A Dixie Carpetbagger

Seventy-one percent of Americans fail the test [...] [f]ewer than half of all Americans can name all three branches of government [...] [o]nly 24% of college graduates know the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. [...] [o]nly 54% can correctly identify a basic description of the free enterprise system [...] [t]hirty percent of elected officials do not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence.  — Civic Literacy Report

Tam points to a reference at USConstitution.net that points to this study by Columbia Law School.  Apparently, two out of every three people think that “Karl Marx’s maxim, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ was or could have been written by the framers and included in the Constitution…”

Two out of every three people, folks.  Look to your left… look to your right.  If you aren’t this dumb, that means that the other two people are.

The Boob Tube

Another thing that has begun to anger me is the “History” Channel’s constant falling short of the mark on things. (Yes, I put “History” in quotation marks.  Any channel that airs anything by Zinn has no relationship with real history.)  Here’s  a channel that could help to educate Americans… but instead, they produce UFO and ghost shows.

For instance, their new documentary– “America: the story of us“– is pretty good.  Until they began skipping over major portions of history, that is. War of 1812… nowhere to be seen.  Donner party– covered in detail.  Texas revolting against the Mexicans… barely mentioned.  Run up to the Civil War… so biased it wasn’t funny.

• They mentioned that the U.S.– i.e., the South– made 67% of the world’s cotton at the time… but they didn’t mention the North using the South as a cash cow.
• They painted Lincoln as wanting to bring about equality between the races and starting the war to end slavery… which doesn’t check with some of his quotes from both before and during the war.
• John Brown was (once again) painted as crazy and/or stupid.
• And Sheryl Crow got her licks in about all of us interested in our Southern heritage being racists.

Add to this “How the States got their shapes,” and “History”‘s fall from grace becomes even more sorrowful.  The portion of the show that dealt with Florida losing its long Panhandle was comical– to paraphrase the show, Florida “gave up some of its Gulf Coast so that Alabama and Mississippi could have access to the Gulf.”  All well and good… until you realized that Alabama and Mississippi gained those portions before Florida even became a territory, much less a state.  (For reference, 1812 < 1822 < 1845.)  Question– if Florida wasn’t a state at the time, how did Alabama and Mississippi get the land?

Answer: they annexed it.  The Republic of West Florida rebelled against Spain on 23 September 1810… and was annexed by the U.S. Government on 27 October.  Troops reached the area in December with orders “to negotiate with the fledgling government if possible, but … seize the territory by force if necessary.”  That’s right… a Republic– which gained their independence by force from an empire and had a republican form of government– was annexed by force by the U.S. Government.

No wonder Texas modeled their flag after the Bonnie Blue Flag, and the song became so popular during the Civil War.

Leaving the Tangent

Okay, back on topic… why does this matter?  Well, to quote Santayana, “[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  To use the Republic of West Florida as an example, a person who knows about it and understands it can see how the annexation effected the area for the next century– the use of the flag by Texans, the use of the song and flag during the Civil War, the attitude the South had about Northern interference in their affairs, why the Indians began their raids, etc.– but a person ignorant of history sees these things as a series of unconnected and random events.

Heck, they probably think the people waving the Bonnie Blue Flag at Tea Parties are waving a “neo-Nazi flag” of some sort.

FTC disclaimer:  my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s brother owned several thousand acres of land in the Republic.  I have no chance of ever making a claim on this.  I’ll never see a dime of the money he lost.  I just wanted to make a disclaimer.  Hurrah to the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!