Maybe I shouldn’t use the word “incarnations�. We tell ourselves that we are individuals, each one different, each one worthwhile. What your particular antagonist at home or the office is good for might be hard for you to say, but … another time. Nor do I happen to believe that I spent my last life as an amoeba and will spend my next as a cockroach. You, of course, were the Sultan of Turkey, sitting there complaining about all the hassles of managing a harem while you’re splitting a Mad Dog with me in my cardboard box, but … another time. Anyway, we’re telling each other (to our faces) that we’re all distinct, individual, worthwhile people, but we’re also saying things like “the wheel turns, and the same spoke keeps coming up.� Maybe we haven’t all been here before, Mr. Crosby, but sometimes it sure as hell looks like it. So I was sitting at my computer, staring at a blank white Word Document file, and I got to thinking whether the phenomenon that is George W. Bush has surfaced elsewhere in the history of the Presidents of these United States. Of course I found some instances, or this blog would be about California Towhees. Or maybe TV evangelists. No, that’s tomorrow’s subject.

James K. Polk

For the most part, the major military adventures that We the People have gotten ourselves into have been either because we (World War II) or our allies (Korea, the first Gulf War) were fired on first, or (Vietnam) we were, ahem, invited to participate in a battle already being fought. The idea that we would just march in and start something seemed un-American. Unthinkable. Well, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was thinkable. And it’s been done before. Against Mexico. By Polk.

James K. Polk (eleventh President, 1844-1848) wanted California and New Mexico for the US, and wasn’t about to take “no� for an answer. Neither was his party (the Democrats) or the Congress, where the Democrats controlled both Houses. He offered to buy the land for $20 million, and when that offer was refused, he sent in the troops, starting what Ulysses S. Grant (more about him later) called “the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation� (Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant). The Whig party, including a hayseed lawyer from Illinois enjoying his first and only term in Congress – guy named Lincoln – was hacked off, but their complaints were about as effective as those of the anti-Iraq War protesters in 2002, all both of them, standing on the bridge in Bath, Maine, that overlooks the shipyard where they make the missile destroyers.

For this action, Polk was dubbed a strong leader, “the last strong president before the Civil War�. Hmmm… Oh by the way, Polk also wanted Oregon north to what is now the southern boundary of Alaska. But Great Britain had a real army and navy. Polk and Queen Victoria’s Government compromised over what is now the northern boundary of Washington state. He also wanted to invade Cuba (then part of Spain), but by that time his party and the nation were so ripped up over the question of the future of slavery in what was once Mexico that he did not have the political support, or the money, to achieve that purpose.

How did slavery get mixed up in this? Well, John Wayne died in the Alamo to protect slavery. Seems that the Mexicans gave Sam Houston and his American friends a license to colonize Texas (which no one but the resident First Peoples wanted), so long as they converted to Catholicism, acknowledged Mexican law (which among other things prohibited slavery), and learned Spanish. So Houston & Co. roared in, built Protestant churches, planted cotton on plantations with Negro slaves, and declared that “only greasers speak Spanish�. Needless to say, the lease-holders were pissed and tried to terminate the lease. Texas declared independence and called on Protestant, slave-holding, English-speaking America for help. The rest, they say, leads to the Crawford compound.

Polk did not run for re-election; he was already too sick – and appalled, after it was too late, by the consequences of his policies. He died in 1849.

(Continued)

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.