Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
October 6, 1966
OUR NATIONAL BIRD
We salute the ripe fruition of the year, and the tribal ritual that attends it.
When soybeans spill out their muted gold in rivers upon the slatted floors at the railheads, and the ears of yellow maize droop toward the ground with waxy weight, comes time for the hallowed ceremony.
Great kettles bubbling with hot oil are prepared, and the sacred fowls are immersed.
Communicants in the ritual gather in a great serpentine line, and do a slow shuffle dance. Generally the men face each other, and repeat incantations about the weather to insure good harvesting conditions.
There is the exchange of tokens, and then each pilgrim runs the gauntlet of priestesses. Each one adds her offering, till his burden becomes too much to bear and he sinks into one of the prepared seats.
The proper form then is to seize various portions of the bird's anatomy, steaming hot to the bare fingers, and sink the teeth into them.
As long tables of participants bow their heads, a subdued murmur arises from the multitude. Young priestesses run to and fro from the sorcerers at the bubbling kettles, and a struggle takes place that symbolizes the bounty of earth contesting against the fury of human appetites.
Faster and faster the magicians plunge fresh birds into their kettles, leaping about to the rhythm of chomping teeth from the central hall. The climax comes when one of the chiefs, usually a man selected for his endurance in the ritual, forms a pyramid of bones in front of him, and leans back with a deep sigh. Others repeat the sign up and down the row, and the ceremony has come to an end.
Benjamin Franklin objected to the Bald Eagle as our national bird, because of its character and habits. He preferred that useful and handsome bird, the turkey.
Both are mistaken. Both are attempts at tradition artificially imposed. The only custom that survives is the one that is ratified by use.
We salute October in Illinois, here in the fertile heart of America, when you can meet your friends at a chicken fry and then drive home beneath falling leaves and the wild, high calling of geese overhead.
Repeated ceremonies in every village throughout the land prove there is only one truly national bird in America; it is the fried chicken!
October 27, 1966
THE CARGO CULT
Between official ceremonies and dodging angry crowds, Lyndon and Ladybird did not have time to visit the tiny South Pacific island where he enjoys the status of a God. Believers in the “Cargo Cult” have given it a special twist there; they want to save up their money and buy President Johnson!
That would take more money than they are apt to accumulate, as any lobbyist in Washington could tell them.
The Cargo Cult is no mystery. The whole history of our relations with the islanders has demonstrated that the white man is apt at any time to appear with boatloads of every kind of goods from the distant outside world. If medicine men can discover some manner of causing them to appear on command, why not?
The reasons which cause the white strangers to come and go are a total mystery to simple peoples everywhere in the world.
Since they cannot understand our language, they never hear the involved and very pretty explanations we prepare why we have come to save them from something or other.
Instead, with primitive realism they observe what we do. “The white man takes the copra... or the tin... or the rubber... the white man comes with guns, he kills our men and takes our young girls”. This is why so many native peoples hate us; not because they fail to understand, but because they understand too well what we are really trying to do.
The self-deception goes on today, because your schoolchildren are given history books which tell them “America is not a colonial nation.”
Unless language has lost its meaning, we are today the greatest colonial power in history. We have military bases in Canada, Iceland, Scotland, Germany; Panama, Cuba, the Bahamas, Portugal and Spain; Okinawa, Formosa, Japan, Korea, and the splinter nations of Indo-China. This is only a partial list.
Our presence in one place may be based on mutual defense, in another naked force, in a third the payment of indemnities. By one means or another, our people are in charge of most of the significant military bastions on the entire earth.
Our presence determines the language, the currency, the consumer habits and behavior patterns toward which the local situation is altered.
A colony such as we maintain in Cuba is so much more honest than others such as Vietnam. In Cuba we dictated from military strength a “lease” which gave us Guantanamo. We have sat down on one end of the Cuban island and held it ever since. In Vietnam we hide behind the hypocritical facade of a puppet government which supposedly “invited” us there. The fraud is so transparent it fools no-one in the world but ourselves.
Our intoxicating wealth and power have given us the notion all problems will yield to gross infusions of green United States dollars.
As a result, we stick our noses into some situations which would correct themselves without our interference. Our “assistance” can readily distort the structure of native societies and turn them into shiftless beggars watching the sea for “cargo”. It is frequently unsuitable, as in cases where we have turned down requests for shovels and hoes, and forced bulldozers on the confused applicants instead.
There you see one of the characteristics of our foreign aid programs. They are designed to “dump” what we happen to have on hand, at a profit to the manufacturer and great cost to the taxpayer. If a surplus was permitted to pile up at home, industry would find themselves subject to that law of supply and demand they keep telling farmers about, and would have to lower their prices here at home!
Our assistance can even become so large it is more burdensome than the original problem, as has become the case in Vietnam.
It did not take a war to bring us to this ridiculous state. One of our perceptive correspondents named John M. Fishell saved a clipping from the WALL STREET JOURNAL of 1959. A story by Vermont Royster shows how “A Look at Thailand Shows the U.S. Problems All Over the World.”
Royster was in a stew because, already in 1959, we were spending twenty million dollars a year trying to assist the relatively prosperous and happy Siamese.
A dozen different programs were running full blast, including a Public Administration division to teach the Siamese how to run the thousand-year-old city of Bangkok!
All the programs required coordinators, busily coordinating with each other. An English language program was teaching the natives our language, as we did not intend to learn theirs.
“Indeed it looks less like a program to give an economic boost to these hard-working and self-reliant people than an effort to re-design... their country... here is a country which, for all that it may be backwards by American standards, has managed to get along for a thousand years without U.S. dollar aid... Its people are proud of their independence, their tradition, their own way of life and are probably as successful in the pursuit of happiness an any people can be. Yet here comes the Americans with a program which, when you look at it, would remake the country from... top to bottom. There is no area of Siamese life – schools, farms, business, language, homes, government, customs – left untouched in some fashion by the U.S. aid program.”
This was seven years ago, before we turned Into-China into a slaughterhouse, and it was one of the smallest of seventy aid programs we were already at that time carrying on.
Since the “Communism” we talk so much about has never been heard of by most of the populations we deal with, the real crime of the Viet Cong and others who oppose us may be that they have refused to play baseball, drink Coca-Cola, and accept U.S. charity!
One friendly Thai in 1959 told the reporter, “I suppose we ought to be glad that you are helping us, but we do wish you wouldn't help us so hard!”
God in his infinite mercy may yet in time grant us the wisdom to leave well enough alone. So much of our “foreign aid” is similar to putting bandages and fancy medicines on your dog. In many cases, he will lick the wound clean and let the sun kill the germs.
The reporter wrote in 1959, “As this visitor says farewell to Bangkok, it is with a sense of wonder at what we think we are doing all over the world.” What we think we are doing is still obscure, but what we actually are doing has now become clear.
With our generous meddling and our colonial domination, we are spreading the “Cargo Cult” throughout the world.