Category: America

Since the issue of the First Amendment to the Constitution to the United States of America is going to be a hot topic in light of Donald Trump getting ban-hammered by Twitter, then a lot of social media sites and even Shopify, I thought I’d share this quick little guide to how it works:

In case you were wondering, here’s the full text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If you need a longer lesson that doesn’t read like a boring civics text, there’s always this classic from the webcomic XKCD:

You just know that they wanted to go with “shithole country” rather than “banana republic”.

When I saw this picture of a fur-and-horns-clad Trump-inspired right-wing rioter who’d broken into the Capitol today…

…I was reminded of The Omega Glory, a particularly campy installment of the original Star Trek series. Here’s a scene from that episode:

Here’s a summary of that episode from Women at Warp:

The Enterprise discovers the USS Exeter in orbit around Omega IV. The crew is revealed to have died except for the captain, who remains on the planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Unlucky Red Shirt #12 beam down to the planet and find Prime Directive-violating Captain Ronald Tracey. He has made friends with the “Kohms,” an “Asiatic” group in conflict with the savage Aryan “Yangs.” Tracey believe he has found a “Fountain of Youth” with the planet’s population, but it turns out it’s just evolution/natural selection following a devastating war with biological weapons. It turns out that his crew would have lived if they had stayed on the planet a bit longer. Kirk and Co. eventually discover that the Yangs and Kohms are parallels to the “Yankees” and “Communists” of the 20th Century Earth. The Yangs, after a decisive victory over the Kohms, celebrate by bringing out a tattered U.S. flag, pulling out a Bible, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.

Cue record scratch noise.

After a few random fights scenes between Kirk and Tracey, Kirk soon triumphs, Tracey is arrested, and the Yang chief pulls out a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Jim next gives a classic Kirkian speech about the power of words, the Constitution, and the good ol’ US of A in general, and the Starfleet crew leave those freedom-loving Yangs to begin living out the words of that foundational American document. The camera slow pans to the Star Spangled Banner hanging in the corner and credits roll.

The Yangs were about to kill the Enterprise landing party until they overhear Kirk mention one of their “worship words”: Freedom. A dialogue ensues, and Captain Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discover that the Yangs — who are really just a bunch of angry, violent white people who engage in cultural appropriation and symbol idolatry — simultaneously worshipped the U.S. Constitution and did not know what its words meant.

In the episode, the Yangs believed that only “chiefs and sons of chiefs” could speak the “holy words”:

YANG CHIEF: Chiefs and sons of chiefs may speak the words, but the Evil One’s tongue would surely turn to fire. I will begin. You shall finish. Ee’d plebnista norkohn forkohn perfectunun.

KIRK: Those words are familiar. Wait a moment.

The Yangs, in their worship of the document, had turned “We the people” into the gibberish “Ee’d plebnista”, a bunch of nonsense syllables that they spoke out of rote, without any sense of their meaning.

In the end, Kirk recognizes the words that the Yangs have mangled, and gives one of those speeches:

YANG CHIEF: When you would not say the holy words, of the Ee’d Plebnista, I doubted you.
KIRK: I did not recognise those words, you said them so badly, Without meaning.
YANG ELDER: No! No! Only the eyes of a chief may see the Ee’d Plebnista.
KIRK: This was not written for chiefs. (general consternation) Hear me! Hear this! Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before or since. Tall words proudly saying We the People. That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people! Down the centuries, you have slurred the meaning of the words: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.” These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!

As a geek and sci-fi aficionado, I had always considered this episode one of the worse entries in the Star Trek oeuvre, and most certainly one of the least realistic.

Today’s news proved me wrong.

Want to see the worst kind of American exceptionalism, espoused by an exceptionally terrible American, say, Ted Cruz? Look no further than this recent response to Rex Chapman’s tweet that Canada is providing the new COVID-19 vaccine to every Canadian who wants it for free.

Ted, who plays Trumpism’s pathological zero-sum game of “I need to win and everyone else needs to lose”, and who apparently hasn’t quite gotten over being born in Canada, decided that he needed to take a dump on something good that would benefit millions of people and likely save lives, since it had nothing to do with the U.S.:

That’s great. Just out of curiosity, which country was it that developed the vaccine? Wonder why.

What he didn’t know is that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that Canada would make use of, was…

• developed in Germany,
• funded by Germany and took no money from the U.S.’ “Operation Warp Speed” project for its development, and
• was developed by two Turkish immigrants (again, I remind you: Immigrants — we get the job done).

When Ted Cruz tweeted that today’s Dems are the party of the rich, he was hoping that you wouldn’t look too deeply into his household’s sources of income:

Heidi Cruz did her masters in Europe and got her MBA at Harvard, and since 2011 has been the primary breadwinner of the family. This is in line with 40% of U.S. households, but might be concerning to social conservatives and other people who still live in the Bronze Age — in other words, Ted’s base.

Ted probably doesn’t think of his family as rich, since Heidi says she has to put in long hours to support her family, according to a 2018 article in Quartz. That’s because “rich” is a matter of perspective. Their guesstimated just-shy-of-half-a-million pre-tax a year doesn’t put him in the top 1%, so that means middle class, right?

As a managing director at Goldman Sachs, Heidi Cruz likely earns over $300,000 a year—without factoring in an additional bonus. As a senator, Ted Cruz earns an annual salary of $174,000 for his work as a public servant, placing him in the top 3% of American earners.

I will remind you that the U.S. median household income in 2019 was $68,703. I will also remind you that “U.S. median household income” means that if you lined up all the U.S. households in order, from poorest to richest, it’s the household in the dead center of the line.