Santa Says America Sucks, As Does Jesus

Wingnuts seem to get very very touchy about the holidays. Michael Medved, for instance, has had his Thanksgiving ruined by Michael Moore.

Big Lies that Poison Thanksgiving and Subvert Our Sense of Honor

Eeek! Poison Thanksgiving!

For some of Barack Obama's most ardent supporters, his resounding victory represented the first sign of redemption for a wretched, guilty nation with a 400-year history of oppression.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, for instance, considered election night "a stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair. In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity."

Actually, Mr. Moore's summary of America's origins is a wholly expected distortion, shocking in its mendacity.

Like so many other revered figures in the worlds of entertainment and academia, the portly provocateur thoughtlessly recycles the darkest assumptions about the generous nation that provides his privileged, prosperous life.

You can tell Medved is hoppin' mad because he uses alliteration. And catachresis. Don't forget the catachresis. Or maybe he's just as stupid and contemptible as his mustache.

See, Medved can't enjoy Thanksgiving unless everyone admits that slavery and the savage treatment of Native Americans were no big deal. His sense of "honor" is apparently deeply involved in making slavery, say, look much better than it seems at first blush. Do I exaggerate? No! Do I shit you? Not!

The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor. In fact, the states dominated by the slave economy counted as the poorest, least developed in the union — providing the North with crushing economic superiority that brought victory in the War Between the States.

Of more than 20 million Africans taken from their homes in chains, at most 3% ever made their way to the territory of the United States (or the British colonies preceding our nation). Americans played no part in establishing the once-universal institution of slavery but played a leading, outsize role in bringing about its abolition.

This is all very nauseating and repulsively glib, and taking this position rests upon a conception of "honor" with which I am personally unfamiliar. It also rests upon an understanding of history with which people who know history are unfamiliar. Besides that, it makes no sense, even on its face. Dealing with it point by point is like having to sip sewage in order to keep it from spilling all over the carpet. Shit. Bottoms up!

For openers, what Medved means by "our forefathers" who "built America" is "white Europeans, mainly the British." It obviously is not, for instance, black people. Or Native Americans. Or Asians. Or hell, even many -- or even most -- European ethnicities, for crying out loud. Just to be clear on this point, because it's rather revealing about who exactly Medved considers to be "Americans."

Next, slavery certainly was "vastly more productive than free labor" in the Southern states. That's why it existed there. Neither cotton nor toacco were economically trivial crops, and they depended on slave labor. And they undergirded a society and culture that may have been eventually "crushed" by the northern states, but which did not exactly go down easily -- and had political circumstances unfolded in certain not remotely implausible directons, the South might have gotten away with the shit it tried to pull. Economic determinism is garbage hindsight history. Besides, Medved's silly point refutes itself: if slavery were such a trivial matter because of Industry and Free Labor, why exactly, pray, was a cataclysmic war fought over it? Kicks? Shits? Giggles? Laughs?

Which leads us to Medved's statistics, for which one might complain there is no source, were not said statistics completely pointess as a matter of simple logic. If the number of slaves in colonial America and then the United States only comprised only 1 billionth of a percentage of all African slaves -- even it it were just four guys, sum total (which it wasn't) -- and these four guys had the obvious effect that slavery and then institutionalized racism have clearly had on the history of the United States, it would still be what historians like to call "really fucking important."

As for the bit about Americans playing a leading role in abolishing slavery, I hope Wilberforce's shade sets fire to Medved's mustache. This is also a rather astonishing way of describing the Civil War. "Our forebears," or at least I suppose Medved's, killed each other in horrific numbers so as to "abolish slavery." Good for us! How pleasantly debated! "We" likewise seem to have been remarkably enlightened when it comes to Native Americans, whom, Medved informs us, "governmental forces" never "massacred," or "sponsored" massacring, whatever that means; and when Indians did get massacred, the government "invariably condemned" such massacring, which I'm quite sure came as a tremendous comfort to the massacred. Just ask a Pequot.

I do not understand why my "honor" or anyone else's is "subverted" if I refuse to look at American history and honestly judge it according to whether or not "we" -- and here I mean the nation as it aspires to be -- have ever genuinely believed and acted like we believe that we are all "created equal." If we haven't, well, shit, let's say so. Why not? That is and should be the baseline standard for our democracy, and I don't see why I have to go out of my way to make excuses for The Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears, or for that matter Bull Connor, or hell, Prop 8, in order to have a nice Thanksgiving with my family. Medved thinks otherwise, a contention that is even more disgusting than that hair he sprouted under his nose, which is grotesque enough all by itself. Freak.

Comments

[Melinda]

What a weird passage (his, not yours). Digby has an extended (for a blog) discussion of the South and honor up this morning, as well, which is a nice coincidence since this really is a very interesting question.

BTW, Medved's wrong about the south being poor, as well. It's not that states like Virginia were poor (yikes) but that they were agrarian and preindustrial. The south had greater wealth inequality (see Berkowitz and Clay, "Initial Conditions and the Antebellum Economy") and that may have contributed to Medved's misperceptions about the south's relative impoverishment or it may have been because of a boatload of contemporary cultural baggage around rural populations and poverty or it may have been that he's stupid.

Also, it's probably worth making explicit that Medved's corner tends to romanticize the side and affiliate with that fought pretty hard to hang onto their slaves. I would guess that has more to do with romance about the old south (er, dirty, impoverished old south) than it does with a genuine interest in getting their slaves back, but still.

[actor212]

Of more than 20 million Africans taken from their homes in chains, at most 3% ever made their way to the territory of the United States (or the British colonies preceding our nation). Americans played no part in establishing the once-universal institution of slavery but played a leading, outsize role in bringing about its abolition.

Lemme see...3% of 20 million is...600,000!

Well, that doesn't sound too bad. Oh wait...what percentage would that be of Americans living in the nation at the time, say, 1790?

Um, well, there were 4 million Americans, according to the census. So 600,000 slaves would be....

ohmy

Moral points aside, Thers, mostly because you covered them so eloquently, do you see the scheme Medved (who's Russian ancestors were nowhere to be found in Colonial America) uses to minimize the impact of slavery?

Rather than talk about how big a population they truly were in America, he points out how "few" slaves we really had.

Nevermind that the south raised sugar which turned into molasses which became rum which funded the slave trade. Nevermind that the entire southern economy was tied to the slave trade.

Nevermind the prima facie evidence that the South *knew* that slavery was more than just a simple component of their economy...why else would they go to war over it?

No. We "merely" had 3% of the slaves held in the world!

[pfc]

"The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor. In fact, the states dominated by the slave economy counted as the poorest, least developed in the union — providing the North with crushing economic superiority that brought victory in the War Between the States."

So, if I get this right, he's arguing that the Ante-bellum South was stupid, not evil? I can live with that.

[coozledad]

And this is why the South fought so hard to have 5/8? of each slave counted as a member of the population according to the apportionment rules?
Because there were so few of them?
There were two large antebellum plantations in walking distance of where I live. "Waverly" had 1000 slaves, The McGhees had 2000. These weren't static populations, either. There are at least 15 likely slave graves in my front yard, from a very small farming operation.
Medved's a lying bitch, and that's not a mustache, it's a turd rake.

[Ripley]

You're all missing the point: Michael Moore is fat.

It should also be noted that Michael Medved has a black friend. He lives in Canada but, y'know...

[steve simels]

Medved is famously the idiot who criticized a Star Trek movie as subversively secular humanist because Captain Kirk remarked that God might actually reside in the human heart. So it's sort of like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel to even take notice of him.

Nevertheless, that piece is really odious and bravo for eviscerating it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[SteveB]

The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor.

"Hey, look! I dug a hole in my back yard with this shovel!"

"But that's impossible, unless you're making the idiotic claim that shovels are vastly more productive than other means of hole-digging, like this backhoe, here."

(steps in hole, breaks leg, to comic effect.)

[MikeJ]

So, if I get this right, he's arguing that the Ante-bellum South was stupid, not evil?

Not only that, but the richest people were the most stupid, that is, they were the ones employing slave labor.

What sort of communist is Medved? He seems to be implying that people don't get rich because they're smarter than other people, and he says you can't get rich from slave labor. Obviously he's taking the radical Bolshevik line that all of the rich are stupid.

Following his logic, he must be mighty rich himself.

[R. Porrofatto]

"The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor.

Involuntary servitude is free labor, in the, you know, not having to pay any wages sense, which helped make plantations turn some handsome America-building profits. Second, the slave trade itself was extremely profitable, which fueled even more America-building. Third, it took until the mid-19th century for this benighted country to make slavery illegal, and another hundred years to make the descendants of slaves full citizens. And fourth, any knowledge of the actual history of the U.S. wouldn't find too much honor in the putatively "free" labor practices of the early industrial revolution, either.

[Fats Durston]

Lemme see...3% of 20 million is...600,000!

The 20 million figure is also a very low estimate for all slaves shipped from the entire continent over basically the second millennium (~1000-1900). It ignores the dead in the extraction part of the equation. It also ignores all the lives born into captivity...

Nevermind that the south raised sugar which turned into molasses which became rum which funded the slave trade. Nevermind that the entire southern economy was tied to the slave trade.

The northern colonies depended on slavery and the slave trade as well. The northern colonies initially weren't terribly useful to England other than for timber, furs, and fish to feed Caribbean slave colonies.

American South slave production was also crucial to the supply necessary for the industrial revolution in England--it's no coincidence that the 1790s (and on) "opportunities" to produce raw cotton led to a great expansion of slave plantations in the deep South.

[Peter VE]

Brown University has sponsored extensive research into the history of slavery and slave trading in the British Colonies and the US, especially in relation to Rhode Island, which originated the most slave trading voyages of any colony/state (about 1,000). The profits from those voyages fed the industrial revolution in the US.
Nicholas Brown & Company specifically sponsored a slave trading voyage for the quick and easy profits they could use to capitalize other ventures.
The capital generated by those voyages was used by Moses Brown (brother and partner of Nicholas) to hire Samuel Slater to organize his textile mill in Pawtucket, RI, the birthplace of the industrial revolution in America.
The profits from the slave trade built Medved's "crushing economic superiority".

[Mark S.]

I really hate Medved. Last year he did a whole series of these "History of the Greatness of White People" columns. I'm not going to ruin my Thanksgiving giving him another thought.

[DrDick]

played a leading, outsize role in bringing about its abolition.

Translation: We were pretty much the last country in Europe or the Americas to abolish slavery, by about 20-40 years.

It would seem that the scholarly tropes primarily employed by the learned Mr. Medved would be butt ignorance and batshit crazy. Of course I am just a historical anthropologist who studies American Indians in the South during the colonial and early Republic periods.

[DrDick]

Melinda -
The South had much greater disparities of wealth and much greater concentration of wealth at the top. Plantation agriculture, which was extremely profitable, dominated the region and drove many small farmers out of business or reduced them to poverty (large operations could function on smaller profit margins which would bankrupt small farmers). The result was that the large plantations came to monopolize most of the productive farmland in the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains. The mass of dispossessed small farmers was the primary reason for Indian Removal in the 1830s.

As to the numbers of slaves, I quote from Wikipedia:

"According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal."

Truly a paltry and insignificant number is it not?

[Thers]

Dr Dick, you have any idea what Medved's sources are for his statistics? It's got to be from some sort of wingnutty slavery apologist. That's a whole cottage industry all by itself.

[Guest]

this is why medved has always been, for me, the absolute worst.

some wingnuts are stupid, and some are smart but misuse their intelligence. medved's both! the worst of both worlds.

it's like that python sketch about the boxer who was having mental problems caused by a small particle of brain in his skull, but once that's removed, he'll be fine...

[DrDick]

Thers - Have no idea where he gets his numbers, but then I try to avoid overtly racist sites as much as possible in favor of fact based sources. He is correct that only a minority of slaves were shipped to what is now the US. Most went into the Caribbean and Latin America because they were not primarily settler colonies and needed more labor and because sugar, coffee, and cacao brought far higher profits than cotton, leading to a greater expansion of the plantation economy. Brazil received by far the largest numbers of any country. According to the website "Slavery in America," 15 million slaves were transported to the Americas with half a million to the US. They also state that only in North America was the slave population able to successfully reproduce itself, which would partially account for the differences in numbers imported. The US also banned importation of slaves in 1808, obviously having ample stock on hand. Wikipedia gives slightly different numbers on the importation of slaves (12 million total and 635 thousand to the US). I am not sure what the "real" numbers are, but these seem to be realistic estimates. I do know from wallowing in historical accounts that the slave populations of the southern colonies of Britain outnumbered the white population by the early to mid-18th century.

[j]

"The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor."

What does this have to do with the price of beans? Somehow, if the lifelong forced labor of hundreds of thousands of people DIDN'T contribute significantly to the building of our country, would that invalidate Moore's point that we've come a long way from enslaving black men to electing one president?

[Fats Durston]

I am not sure what the "real" numbers are, but these seem to be realistic estimates.

After lots of wild guesses, in the 1960s Philip Curtain counted up all existing records of imports/exports for the Atlantic trade only, and got a number slightly more than 9 million who departed from African shores for Atlantic destinations (the Med, North and South America). His number is still cited quite often, but a more recent project (David Eltis and others) has pushed that number up to about 12 million.

Although exhaustive, both of those studies have their flaws that tend toward undercounting, like assuming very little black market activity, and don't include "casualties" in the apprehension and transport of overland trade.

"High counters" tend to argue around 15 million for the Atlantic portion of the trade between 1440s and 1880s, again, slaves who actually were put on boats.

[actor212]

The northern colonies depended on slavery and the slave trade as well.

Point taken, with the condition that the North economy was not as wholly dependent on African slaves as the South.

After all, we had the Irish and the Swedes to enslave in indentured servitude contracts, too!

[El Cid]

This column should be reprinted, each and every year, before every Thanksgiving.

I'm not joking about that, either.

[Reed]

J, above, is quoting the most reasonable and acceptable statistics regarding the number of Africans transported to the New World between 1500 and 1850. Curtin and Eltis are excellent sources, with caveats as he/she gives.

While the international slave trade was banned in the US in 1808 per the 3/5 Compromise, it was not banned in the District of Columbia until 1850, and interstate slave trading was was thriving business up to the Civil War.

Yes, the production arising from slavery was extremely profitable; the 12 most affluent counties in the US in 1860 were in the southern states.

[David Duke]

"History of the Greatness of White People"

(nods head in sage-like manner then strokes chin thoughtfully)

[Johnny Pez]

And to think, if it weren't for the Public Broadcasting System, all of us might have gone our entire lives without ever hearing the name "Michael Medved".