Tom
Cotton - perfectly named, considering.
Last week, Cotton [R-Arkansas] introduced a bill to prohibit federal funds from being used in schools to teach "The 1619 Project," which posits that slavery was embedded in the country's very foundation.
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It is breathtaking in the year 2020 to hear a United States senator use the term "necessary evil" to describe slavery. But it is important to note that Cotton's comments came in a context: Millions of Americans are waiting on Congress to pass another economic relief package, lest they lose their homes and ability to feed their families. But Senate Republicans haven't taken action yet — in part because some of them worry that unemployment benefits are too generous.
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Republicans haven't deployed the term "necessary evil," but they are making the case it is more important to get people back to work than to pay to let them stay home.
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If the aim is to take care of Americans during the pandemic, then the solution is relatively easy: keep giving them money. If Republicans won't do so, it is worth asking why not. To ensure that existing businesses continue to have a cheap labor supply? To reduce unemployment rates to goose President Trump's election prospects? Why is it necessary to force Americans back to work? And is it truly worth the cost of endangering their health and safety — or is it just convenient for a few people at the top of the heap?
Low-wage work in a pandemic is certainly not the same thing as chattel slavery. Modern-day Americans still have a choice, technically, about whether to work or not. But a similar justification undergirds the viewpoints of elites in both cases: Humans are a means to an end — a better economy, efficient production, beating another country at war — instead of having value in and of themselves.
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Rather ominously, Cotton's comments echoed America's original enslavers, who justified themselves by saying slavery was needed to build the south's economy — and to maintain white supremacy. Cotton, however, seemed to argue on Sunday that he meant only to refer to the Founders' views that the actual process of making a union — that is, bringing the states together under the Constitution to form the United States — required northern states to compromise in order to bring southern slave states into the fold.
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Even viewed in that light, Cotton's statement is troubling, because it endorses the notion that the lives, bodies, and freedom of Black slaves were an acceptable down payment to build this country. The idea is abhorrent — and, for many Americans, was abhorrent at the time the time of the founding.
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The antifederalists rejected the idea that it was worth accommodating slavery in order to achieve the union. Some recognized America's leaders wouldn't be willing to endure the evil they deemed necessary to inflict on others. "Where is the man, who under the influence of sober dispassionate reasoning, and not void of natural affection, can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery?" a trio wrote for a Massachusetts newspaper in 1788.
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Whenever the term "necessary evil" is used, it should be questioned: Necessary to whom? Evil for whom? And for what purpose? Is the evil truly justified, or merely convenient?
MSN
Cotton’s bill, the Saving American History Act of 2020, labels the 1619 Project as “a distortion of American history,” and would cut off federal professional development funds from any school district that teaches the project’s curriculum, as well as reducing other federal funding in the amount estimated for that district’s “cost associated with teaching the 1619 Project, including in planning time and teaching time.”
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In his interview with the Arkansas paper, Cotton called the 1619 Project “left-wing propaganda,” “factually, historically flawed,” and “revisionist history at its worst.”
Mediaite
"Saving American History."
“[I]f local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice,” said Cotton. “But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America.”
Always with the "they hate America" trope.
“It won’t be much money,” he pointed out. “But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools. The New York Times should not be teaching American history to our kids.”
How many kids read
The New York Times?
Cotton spoke at length about the core premise of the 1619 Project. “The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project,” he said, “is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch.”
Is that a reference to the trees from which Southerners like Tom Cotton hung black people for centuries?
Cotton also addressed how he believes slavery should be taught.
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“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
A necessary evil. That's America's excuse for every atrocity it perpetrates.
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