Half breed

Two weeks ago B. Hussein Obama said that he was not going to question his opponent’s patriotism.  And then this week he did just that with his ad about how Romney wouldn’t have gone after Osama.  It surely reminded me of how he wasn’t going to make abortion or reproductive rights part of the campaign and then a couple days later he started the baiting of the Catholic church by making it plain to them that they would have to pay for birth control and abortafaciants, Fluke and all.  Does this not show what kind of a campaign this is going to be?  Making such ‘high road’ statements and then dropping a bomb doesn’t just show hypocrisy.  It shows a real eagerness for mudslinging.  Disclaimer: when I suggested that, due to his penchant for taking over the auto companies, and all my friends saying he was really a Muslim, that his nickname could be Carbama, I did not realize what a bomb-thrower he was going to be.  So I am not responsible.

Listening to Rush on Friday, I think he was getting pretty edgy with his fun again.  He was laughing about Elizabeth Warren’s gaffe about being Indian because she was 1/32 and using her minority status to get a dinner invite when she was at Haw-vud. He selected an old Cher favorite,Halfbreed, as a theme song.  I haven’t heard that song in about 40 years, remembered the words and began laughing not only at his skewering of Diversity, but laughing at myself for having liked that song.  The Indians said I was white by law.  The white men always called me, Indian Squaw.  I guess that song captured the angst and anger of youth which pre-emptively blames an adult world for failure on Unfairness and Racism. I suppose I was more liberal in those days. Half Breed! ‘She’s no good’ they warned. Too bad we still have one party that uses Unfairness and Racism and teenage thinking to get voters.  The songwriter eventually blames her love life and all else on being mixed race.  But you get older and realize things never were as you imagined.  America is a pretty mixed race place.  I read a series of papers that were meeting notes of the Nazis and Japanese at the beginning of WW II.  The thing both agreed upon was that if America entered the war, it was a nation of “mongrels and mixed races” that naturally fought with each other.  Thus USA would be easy to defeat.  Then came the windtalkers.  Then came the patrician general Patton who asked a bunch of Texas farmers to make suggestions about the Sherman tank.  They gave him a host of critiques about where grease zerks needed to be and certain parts needed to be redesigned “else you’d wait forever for parts’.  That done, the Sherman became a rapid-manufacture tank that “any farm kid could fix and any city kid could drive.”  The mongrels found no trouble allying with every nation against the Axis powers and Ike held them together like determined brothers.  Instead of a patsy, the Nazis found a juggernaut. 

We always moved around from town to town/ When you’re not wanted, you don’t hang around. Perhaps the Halfbreed songwriter really did experience such prejudice, but I doubt it was long-lasting or in Oklahoma.  I was doing research on Indian numbers for one of the elderhostel classes I taught for OU.  I came across evidence that totally destroys the racist narrative.  The US Army has kept very thorough notes on frontier incidents since colonial times.  The sum of all Native Americans killed in all skirmishes, ambushes, disagreements, and wars totals about 79,000.  But the census of 1900 for the first time asked about ethnic background and found 200,000 full bloods and over a million people were “partial Indian”.  Now if you are ‘partial’ that means you had a mixed marriage in your ancestry.  Thus there were at least 10 times as many romances going on as killings. (roughly 1/3 of Oklahomans are part native American.)  So I asked my blonde housekeeping assistant at the hotel (who was on the Ponca Tribal Council) if she knew anybody with a romance story about Cowboys and Indians.  She gave a grin as wide as the Salt Fork River and sat down to tell me the stories of her grandparents on both sides.  Gee, that didn’t take long!  Boy meets girl at trading post stuff. 

One story was humorous.  Some Indian fathers were eager to marry their daughters to settlers since the cowboys treated the girls well (that Western notion called “romance”) and the family got a heads-up on new ways of the white people with a son-in-law.  Ah, so Carolyn’s grandmother’s cowboy asked Papa for her hand and secured a dowry and the girl was so darned mad she wouldn’t talk to anyone.  This dismayed both her father and her fiancé.  Finally they figured it out.  A good woman was worth 3 horses in Ponca dowry, but the poor cowboy had only two.  Bride was insulted.  But the poor cowboy sat her down and told her he really loved her and was terribly disappointed because he wanted her to wear his sister’s wedding dress and get married in the Methodist church.  Suddenly she flew into his arms and all was forgiven.  Because Indian girls used to hide behind trees from a distance and envy the white girls getting married in the gown, and the cake, and the dance—well, you understand. Now in their 80’s, health of the old farm couple was getting bad and so Carolyn had come home to take care of them. 

The genius of America is that you can be what you want to be.  The genius of Oklahoma is that they poured a whole bunch of mixed people together and it still works, maybe works better.  So when this campaign gets nasty with the race allegations from the left, just roll your eyes and laugh.