People's History
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1600s 1700s 1776 1810 1840s 1860s 1870s 1900 1920s 1940s 1918,1945 1945 1960s 1980s 2001 |
Haranguing History (People's Version)Upon a land embroidered with a curiousaccoutrement of native flavors, primitive but symbiotic with the earth, penurious in paint and plume, with living styles alternative to ours, we ventured forth with common tenancy intended, but impeded by recalcitrance and, truth be told, a certain animosity that tested our commendatory tolerance for disadvantageness, while making manifest our destiny as rightful magisterial custodians of habitations newly dressed in deeds, devices, derring-do, material possessions, ample riches, grist and circumstance beyond a speculator's finest fantasies. And while dismissing miscreants we looked askance at insubordinance while seeking to appease the weary rabblery with rousing vitriol addressed to royalty as men of property rebelled against all attitudes imperial; and while endeavoring to calm the refugee and vagabond with compensating living space (which, time would certify amidst an overall return to temperance, we started to embrace as more desirable, demanding overhaul of deeds already done). With bolstered confidence and prudently compatriotic attitude we toasted most devoutly our deliverance from any vestiges of heathen crassitude -- indeed, our theopathic leanings would ensure predominance against the mythologic claims of foreign realms, as if a primogeniture from times Tenochtitlan could elevate their names above our holy god's, or if the fertile soil and precious metals of our righteous western shore should stir a god-forbidding reason to embroil humanitarians in totemistic war. As issues, thus, of property entanglements were giving way to industry and enterprise, there came about a shrewd and gentlemanly sense that servitude would smartly revolutionize production of the kingly fleece, until the winds of Northern avarice unveiled a covetry disguised in scriptures of morality, the sins of subjugation duly noted, and esprit of union and rebellion urged on either side by men of reputation, as a wilderness of blood and innocence engendered fratricide from once-ethereal fraternal bondedness. But leaden shadows drifted past and all were free -- or so the documents of tolerance declared -- as reveries of reconstructive policy appeared resplendently to heal a race impaired by sluggish centuries of other men's disdain. But codes defiant pressed the blackness to the earth and ground its twisting flesh: the requiem's refrain still echoes from the chambers of a hopeful birth. A second hundred years begin with circumstance mercurial and daunting, as our shores recede to levels unbefitting patrons of expanse and acquisition -- hence a germinating need to radiate our freedom, faith, and intellect to distant lands, to devilishly coffee-skinned appendages of humankind refined to genuflect before the fair-skinned deity as they rescind their pagan posturings. The sacrificial pit disgorges fiery virtues through a needy world as gilded sneers of industry bring benefit to patrons of plutocracy, their flag unfurled in patriotic flurries of grandiloquence, productiveness, imagination, influence, and fluttering acknowledgements of Providence. Yet now, in odd and disconsoling recompense for this above-recounted magnanimity, the motherland erupts, and bloody turmoil spills across the sea, and shatters our prosperity: the pounding fist, a slith'ry hiss, the poisoned wills of innocents -- and in response, not once but twice we turn away marauding Huns in freedom's quest, almighty potencies invoked to sacrifice the children of the wicked, making manifest our destiny, our birthright, our entitlement, our biblical dominion over savages, our longitudination to the orient. But then rebellion in the heartland ravages our perfect world, grotesquely-garbed idealists contrive a metaphorical society whose uniformity-preserving exorcists are dizzied by the anarchistic foolery paraded in the streetwise spectacle. But order is restored, at last, as we revive the markets and eradicate the radical impediments, our talons sharpened, words alive with rectitude, an eagle's energy released to revel in a gastronomic harmony of fiscal self-indulgence, till we see the feast disrupted by the flaming twins of liberty. |
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