JANUARY 23, 2019
The Ultimate Irony of the 'Native American Elder' and the MAGA Hat Kids
By
Selwyn Duke
This past weekend’s big news was a big media frame-up of kids and the beating of a leftist drum by a little Indian. There’s no need now to elaborate on how the Covington Catholic High School students may end up being 2019’s most unfairly maligned group; their innocence
has already been established. But suffice it to say that with video-recording devices ubiquitous today — and with incidents such as last Friday’s Lincoln Memorial affair shot by multiple people from many angles — if there’s no footage of something that allegedly happened there, it didn’t happen, period.
Source: Twitter
What did happen was that Talking Bull (Nathan Phillips), a professional agitator and American Indian separatist, was given a forum in which to spew nonsensical ideas. Here’s a prime example: “I heard them [the students] saying ‘build the wall, build that wall,’” he said,” as
Vibe reported. “This is indigenous land. We’re not supposed to have walls here. Before anyone came here there were no walls….”
(Actually, the Indians built plenty of walls, as
old ruins attest.)
But something occurs to me here: If the Indians had effective border security, perhaps they wouldn’t have been overrun and conquered.
So, what’s the message? “We lost the continent…and we can show you how to lose it, too!”?
Talking Bull followed up his anti-wall blather by adding that American Indians “never even had prisons,” either.
Well, most of them also didn’t have the wheel, a written language or anything beyond stone tools. What’s the point?
Mine is this: We all could conceivably wax romantic about our primitive ancestors’ days. Yet it’s silly. I don’t want to live as my savage European forebears did in, let’s say, 500 B.C. any more than Talking Bull desires to live as American Indians did in 1500 A.D. Typical of activists, Talking Bull is all talk.
It’s reminiscent of an old
Sanford and Son episode in which the Lamont character, claiming embrace of his African roots, dons a dashiki and assumes an African name (video below). To the show’s credit, it later illustrated how he knew nothing about African traditions and was just childishly playing African.
Likewise, Talking Bull & Co., with their ceremonial pipes and drums, are merely playing Indians and Indians. Had Western civilization never existed and the dreaded white man not ever arrived on these shores, the Indians would still be living a stone-age lifestyle. The “noble savage” suckers may romanticize this, but neither they nor Talking Bull want any part of it. They could withdraw into the wilderness and live like the
Sentinalese, but they don’t. They love our modern conveniences, luxuries and prosperity too much.
In truth, we all had ancestors who once were conquered or colonized. And the European tribes subdued by the Romans surely had many of the same complaints today’s grievance groups do: that their cultures were being trampled, their values eviscerated. Yet should we lament those Roman conquests and demonize Italians?
