The Moral Values of Yesteryear

The Moral Values of Yesteryear

NOVEMBER 2004

Moral Values. What does that mean? Aside from being rather redundant, what are they? They must be important because they were the single most important reason people voted for Bush, assuming you can believe the exit polls. (I believe nothing anymore. If Kerry had won I wouldn’t have believed the results either.) If you carefully follow the polarization of this country you will find that "moral values" is no more than code jargon for intolerance and bigotry. It sounds real good and it means real bad. But it’s certainly safe to say.

No (well, almost no) Red-Staters would say, "She’s a coon" or "He’s a fag" in public. But they can safely sniff their noses and cry out for "yesterday’s" Moral Values. Ah, how they long for the moral values of yesteryear! However, what yesteryear are they talking about? If you go back enough yesteryears, all the way to when the first Europeans reached the Americas, you will find frightful examples of intolerance and greed. "We came here to serve God, and also to get rich," announced a member of the entourage of Spanish explorer and conqueror Hernán Cortés. Well, they did more than that. The Native Americans that were not struck down by smallpox and other unknown diseases were outright murdered by Europeans who believed that it was their "divine right" to occupy these new lands, natives be damned. Those not murdered were, literally, enslaved. White men broke treaty after treaty and drove the Native Americans inexorably westward, away from the plentiful game they were used to hunting. It was genocide, pure and simple. The tragic ending to this tragic story was that all the once proud, healthy, vigorous Native Americans were forced to live on "Reservations" which is a polite word for barren ghetto. They never regained their strength or sovereignty:

The United States declared in Article I, Section 8, of its Constitution: "The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." This was the law from which more than 200 years of federal legislation and programs would derive. Before any of you scream about how that has nothing to do with us, just remember that for many of us, these greedy, bloodthirsty Europeans are our ancestors. We share their DNA. As a country, we share the shame.

But if you want to regard our beginnings as residing with the Founding Fathers in the late 18th century, you’ll find legal slavery, no rights for women, and child labor. Slaves (mostly black) and women and children were all considered, literally, to be the property of white men. Oops, better jump ahead.

If we move on to the year 1860, we’ll find nothing has changed. Almost a century and still no move toward equality. Not a good sign. If we then move to January 1, 1863, we’ll find Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Most people think that document freed "the" slaves. Wrong. It freed only the slaves in the rebellious states. Too many people don’t know that. The slaves in the rebellious states were "forever free." However, "For the present," Lincoln wrote, the following areas were exempted from emancipation: those Louisiana parishes behind Union lines, certain occupied places in Virginia, the counties of West Virginia, the state of Tennessee and the entire loyal border (Maryland, Delaware, etc.) Not exactly a Civil Rights document, is it? Lincoln didn’t give a damn about the slaves per se. The Proclamation was a purely political deed, designed to cause a slave rebellion in the Confederacy (which never happened) that would hopefully deter the willful rebels. It did not. So between January 1, 1863 (Proclamation) and the passage of the 13thAmendment on December 18, 1865, which freed all slaves, slave owners in the "exempted" areas were free to continue their abominable practices unhindered, with the full approval of the President of the United States of America. Moral Values? Let’s move on.

When we get to 1891 we’ll find that slavery is gone but has been replaced with….Jim Crow Laws. These prevented blacks from interacting with whites at all except as (poorly) paid laborers. It was a de facto form of slavery. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of these dreadful slave-owners-cum-employers were proud Christians, the Bible having endorsed slavery:

Gen 9
22   And Ham, the father of Canaan….
24   And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25   And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26   And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27   God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. (KJV)

Presto! Slavery’s just fine.

The revolting Jim Crow Laws prohibited blacks from sitting on the same PUBLIC park benches as whites, drinking from the same PUBLIC water fountains, using the same PUBLIC restrooms, eating in the same restaurants and on and on.

If we move ahead slightly to 1910, a new century, we find that although women still cannot vote, several states have passed child labor laws. In 1918, however, the US Supreme Court ruled that the legislation was an unconstitutional infringement on personal (meaning States’) freedom. Well, time to jump ahead again. (We’re not doing too well in our search for Moral Values, are we?)

Okay, let’s try 1919. Congress tried another strategy to establish protection for child workers through taxation of employers. But in 1922 the Child Labor Tax law was ruled unconstitutional for being overtly "prohibitory and regulatory." In 1924 both houses of Congress passed an amendment to the US Constitution, empowering Congress to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under 18 years of age. The number of state legislatures that ratified the proposed amendment was 28, or 8 less than the 36 then required. Well, that’s going nowhere fast, isn’t it? Let’s jump ahead yet again.

How about 1920? Well, women can finally vote! It only took our nation, which was supposedly predicated on "Moral Values," 144 years to realize that women had brains like men and should be allowed to elect the people who ruled them. How brilliantly enlightened of those white men—only a century and a half to work that one out. Of course blacks could not vote yet. The 15thAmendment, ratified in 1870, supposedly ended racial discrimination in the voting booth; but those southern states that so cherished their Christian Moral Values found a way around that. From 1877 onward they passed laws including poll taxes, fees which were charged at the voting booth and were too expensive for most blacks; and literacy tests, which required that voters be able to read to vote. Since it had been illegal to teach a slave how to read, most adult former slaves were illiterate. A segregated society was created that separated blacks and whites in almost every sphere of life. Women were almost fully human but blacks were not. Hmmm. Time to move on in our search for that glorious yesteryear, don’t you think?

The 1930s and ‘40s saw no relief for blacks or other minorities. But in 1933 the National Industrial Recovery Act was passed by Congress, finally establishing a minimum age of 16 for workers in most industries. (18 for "hazardous" work.) A mere 80 years earlier many states had adopted a 10-hour work day for children under 12, and this was considered enlightened. It was viewed as a great improvement over existing child labor practices. So it only took this great "moral" nation of ours 157 years to decide that 8-year-olds shouldn’t be forced to work in factories or coal mines for 12 or more hours a day. [The research for this article was quite depressing.]

The mid-1940s brought World War II and found Americans indiscriminately bombing huge areas of Germany, killing untold thousands of innocent civilians. To say that Hitler started it all is so very juvenile— playground taunts. "You did it first!" That doesn’t make it right, does it? But our ultimately inhumane moments came when we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the horror of Hiroshima (100,000 dead, untold wounded) the USA, only days later, dropped yet another atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki. Official reason two bombs were needed? Japan didn’t surrender quickly enough. Real reason? One bomb contained uranium and the other plutonium, and we wanted to see how differently they would perform in destroying people and things. (Scientists, if I’m wrong about that, I stand ready to stand corrected. But I read it in more than one reliable source.)

Equally deplorable was the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. They were American citizens for chrissake! Why not then inter all American-Germans and American-Italians? Oh, yeah, I forgot. Those people had white skin. Disgusting and inexcusable, this was hardly our finest hour.

The 1950s, which have been so fondly remembered for unfathomable reasons (such as in the hit TV sitcom, "Happy Days")—offered us something new in Moral Values to cling to: The McCarthy Hearings and the Korean War! We were fighting communism in Korea and practicing it here at home. Because after the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) became a standing body of the House of Representatives in 1945, all hell broke loose. It wasn’t long before Joseph Raymond McCarthy became an infamous Grand Inquisitor. Seeking communists under every bed, the Hearings turned into a vicious witch-hunt. The famous Hollywood Ten, a group of writers, directors and producers, were imprisoned for refusing to "name names" of others in Hollywood who had ever belonged to the Communist Party. Careers were ruined, families ripped apart, and for what? For belonging to a political party that it was legal to belong to! Bigotry and paranoia won that day. The two Josephs (McCarthy and Stalin) used similar coercive tactics to force unwilling and/or false statements from accused witnesses. This was a moral low point in American history. It was also when the US decided (1954) to put "In God We Trust" on American money. Too many people also don’t know that fact. They think that the meaningless (which God?) motto had always been on our money. Wrong. It was not until the middle of the McCarthy madness. We wanted to prove how godly we were compared to those evil Soviet atheists. Kind of the pot calling the kettle black, no?

Of course the Korean War was no slouch in the sleaze department (1950-1953) as soldiers fought over who controlled a piece of land called the 38th parallel. Results: For the US, 33,629 dead, 157,530 total casualties. South Korea, 415,004 dead, 1,312,836 total military casualties. Other UN allies, 3094 dead, 16,532 total casualties. Estimated Communist casualties were 2 million. The economic and social damage to the Korean nation was incalculable. And for what? Today we have a Communist North Korea still threatening South Korea, only now they have nukes.

[Note: My Word Count tells me that I have used over 1, 800 words searching for that Golden Age of American Moral Values. We haven’t made much progress for all that, have we? Well, on with the search.]

When we get to the 1960s there are almost too many immoral things to cover in this piece. In 1961 there was this: In Hoyt v. Florida, the US Supreme Court held that state laws which effectively exclude women from jury pools were not invidious discrimination, but rather, an "inoffensive" attempt to accommodate the "special responsibilities" of women, and that women tried before the resulting all-male juries had no valid claims under the equal protection clause. Blacks had to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, repeat, nineteen hundred sixty-five, to be allowed the vote, the 15th Amendment having been made a mockery of. Even then they were intimidated by rifle-wielding Klansmen hanging around voting booths. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Not in the strongly Christian South. So, it only took this great moral nation 189 years, nearly two centuries, to decide that blacks were fully human, deserving of the vote. But, obviously, discrimination, both racist and sexist, was still alive and well in the 1960s.

Then of course the ‘60s brought that abomination known as the Vietnam War. Over 50,000 American soldiers died, and who knows how many million Vietnamese. Again, for what? How did that ravaged country benefit? Remember those dreadful images of desperate South Vietnamese clinging to that last helicopter out of Saigon? The chopper blades could still be heard as North Vietnamese communists entered that city. We were playing chess with the Soviets and using American soldiers as chess pieces. "Immoral" barely describes it.

The anti-war protestors took things way too far and turned their (understandable) frustration on the beleaguered returning soldiers who had fought in Vietnam (not understandable). They also decided that drugs were totally cool, and having sex with any passers-by was equally cool—stupid and utterly lacking in any moral sense at all. But then so was the war they were protesting.

The 1970s heralded political corruption on a scale heretofore unknown publicly. Political corruption is a redundancy, but the ‘70s, for one brief, shining moment, shone some light on the dark, nefarious deeds of our elected officials at the highest levels. In 1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew was charged with bribery, extortion, tax fraud, and conspiracy. To avoid a public trial, Agnew pleaded no contest to charges of income tax evasion, and then resigned. This was just the beginning.

Starting with a petty, botched burglary attempt on June 17, 1972, Watergate marked the watershed, or so Americans hoped, in modern politics. The Bad Guys, we thought, would no longer get away with their dirty tricks. As Richard Nixon and his cronies were toppled, one by one, Humpty Dumpty came to mind. Surely all the King’s horses could not put this mess together again! (Sadly, the King’s horses did a bang-up job and things only got worse.) But when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, the first president ever to do so, we all drew a sigh of relief and looked forward to better days to come.

However, all that happened was that the Dirty Tricks Experts just became more careful and secretive about their shenanigans. Consider the 1980s. In light of what’s happening today, it is almost inconceivable that we, the United States of America, could ever have provided comfort, let alone arms, to The Butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein. But provide we did. Sarkis Soghanalian was the world’s largest private arms dealer, and he was the intermediary between many governments and Iraq. Despite a worldwide embargo, Sarkis sold billions in arms to Saddam Hussein, much of the buildup occurring after the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Saddam was not only given military technical assistance from U.S. companies, but computer technology as well. Hughes and Bell helicopters were sold to Iraq, along with untold other munitions, in the hopes of keeping Iran from becoming too powerful. Irony indeed. Whether earlier US sales included chemicals which Saddam ultimately used on the Kurds is a murky unknown. Sarkis Soghanalian had a relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies for decades, and had performed work on their behalf.

The ’80s also featured the Iran-Contra Scandal in which the US arranged for the secret sales of arms to Iran in direct violation of existing United States laws. Profits from the $30 million in arms sales were channeled to the Nicaraguan right-wing "Contra" guerrillas to supply arms for use against the leftist Sandinista government. This, too, was in direct violation of U.S. policy. The chief negotiator of these deals was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a military aide to the National Security Council. Independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh published his final report on the investigation of the affair in January 1994. (Um, a tad slow, wasn’t it?) Walsh concluded that there was no evidence that Reagan had broken the law, (yeah, right) but he noted that Reagan may have participated, or known about, a cover-up. So when is that not breaking the law? Oliver North now has his own talk show and is the darling of many Conservatives. The King’s horses were in fine fiddle when it came to sorting out this mess.

1998 presented us with a newly Republican-controlled Congress and with that came………….the Clinton Impeachment! Wasn’t that fun? In a fiercely partisan, voyeuristic, vigilante-like atmosphere, the Republicans took on Bill Clinton’s sex life. Yes, boys and girls, as hard as it is to believe today, with all the death and terror around us, the entire world was then fixated on Clinton’s penis and his ejaculations and whether or not he touched someone’s nipples. I knew the day would come when I could say, "I told you so!" about that sordid affair, and today is it. Precisely three years, almost to the day (September 21, 1998) before 9/11, our Congress voted to impeach President William Clinton. Why? Because he lied to a Grand Jury about his sex life. As I said in March of 2002, "Surely semen stains are more important than oversight committees maybe overseeing something, such as funding for anti-terrorist intelligence. But no, our hypocritical Representatives and Senators were too busy spending hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars, and hundreds of thousands of collective hours of work, investigating the constitutionality of oral sex in the Oval Office." I hope any of you who were in favor of that impeachment are blushing right now. It did irrevocable damage to our Constitution and made us look (rightly) like assholes to the rest of the world.

Which bring us to the 2000s. Yet another new century. And what do we find today? Why, we have yet another "war." (We do repeat ourselves, don’t we?) This time the obscenity is in Iraq. We invaded a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us, and we based it all on lies. The results so far are sickening. Not only did the Iraqis not throw flowers at our feet for "liberating" them, but most Iraqis are far worse off now than they were under Hussein. They have endured non-stop fighting for 19 months, and the innocents caught in our crosshairs make even Hawks queasy. In a study published by Britain’s prestigious journal, The Lancet, over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion. That number will surely rise dramatically as the months drag on. Dead and maimed children do not belong in the same sentence with Moral Values.

An example of where we stand today in this country was found in my own local post office just a week ago. My husband Pat was in line at the counter and the woman in front of him wanted a whole slew of postage stamps. When asked what image she wanted on her stamps (flowers, birds, commemorative, etc.) the woman said she didn’t care. The postal worker cheerfully offered, "Well then, how abut the American flag? It looks good on everything!" Pat responded loudly, "Except on coffins!" The whole place went dead silent. All these well-fed, happy, Christmas-card-mailing Americans were shocked into thinking about the 1,130 American soldiers killed (up till then) in the Iraq invasion. This president will not allow Americans to view nor publicly honor the returning dead. And he was elected because of Moral Values. Dishonoring the dead, who have died because of your own harebrained schemes, is appallingly immoral.

As I finish writing these (many!) words, Americans and Iraqis have squared off in Falluja and the New York Times headline screams, "6,500 American GIs and 2,000 Iraqis on Attack." Sounds like fair odds to me. And let’s not forget, it is their country. Good grief. I just checked, and the American death toll in Iraq has climbed to 1,137. I shudder to think what it will be six months from now.

_____________

I’m afraid we have not found that Golden Age of Moral Values. There never was one. Pick any decade you want and you will find slavery, oppression, women and children treated like property, senseless wars killing millions of people, the Ku Klux Klan, racism in general, and all manner of immoral, despicable behavior on the part of the United States of America. I am not saying that all Americans are immoral and despicable……just our government, which is now fully and solely owned by Corporate America, if it wasn’t always. Who knows.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late!
Before you are six, or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

It’s so true. We are not born hating people. We do have to be taught who to hate and how much to hate them. It takes careful tutelage and guidance. You can’t hate just anyone, you know! And easily 80% of all Americans felt hatred and/or bigotry toward blacks during the Civil War. So we have made some progress. But we still have a long way to go, and I see nothing at all worth looking back on with nostalgic Moral Pride. We have yet to possess those highly vaunted Moral Values. May we someday achieve them.

Back to Main Page Back to Previous Columns