and a few that have begun to do so more recently, were all, at one time, slave-holding states or territories. In fact, with the exception of a few yet-to-become states, like Idaho and the Dakotas, almost all of the most unregenerate and backward states in today's America were once the bastions of the institution of slavery, including Oklahoma, which didn't become a state until the 20th century, but existed back then as the official national concentration camp for Indians from all over the country. (None of which is to give a carte blanche pass to northern "purple" states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, or any other place in the U.S. where conservatism is capable of flourishing on its own.)
The social historian W.E.B. DuBois, whom I quoted earlier, was himself born into a small community of free Black people in Massachusetts, but the main target of his accusations was the South and its influences on the North, not to mention the ways that northern capitalism tacitly encouraged slavery to exist in the first place. Because of the disproportionate political power of the South, which drags on into the present day, and whose regressive ideas infect likeminded people all over the country, the South has risen from the ashes of its momentary defeat in the 1860s to become a force for evil even greater than the North. The brutal institution of slavery, which it fought to protect and expand, permanently corrupted its white population, turning them into subnormal beings. In addition to its already-mentioned general disregard for basic human rights, the South has been a haven for opposition to organized labor, promotion of capital punishment, promotion of gun ownership, a bastion of backward religious fervor, and promotion of poverty, obesity, and general unhealthiness of body and mind. The South is, as it always has been, if not always the political, then most assuredly the moral and spiritual leader of the great, ignorant, and simple-minded land in which we live.
