A Presidents’ Week Update – Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” And What The Virgin Islands Can Teach Us About Settler Colonialism
Happy Presidents’ Week to all, and with it a holiday update from us. I recognize that for those with school children, Presidents’ Week starts next week. However, for those of us of a certain generation, Presidents’ Week means the week between Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s, two days that were once celebrated. With apologies to our readers, this week’s article has been delayed because this author has been celebrating the holiday not merely in theory, but in practice, writing from what my family likes to call the Danish West Indies, but which most Americans refer to as the U.S. Virgin Islands. While St. Thomas is one hour ahead of New York, it still operates on “island time.” Nevertheless, the news has been replete with stories that hearken back to stories we wrote in the past, and which call for an update.
Oppressor or Oppressed – How Can One Tell
The first update concerns an article, Istanbul, Not Constantinople -- What The Four Lads Can Teach Us About The Middle East, in which I addressed the phenomenon that has swept college campuses across the country, namely settler colonialism. In that article, I noted that the Ottomans were not indigenous to Turkey but drove out the indigenous population, which was predominantly Greek. Thus the Crusades, pace our former president, constituted not an invasion but a counteroffensive to recover an area that had been Hellenic for almost a thousand years. Moreover, the Turks arrived in Istanbul at about the same time as the Spaniards arrived in the New World, and that the President of Turkey, far from apologizing for Ottoman aggression, boasted of it, in sharp contrast to the West. The not so subtle point of the piece was to compare how the Ottoman history of settler colonialism was treated to how the West’s was treated.
The U.S. Virgin Islands is an apt place to address settler colonialism. It has served many colonial masters. St. Thomas, except for a brief period, was once ruled by Denmark. St. John was ruled by the English, until sovereignty was effectively ceded to Denmark in 1718 (although the British did not formally recognize the transfer until 1762), after Danish settlers replaced the British. St. Croix was ruled by the French until it was purchased by Denmark in 1733 following a similar influx.
However, what distinguishes the islands from other colonial sagas is that they were uninhabited when Europeans arrived. Accordingly, the Danes were not mere settlers– they were the original settlers. If they were colonialists, they were so only in the most technical sense because, as the original inhabitants, they did not displace any indigenous population. They are indigenous.
That is not to say that the Danes were blameless; like most Caribbean settlers they engaged in a sugar trade dependent upon slavery. Indeed, it is believed that Alexander Hamilton became a lifelong abolitionist as a result of his exposure to the evils of the Danish slave trade. Danes had long dabbled in slavery. During the Viking era, the Danish trade in Europeans probably exceeded their trade in African slaves (the subject of a future article). Nevertheless, as any Dane will volunteer, Denmark, to its credit, was the first European country to abolish the slave trade in 1792. Denmark gradually emancipated its slaves thereafter until complete emancipation was formally declared in 1848.
The Virgin Islands remained under Danish suzerainty until 1918, when, in the midst of World War I, it was purchased by the United States. According to U.S. histories, America purchased the Virgin Islands to further the fight for democracy. The purchase served two purposes: (1) it provided a naval base for Allied warships in their struggle against German U-boats, and (2) it kept the islands out of the hands of the Germans. Danish schoolchildren are taught a completely different story. According to the Danes, the United States made an offer that Denmark could not refuse.
Assuming the Danish version is true, it is difficult to discern, pursuant to the Manichean world-view that divides the world into one of two classes -- the Oppressor and the Oppressed – on what side of the ledger fall the Danes, who can claim to be the indigenous population of the Virgin Islands, and on what side the Americans, who forced them out to establish a new, arguably illegitimate state.
But, it is hard to view the Danes as oppressed. On the matrix of intersectionality, Danes rank near the top, or near the bottom depending on one’s perspective. Not only are they white, but they are generally regarded as among the coolest of whites, even by those who, historically, placed great weight on such considerations. They have the looks, the style, and, of course, “hygge.” However, it can be argued that, if the Jewish people’s long history of discrimination and persecution has, to those currently protesting on behalf of Hamas, no bearing on Israel’s status as an oppressor nation today, then Denmark’s status as the winners of Nature’s lottery should have no bearing on their claim to be the oppressed in connection with the American seizure of their Caribbean homeland. To drive that point home, the Danes should produce a television series about the entire affair, because everyone loves Danish television.
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a/k/a, Joe Biden
A second article due for an update is Biden, Fetterman, & The 11th Century "Weekend at Bernie's," in which this author compared Joe Biden to the 11th Century Castilian knight known as “El Cid.” El Cid was a famous Spanish general who died on the eve of a great and determinative battle against the Berbers. Rather than risk demoralizing the Spanish troops by revealing his death, El Cid’s wife supposedly instigated a plan to place his body, concealed within his knight’s armor, on his horse, whereupon it led the Spanish army to a glorious victory and relieved the siege of Valencia.
Sadly, Joe Biden resembles the dead corpse that was El Cid more by the day. Nothing has drawn this into sharper relief than the recent report of the independent prosecutor, Robert Hur, which effectively deemed President Biden too senile to prosecute, as well as the President’s catastrophic press conference, which demonstrated the decline in his cognitive abilities more clearly than the report itself.
What has been the most amazing element of this sad spectacle is the insistence by those around the President that he not only is fully functioning, but that he runs intellectual rings around his staff and advisors. Most notable among these assertions was that by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, that “it is hard for us to keep up with this president.” The statement, if true, makes one wonder who is running the country.
In truth, the question is not whether there is a single person in this country who actually believes that anyone would have difficulty keeping up with the President. The question is whether Karine Jean-Pierre actually believes someone who does believe it exists? Given the likely answer, what is remarkable is the level of shamelessness that would be necessary for Jean-Pierre to say what she did. Indeed, only remuneration on a Muskian scale, comparable to that recently disallowed by the Chancery Court of Delaware, would be enough for me to abandon my self-respect so easily.
However, to show that I am not entirely partisan, I engaged in an experiment here in the Danish West Indies to test the cognitive powers of Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump. More specifically, I put to the test Mr. Trump’s assertion that magnets lose their power when exposed to water. “All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” Every day this week, I swam with my hotel magnetic key card in my pocket. I exposed it to both chlorinated water and salt water. Thankfully, I can assure all that this exposure was not the end of my key card and that it continues to work. Trump is not infallible.
Listening to both candidates causes this author to look back wistfully upon the election of 1856. Like today, among the candidates seeking the presidency were the incumbent, Franklin Pierce, and a former president, Millard Fillmore. Pierce became the first incumbent president not to receive his party’s nomination, a fate that could yet befall Joe Biden. Fillmore was the nominee of the Know-Nothing Party, a moniker that many critics on the left would say describes the Republicans in this era of Donald Trump.
The winner of the election was, as most know, James Buchanan, primarily because he was neither of the other two. Buchanan, of course, went down, in the estimation of most historians, as the worst president that America has elected. Nevertheless, given the choice currently presented, aren’t many Americans silently praying for today’s James Buchanan?
Bud Light Goes All In
Of course, no update would be complete on this site without a reference to a topic over which I obsess, Bud Light. If Dante had written about the nine circles of frattiness, the last circle, featuring Satan, would simply consist of Bud Light’s latest Super Bowl commercial, starring the Bud Light Genie, who grants a group of slovenly beer drinkers any wish. The commercial touched every button of sophomoric humor, and also necessarily included some ex-jocks, such as Peyton Manning.
If Bud Light’s former VP for Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, was watching the Super Bowl, one suspects that she spent at least ten minutes bent over a toilet after this commercial aired. In her defense, last year, she produced one of the top-rated Super Bowl commercials, starring Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh, dancing together to music played over their phone while placed on hold. The commercial was original and funny, and it will likely have a longer shelf-life than the Bud Light genie. She did what she was asked to do and, in this instance, did it well. If there is a reason to boycott Bud Light, it is because of how shamelessly the brand threw her under the bus.