A Palin's History of the United States

There was something that outraged me a few weeks back while I was watching the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Well, actually, there were many things that outraged me, but one in particular that, at the time, I couldn't quite explain why it was important. Now that I've had some time to think about it, I know, so let me explain.

During the debate, Sarah Palin leaned heavily on prepared remarks and Republican party buzzwords, specifically invoking Ronald Reagan. At one point, she stated the following: "And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said..." Anyone who knows anything about Reagan would recognize this line, since he said it often. The thing that made me mad was that, Reagan didn't write that line. She was crediting Reagan with a line that he himself was quoting from someone else. At first, I assumed this bothered me because it was doing what Republicans often do: crediting Ronald Reagan with all manner of things that happened that weren't his doing. Really, though, this bothers me because it says something far more worrisome about Sarah Palin specifically, and a large number of people in her party generally. That is, that they have no true sense of History.

Sarah Palin and her supporters have developed a myth of America, in which everything they believe is confirmed by our founding fathers and everything the disagree with is wiped from history in Orwellian proportions. When Ronald Reagan refered to America as a "city on a hill," he was referencing a famous sermon by John Winthrop titled A Model of Christian Charity, who himself was referencing Matthew 5:14 from the Bible. Perhaps it doesn't matter where the quote came from, but it's a sign of a much larger problem that I don't think Sarah Palin is aware of who John Winthrop is, and probably doesn't know that the phrase is from the Bible. As far as she's concerned, Ronald Reagan created the line from whole cloth, and whatever he says is the final word on the subject, rather than him being in the middle of a long line of commentators.

Despite having no understanding of history, though, they so often rely on it to bolster their arguments. When we talk about the separation of church and state, an important concept put in place by the Founding Fathers of our nation, they talk about the Pilgrims and the Judeo-Christian (by which they mean, mostly Protestant Christian) foundation of our country. However, to know history is to know that this is a false affirmation. The reason the Pilgrims came to the New World is because they had suffered under a government that had established a religion, and they specifically preferred local congregations that were neither related to government nor even to a larger, national church. They would also probably be surprised to know that Governor John Winthrop, the man who referred to his new colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as that proverbial "city on a hill," and who so inspired Reagan, in fact thought that democracy was "the meanest and worst of all forms of government." He also thought it was a violation of the Bible's Fifth Commandment. So, it's difficult to claim that our nation's values should be dictated by a group of people who think our nation's very founding could be sinful. These were people who, though they disagreed with the King's mistreatment of religion, they believed that he was owed due respect as an anointed representative of God. The King was the father of the nation, and as such, had to be respected as the Bible commands.

By misunderstanding history, they can claim that the founding fathers wanted all citizens to have guns, ignoring the fact that the 2nd Amendment was written at a time when we had no army and needed militias, and at a time when gun violence was not a huge societal problem and guns couldn't be easily concealed and fire hundreds of rounds a minute. They can claim Mexicans are stealing our country while ignoring that the Europeans were the original immigrants, and they stole land from the people who were here, and then made the same claims against every wave of immigrants from the Irish to the Italians to the Russians, all of which now make up large and productive parts of our America. They can even deregulate the banks and blame the economic decline on Democrats while ignoring the Great Depression which was under a Republican President's watch and lead FDR to establish many of those regulations in the first place. And of course we can't forget the attacks of September 11th, which they tell you will be repeated if we allow a Democrat into office, even though they occurred with a Republican President and Congress, and with a Republican mayor in New York, and it was those same Republicans that have endangered us since by not finishing the job in Afghanistan and creating a hotbed for terrorists in Iraq.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not understand history, doom the rest of us.