Harriet Tubman’s 20 Dollar Bill — and Pat Buchanan’s Silly Opposition to It — Sometimes It Helps to Remember What Incorrigibly Nasty People Some of Our Predecessors Were

25 April 2016

Just as with renaming Denali, some of America’s unrepentant anal drippings are out and about again

Treasury’s decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill — and to take former president Andrew Jackson off it — appears to have ignited a mini-toilet bowl swirl among some of the folks who so populate America's pseudo-fascist right.

Take once presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan’s upset over this issue:

Great men are rarely good men, and Jackson was a Scots-Irish duelist, Indian fighter and slave owner. But then, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were slave owners before him.

To remove his portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Tubman’s, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd.

Whatever one’s admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.

It apparently does not occur to Mr. Buchanan that . . .

Just because someone is a large figure in History does not make them necessarily suitable as one of Society’s most easily visible images of self-reflection.

By Buchanan’s logic, Adolph Hitler should be somewhere on Bundesrepublik Deutschland’s currency. And Joseph Stalin on the Russian Federation’s.

“We” get choose aspects of how we present ourselves — sometimes in the hope that it might motivate us to be better than we have been

Harvey Wasserman’s rejoinder to Buchanan is right on the money — double pun intended:

A vicious racist, Jackson also made a fortune in the slave trade, and from stolen Indian land, leaving him with a slave plantation of his own.

At the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson enlisted Cherokee warriors to fight their rival Creeks. Then he brutalized his “allies” as well as his defeated enemy. His troops took slices of the dead Creeks’ noses for a body count, and used their skin to make bridles.

Jackson’s defining document is his 1830 Indian Removal Act, demanding that all native peoples be moved west of the Mississippi.

But the Cherokee had a written language, state capital, constitution, elected leadership, newspaper, and at least seven lumber mills. Most lived in frame houses or log cabins with nuclear families.

Chief Justice John Marshall turned down a Cherokee petition for statehood. But he ruled they did have sovereignty and could not removed against their will.

Jackson told the Court . . . to drop dead. In 1838, Martin Van Buren (Jackson’s vice president and successor) sent in the troops. That May, some 14,000 Cherokee were forced out of their homes at gunpoint. They were imprisoned on an open field . . . without shelter, food, or care for their children or animals.

In the fall about 13,000 were “ethnic cleansed” to Oklahoma. More than a quarter died along their infamous “Trail of Tears.”

Jackson’s face does not belong on our money.

The moral? — Social perspective changes and our symbols legitimately with it

Change is something that the “South Shall Rise Again” mentality has a great deal of trouble with. The trait is arguably synonymous with a form of bigoted stupidity.

By pouncing upon the arbitrariness of selecting Tubman for the $20 dollar bill — when it comes to commemorating The Bigot’s Accepted History of Mostly Great White Men — Buchanan and His Ilk deny the equally large question involved in asking why those symbols of murder and cruelty were selectively chosen in the first place.

Jackson was an especially heinous representation of the Old White Right. Why the Year 2016 doesn’t get to toss him out with yesterday’s trash is something that Buchanan makes only poor argument against.

Why we should continue to venerate Jackson’s inhuman dickishness is something that Mr. Buchanan’s shallow argument does not capably address. It is not as if the Treasury Department is erasing President Jackson from history itself. Because money is a figurative suit of clothes, Treasury has simply chosen to change suits for tomorrow.

Of course, by mentioning tomorrow and its implicitly New Day, we lose a boatload of Anally Rigid Dunces right off the bat.

These folks have difficulty with change and with accepting the absence of black and white absolutes. They become deeply offended when milk is "polluted" by yellow, red and dark chocolate. And incensed when someone other than themselves gets to say and do something representative of a larger or different Whole. Which brings us back to hole drippings and closure.

PeteFree.com

Harriet Tubman’s 20 Dollar Bill — and Pat Buchanan’s Silly Opposition to It — Sometimes It Helps to Remember What Incorrigibly Nasty People Some of Our Predecessors Were