Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Uh Oh, Obama's children's book is under fire by FOX

So President Obama has included Sitting Bull as one of those heroes worth emulating.  We all remember him, chief of the Sioux nation that pretty much wiped out the 7th Cavalry led by General George Armstrong Custer, even though he probably didn't actually take part in the battle of the Little Big Horn.  Well, there's not really much to see there.  Sitting Bull usually got passing grades even when I was a kid in the 70s.  Custer was seen as being foolish in his enterprise, and ended up paying the price along with his men.  They even had songs lampooning the event in the 1960s. 

Now, there could be some concerns about this, not the least of which is other Plains Indians who sometimes object to the heroic portrayal of the Sioux Indians.  They often tend to see the Sioux as very hostile and imperialistic, seizing land from others and absorbing their people against their will into one Super-Nation.  That could be a reason to object I suppose.  Others might want to point out that while America's list of atrocities is pretty long, American Indians were usually pretty good at making their own list, such as how they treated the troops of the 7th. 

My guess is, Obama being a post-modern progressive, doesn't really care what happened to Custer one way or another.  That wasn't his point.  Or he might not think much about it beyond 'cool Native American kicks White European Imperialist butt', if he thought about it that much. Likewise, that the Sioux Indians could be anything other than the perfect examples of Utopian love and peace may have escaped him as well, especially if he watched too many showings of Dances With Wolves or Avatar. In all, I doubt at worst it represents anything other than the influence post-modern progressive ideals, manafested in multi-cultuural education, had on the man, if it even does that; ideals and biases he is as unaware of as The Cutline is of its own biases against FOX News, or as FOX News is of its own biases in making a stink out of this in the first place.  Bias is, after all, a lot like body odor.  You tend to recognize it in others long before you recognize it in yourself.

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