Ownership

posted by Armadillo Joe

This is your official daily reminder of who actually owns this country, no matter which party may be ostensibly "in charge" of minding the store from time to time. Whether health-care or blocking the release of White House visitor logs, the reminders come in all sizes, great and small:

US seeks to stop Geronimo lawsuit

US officials are seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit brought against the government by descendants of Apache leader Geronimo to recover his remains.

The descendants want to rebury Geronimo, who was buried in Oklahoma in 1909, in his native land in New Mexico.

They are also seeking the return of body parts they say were stolen in 1918 or 1919 by a secret society at Yale University known as Skull and Bones.

[...]

The lawsuit seeks the recovery of Geronimo's remains "from 100 years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut and wherever else they may be".

This refers to long-standing allegations that members of the Skull and Bones Society, including Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W Bush, broke into Geronimo's tomb and stole his skull and other bones to keep in their clubhouse in New Haven.

[...]

The US justice department has now filed a motion asking a federal judge to dismiss the case.

...read more...

That would be Obama's Justice Department -- again with all of us hoping that some rogue, yet-to-be-flushed-out, left-over Bushite functionary within the department (like the DOMA brief) just reflexively operated on auto-pilot in defense of monied privilege and the status quo -- instead of simply taking no action at all and letting the suit move forward on its own, choosing to insert itself into the process, on the pretext of the the letter of the law and not the spirit of actual, you know, Justice:

Officials say the descendants' complaint does not fall within the scope of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

Just remember that when we get into these fights over the health-care bill, Employee Free Choice, bank bailouts and CEO compensation, etc., the people who own this country are just a bunch of soulless assholes, pining away for the days of aristocracy, who really do think the rest of us exist at their pleasure, for their own private amusement, like peasants tilling the soil on the lord's land during the Middle Ages.

For them, stealing the remains of perhaps the most famous opponent of white, European settlement of North America, keeping those remains in what amounts to the Masters of the Universe's frat house to be humiliated and desecrated as befits a vanquished foe, is just how things should be. It makes digby's recent movie quote all the more poignant:

A couple of years ago Matt Damon made a movie called The Good Shepherd about the creation of the CIA. As you all undoubtedly know, for years the CIA recruited only the best and the brightest waspy ivy leaguers ... Damon's waspy, ivy league character Edward Wilson had a line that I thought rather cleverly explained how the CIA thinks of itself:

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?

Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.