🎶 “So Complicated, So Complicated”🎶

One of my friends sent me this in a text.

She’s spot on about how we got here:

“Sitting here tracing a line through history from the Reconstruction era until present day. I can see how they did it. Quietly. Within nuclear families, small groups of LEOs, keeping the keeping the confederacy alive and well, changing and evolving—quietly. Hitler learned all about how nazism from the USA. But he was a lunatic and they watched him and took notes—quietly.

Then at the end of the war when he inevitably lost, they quietly removed the scientists, engineers and technology and moved them to the Deep South of the USA where their way of thinking could take further root. Quietly, they had families and spread their hate.

It was never about the Jewish population for these American Nazis. They learned from Hitler’s mistakes how to execute this takeover of the populous. They infiltrated the Christian extremists, then placed people in more progressive churches and quietly kept spreading their hate.

I am not a historian, I am not an expert on anything. This is just me thinking about how we got here. They looked for weakness in leadership and found ways to spread more of their ideologies such as the Council for National Policy via Reagan and most currently, the Heritage Foundation. If we do not stop them, we will descend further into chaos.”…

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) February 22, 2025

It’s all as American as cherry pie.

America didn’t teach Hitler Nazism, any more than Europe taught us to have labor unions. We taught Germany how to write and implement race laws, laws as common in the North as the South, and what we taught Germany specifically was how to write laws based on eugenics. A legal concept upheld by no less a New Englander than Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Cherry pie is for everyone.

And the line doesn’t start with Reconstruction. It starts with the slave trade itself, a deal with the devil that has corrupted American culture since we found dealing in human flesh and labor proved so profitable (and made profit, at any cost, the highest good. As Gordon Gekko said: “Greed is good. Greed works.” Or the immortal words of “Deep Throat”: “Follow the money.” Neither phrase uttered by a Southerner, nor in a location below the Mason-Dixon Line.).

Greed means there’s never enough cherry pie. Which, according to the market, is also good.

The churches weren’t either subverted or infiltrated. They have always supported the powers that be. And always prophesied against them. But the former get along better than the latter. Just ask Dr. King.

Cherry pie, cherry pie, sweet, sweet cherry pie.

Nobody infiltrated anything. No body snatchers grown in pods replaced our “good” Northerners with their “bad” Southerners. Oregon and Washington were started as white supremacists enclaves. Reagan came out of California. Racism in America west of Appalachians against Native Americans and people with ancestral roots in Mexico (and the rest of Central America) is alive and well. Strom Thurmond didn’t teach Trump his racism; his New York daddy did that.

Cherry pie is as American as racism. 

Randy Newman’s song is as as accurate now as it was 50 years ago. George Floyd didn’t die on the streets of Houston. He died in Minneapolis, at the hands of a racist cop I think any large city in Texas would have hesitated to hire.  “We’re gatherin’ ‘em up from miles around.” And doing it all over the country.

No body snatchers needed. No insidious takeover, no strategic spreading of hate until even persons of goodwill are powerless. I saw this conspiracy theory spread in the years of the Red Scare.  HUAC, after all, only changed its name in 1969, and wasn’t abolished until 1975. The favored term used against the civil rights marchers and workers, and the anti-war protesters, was “outside agitators.” Blaming someone else for the evil we grow in our own gardens, is as American as cherry pie.

We didn’t get “here.” We never left.

The great lesson of Pogo came out of the rampant racism conspiracy theory of the Red Scare (Trump is still a piker by comparison. That one had the entire U.S. Congress behind it, for over a decade), and it is the curative to this recurring “don’t blame you, don’t blame me, blame that feller behind the tree” denial of responsibility:

“We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

A very good lesson to learn, indeed.