Though circuitous it was, the word insufficiently describes the randomness of our Sunday drive. After six days of recuperating from uterine embolization, M. was getting a bit antsy, and after listening to a morning's worth of sophistry and fatuousness on Meet the Press, et al, despite the stack of ink-smudging newsprint still unread, it was time to get in the car and enter the parade of freaks that is the American highway on any given Sunday.
I felt a genuine sense of foreboding, as though I were at risk of being sucked into an atramentous vortex or labyrinth of unimaginable and eternal suffering at any moment, even though a mean temperature hovering around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, ebullient sunshine, cobalt skies, and an irresistibly uplifting 4-chord piano progression from a Pharoah Sanders' tune were the manifest destiny of the afternoon. Satan passed us on the right in a mid-90's white Volvo sedan, with a furtive, behind-black-Wayfarers glance that caused me to hit the brake like passing a speed trap. M. didn't seem to notice, so I thought mentioning either the Beast's rude and illegal maneuver or my near fall into the abyss imprudent and thus stepped on the gas and turned up the music. I decided to head southeast toward the back roads of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where some of the farmlands and stonewalled meadows still look as they did back in the King Philip's war. Not a popular subject of American history, the King Philip's War was America's most devastating conflict with a death rate nearly twice that of the Civil War. To quote Walter Giersbach,
King Philip's War (1675-76) is an event that has been largely ignored by the American public and popular historians. However, the almost two-year conflict between the colonists and the Native Americans in New England stands as perhaps the most devastating war in this country's history. One in ten soldiers on both sides were wounded or killed. At its height, hostilities threatened to push the recently arrived English colonists back to the coast. And, it took years for towns and urban centers to recover from the carnage and property damage.
Traveling the sun-dappled back roads of Westport and South Dartmouth, it's difficult not to sense the history, nor to notice the creeping creeps of development spreading their tacky subplots in muddy deforested land, knocking down the colonial stone walls of property lines, and erecting cookie cutter houses on cul de sacs. Still, the expanses of absolute beauty were evident, as was the huge Lincoln traveling 15 mph with the yellow "Support-our-Troops" bumper sticker like a talk-to-the-hand palm in my face. The roads were too narrow and winding to attempt a pass, so resolved to the slow pace, we took in the scenery. However, that damned bumper sticker kept goading me. Is that just a blatant expression of moral superiority phrased as an imperative? Or is the sticker a reward for a donation of some kind? I started noticing how many of those yellow ribbons were smacked on the trunks of vehicles and was surprised to see an ample number of those Jesus fish as well. I know I should let these little things go, and that these random folks seem to be out of my sphere of influence, but the spreading virus of self-righteousness promulgated by the heretofore unseen, unheard radically conservative droves is getting me a little unhinged. Less than 5 minutes ago, C-Span playing on the TV in the background, at an Oklahoma bombing memorial, with gigantic crucifixes on either side of him, a Republican Congressional Representative from that state was giving a speech declaring that Americans should bless God, thanking Him for, well the list was long, and the tone was puritanical on steroids, and this guy got a standing ovation. Is this where after we are bombed we look to the sky and say, "Thanks, may I have another?" Bumper stickers are one thing, or maybe they are just part of the same thing, the insipient rhetoric of a religious war. Christianity was at the root of the King Philip War, even if used as a pretense for land grabbing and racial subjugation. Note this brief passage:
In January 1675, the Indian John Sassamon died at Assawampsett Pond, about 15 miles north of present-day New Bedford. Sassamon was literate and a Christian convert. He may have been acting as an informer to the English and was murdered, probably at Philip's instigation. Increase Mather, writing after the war, suggested he was killed "out of hatred for him for his Religion, for he was Christianized, and baptiz'd, and was a Preacher amongst the Indians...and was wont to curb those Indians that knew not God on the account of their debauchereyes"
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To get a sense of how the Wampanoag and other tribes were betrayed by the English one needs to read a bit of colonial history, beginning with 1620 (as here and here) and the fact that the native tribes saved these English settlers from perishing. King Philip, actually named Pometacom, was the son of Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag nation, and the brother of Wamsutta. In 1662, the court at Plymouth Colony arrogantly summoned the Wampanoag leader Wamsutta to Plymouth. Major Josiah Winslow (later Colonel) and a small force took Wamsutta, Philip's brother, at gunpoint. Soon after questioning, Wamsutta sickened and died and his death infuriated the Wampanoag nation.
King Philip acquiesced to a shaky peace with the English settlers, until the aforementioned Sassamon incident. If we look at the rise of religious fundamentalism that is wedging its way into our legislative bodies, media culture, and everyday rhetoric, there is a déjà vu sense of intolerance becoming the exegesis of society. There are extremes that can not coexist in a social fabric without eventual violence. When the stakes become this high, as in freedom from religion in government, the cost of defending that freedom versus those that would imprint their religiosity into the governing doctrines would be correspondingly as high, even unimaginable. The voices that are now silent, those that would demand that religion has no place in government, that spirituality is a private matter for individuals and families to practice, need to become strident before the very act of speaking such things becomes, by law, blasphemy.