When you're weary, feeling blue,
When tears are in your eyes,
History can pull you through.
That's the way it is for Mad Dog, reading things like "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg, for the umpteenth time. When you look at Trump next to Andrew Johnson, or Andrew Jackson, or Woodrow Wilson, or Jefferson Davis, you realize as loathsome, as fatuous as he is, we've had Presidents every bit as bad and somehow, the nation survived because the United States is not a porcelain trophy on someone's mantle, but it is a swampy thing, which periodically floods, then desiccates, then flowers again, then returns to some other part of a long cycle.
Trump has given us RFK JR and Kristi Noem, but Teddy Roosevelt was in bed with Charles Davenport and Francis Galton, who thought the white race supreme over all others, who thought intelligence and poor character could be inherited, who believed in sterilizing or even killing imbeciles and morons for purposes of breeding a superior race of human beings as you breed race horses.
And Oliver Wendel Holmes wrote the famous Buck decision approving the sterilization of a woman thought to be mentally retarded and ended his opinion with "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!" These "defectives" breed and either commit crimes or starve or become dependent on the state and so it is only a matter of self defense for the United States government to get rid of them. This opinion was cited by the defense of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. The defense counsel was quite correct, if maddeningly sly, to point out that much of the racial theory and justification for extermination camps of the Nazis was drawn from American (and British) writers and theorists.
There was a reason Adolph Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford hung on his office wall--Ford the author of the polemic, "The International Jew."
It is actually a relatively recent phenomenon--dating back only 60 years really, that the idea really took hold, that people of all races are capable of equal intellectual attainment, that our laws really should embrace the idea that all men, all races are or should be considered equal in the eyes of the law and the government.
Even Lincoln spoke of "very intelligent Negroes" and his solution to the slave problem would have been to deport them all to Liberia, to reverse the history of having brought them here in slave ships. He knew the African American was the cause of the Civil War and he wanted to avoid that catastrophic, heroic and defining epic.
Wilson was an out and out white supremacist and even Teddy Roosevelt believed in Kipling's white man's burden and while he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner--inflaming the South into a near second insurrection --he really made Booker T the exception. For the most part he believed allowing lower forms of human beings to immigrate into the United States was racial suicide.
For the most part, until the 20th century--1924 to be exact--the United States had open borders. (The Chinese Exclusion Act being the exception that proved the rule.) But in 1924 "eugenicists" like Davenport convinced the Congress that allowing people from Italy, Ireland, the Slavic countries, Africa, to freely immigrate would poison the blood and the purity of White, Christian America.
Trump likely did not know it, but he was echoing these racial purity/racial improvement types when he lamented that the only people who seem to want to immigrate to America are from "shithole countries," and why couldn't we be getting some nice, blonde people from Norway? Or, as it turned out, from South Africa, which was the only country with some affluent white people who wanted to actually leave their country an come to America.
Of course, those blondes in Scandinavia, Germany and even Ireland were laughing at Trump: Why should we want to leave our free healthcare, free education, supportive governments and open societies for the United States, with its mass shootings, its "culture of death" and its President Donald Trump who calls climate change a Chinese hoax and who thinks vaccines cause autism and worse.
Right now, the mentally impaired have nothing to fear from Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Buck decision: They are, in fact, in charge.
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