The Tao of Spartacus Jones

A Long Way From Homeland

America is a nation of immigrants.
Ask anybody.
Huddled masses longing to breathe free. Ellis Island.
You know the story.
Starting with the first English boot to step ashore at Jamestown, wave after wave of tired and poor left their Old World for the new one. English, French, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Italians, Spaniards — they all took that long boat ride to become English-Americans, French-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, German-Americans, Russian-Americans, Italian-Americans, Spanish-Americans. African-Americans came too, but on quite a different boat. That's another story. Later on Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese joined in to become our Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans.
And recently, as you may know, our Arab-Americans have been getting a lot of press.

One of the potential strengths of the United States as a nation is this diversity. People from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, speaking different languages and worshipping different gods, somehow all getting along well enough to work together, live together, and make the country happen without becoming a John Ford bar-room free-for all.
At least that's what all the books say.
After a little editing.

Alex Haley wasn't the only American to trace his "roots."
Lots of Americans of different stripes have some level of roots-awareness. Some grew up speaking a little of their ancestors' language in the home. Many can tell you exactly what generation of American they are, whether it was they themselves or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who were the first to be born in the good old US of A. A lot of them still have branches of the family, distant cousins or whatnot, back in the land of their family origin. It isn't uncommon for them to take a sentimental journey back to tread the stone of streets their forefathers knew.

No matter where your people hail from, this nation belongs to you just as much as it belongs to any other American from anywhere else. You have as much right to influence the future of it as anyone else, as much right to govern it as anyone else.
It's your government.
It's your system.
It's your country.
But one thing it's not: it's not your homeland.
Not even if your grandaddy to the tenth power was the first guy to wade ashore at Jamestown.

There are people whose homeland it most certainly is.
Their blood goes back on this continent not a mere 400 years, but for 10, 000 generations.
They lived here, from sea to shining sea, long before there ever even was an England, or a France, or a Spain.
When they trace their roots, the journey begins and ends here.
They have no branches of their family tree elsewhere. Only here.
Their language is the language they have always spoken in this, the land where they have always spoken it. Their names remain, though sometimes mispronounced or corrupted, even in places where they themselves abide no longer. Perhaps you might recognize some of them: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, Kansas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Arkansas, Chicago, Manhattan, Miami, Malibu, Saratoga, Niagara — just to name a few.

You might call them "Native Americans."
I don't.
That sounds much too much like the other Hyphenated-Americans, as if these aboriginal peoples came over on one of those boats, too, instead of greeting the first boats that landed — and I assume that's the intention.
So I call them by their proper names instead. You know who they are. They are Wampanoags, Pequods, Penobscots, and Passamaquoddy; they are Hurons, Cayugas, Onondagas and Senecas; they are Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw; they are the Ojibwa, the Abenaki, the Dine and the Hopi; the Menominee, the Mohawk, Mohave and Mahican; they are the Omahas, the Ottoaws the Narragansetts and Shoshone; the Witchita, the Yakima and the Lakotas — and a hundred more.

A few of these people have somehow managed to survive the holocaust of "manifest destiny," an escape that would awe even Houdini. Despite more than 400 years of systematic slaughter, starvation and sterilization, despite the very best efforts of the US government and most of the Hyphenated-Americans to murder them off and to eradicate any memory of their culture, their customs, their religion, small pockets of these aboriginal people still live and many keep alive the wisdom and ways of their distant ancestors. Some have gone to the cities; some remain on the reservations that comprise only a tiny fraction of what was guaranteed them by treaty with a treacherous invader.
Some have become artists, athletes, engineers, teachers, doctors, or lawyers, precariously straddling past and present, the spirit and the flesh, balanced between their own values and beliefs and those of their captors.
All remain in exile in the land that was, is and forever will be theirs as long as one drop of their blood remains.

These "Americans" and these alone have the right to call America their "homeland."
Only for them is it true.

It is beyond any reasonable doubt that since George W. Bush managed to abscond with the key to the Oval Office, he and his cronies in that fascist circle-jerk known as The Project for a New American Century, have told so many egregious lies that it's practically impossible to single one out as more outrageous than any other.

This particular one, unlike many others, may not be an impeachable offence. But I must say that for foisting this decidedly Hitlerian phrase into prominence, that dull, arrogant, spoiled bigot should be dragged out into the town square in only his Yale cheer-leading sweater and a cowboy hat and be given the world's finest, most deserved and long over-due horse-whipping.