Remove the Indian, Keep the Land

by Carl Nelson

There is a funny and damning meme which has been travelling social media for some time, which demonstrates how Land O’ Lakes butter sidestepped the looming cultural impropriety of using an attractive Native American maiden standing in a verdant wilderness of mountains and lakes to sell their butter. Currently, the updated butter packaging features only the lovely scene of the virgin wilderness, sans Indian. (Currently, employed somewhere else I’d suppose with reservations.)

I’ve likewise felt the wrath of cultural appropriation, ever since I embarked as a Conservative artist. I would say American artist, since that is all this Conservative is, that is an individual who believes in what our founding fathers stood for, what the founding documents describe, and the blessed nation created thereof. But the culture I have tried to engage has gone the way of the Land O’ Lakes butter. The Left has removed the actual American and usurped the culture. (Warning! It’s no longer REAL culture, being just stuffed with transfats, among other synthetics.)

Taking in American culture nowadays is a much like reading the New Yorker Magazine. A person attends for the quality of writing and the engaging material, hopefully a thought or two – and leaves disgusted with the sewage of propaganda which has been allowed to leak into the ink somehow and pollute most every scribble and scrawl. The stench around the copier in such a place must be awful!

This past evening, I decided to attend a poetry reading at the local museum in the more liberal college town upriver. The reader/poet had driven several hours from an urban center where he was the editor of a prestigious literary journal, a professor, and was working for a prestigious national publishing house to assemble an anthology of poems by a passed away but influential poet of national recognition (and dear friend). He was also a (mostly) sympathetic and pleasant person. (No sarcasm, intended.) In short, he was The Common Man, schooled.

He began his presentation by trying to hammer in the surveying stakes of the proposed duty of the poesy he intended to inscribe. A proposal which was immediately beset with difficulty, for, “How can I include in my poetry” the fact that last year there were over 6,756 gun fatalities in Ohio alone? (This amount is almost certainly in error due to my poor recall. But an explosive statement nevertheless.)

(I failed to quip helpfully, as least regarding gun violence, that in the words of Emily Dickenson, when “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Everybody’s loss.)

He went on to whine that, how could he possibly incorporate ecological horror of the recent train derailment disaster in Hamilton, Ohio into a simple nature poem?

How could he possibly find a poem to adequately account for the ravages to Nature and the planet in these times

And, sweepingly, how could he possibly write from our pool of common humanity, when the common well of public discourse had become, it would seem, so permanently, poisoned?

These were all rhetorical questions, of course. Nevertheless, he was righteously defeated before he started and so had naturally located the boundary markers of true poesy in today’s world. Of course, he didn’t come out so much as to say so, but by the emphatic sighs, and nods from the few others in attendance (nearly all teachers in some sort of governmental capacity) – he had pretty much staked out the moral (and aesthetic) ground where he had concluded any poets of merit and conscience would be working. And then he read from a few of these, plus himself.

Only a few days previous to this event, I had quit the book club I had labored to assimilate into for over five years. (Not an easy task. A conservative must weather a lot of slurs in order to do so.)  The group was begun in Marietta, Ohio in 1864 and had once included a Vice President of the United States among its members. Though in the founding mission statement it was recorded that whereas healthy controversy is the lifeblood of any intellectual organization, excursions into politics was discouraged (as the tendency of political discussion was to tear apart the fabric, humor and general goodwill among the membership). Well, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, it was a nice organization – if they could keep it.

(“Nice community you got here. Too bad, something should happen to it.”)

Since my joining, the ‘enlightened’ book club Democrats kept traveling back and forth across the “no-politics” boundary like Hamas agents. Among the like-minded, the slurs which slipped from their lips regarding Conservatives and Republicans was just common knowledge and consisted of no more than day to day conversation. No harm. No foul

This past meeting had been my final straw, wherein by ‘clever’ intellectual slight of hand a book review about the 1920s Klan overwhelming the Midwest, “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Eagan – was pitched as a sober alert to the current crisis in our nation as posed by the Right Wing.

I gave them as good as a debunking as I could, choking with rage as I was. Then I quit after renaming them “The Useful Idiots Readers Club of Marietta, Ohio.” And cursing to myself, and later to my wife, that “If I do see these members again – it will have been entirely by accident!”

Well. They have removed me, without firing a shot. But I don’t think they are going to get the land. This club would seem to have passed its date of expiration some years past, and are bloated from botulism and suffering terminal delusions. May it be so for all the canned and preserved Marxists, Communists, Islamists, plus the Wokes and their “useful idiots” everywhere.

This was the final portion of my parting recollection to them in my rebuttal to the published minutes:

“By this time I could no longer remember any more portions of Joyce’s scree to rebut.  I did note though that I had a personal recollection of a poet friend’s grandfather who once attended Klan events in Marietta. But that he came home one night, put his robes away and didn’t say a thing. But something had occurred that didn’t rub him right, and he never attended again. The point being, that these populist supporters supported organizations which expressed their values, and when the organizations violated their values, they stopped supporting them. In other words, these were real people, who had truthful reasons for acting as they did – that they considered matters, and could change their opinions when experience dictated.

I’ve participated in this group for many years, and try as I might, I can’t see this same humanity reflected in the membership of the Marietta Junior Reader’s Club. And this meeting has been the final straw. I no longer want to be part of this group. I no longer want to associate with it. You all believe you are above the common hoi polloi (“This steak is inedible!”) – when, in truth, you really can’t measure up.

Submitted, without regrets,

Carl Nelson