Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again

Wow. There is no way I can do justice to this book: it is information-dense and so rich in decent human values, refreshingly so even thought it's by no means a feel-good volume. (Nor doom & gloom. Just... honest.)

Perry begins with a history of the immense but unacknowledged basis that the U.S. foundation owes to Native American governing principles; citing extensive documentation on the influence that Haudenosaune and other tribes had on the development of the U.S. Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution; he also of course speaks out about the criminal harmfulness of the founding fathers' omission of rights for anyone other than white males, an omission whose costs will likely continue beyond all our lifetimes.

I did not know any of this. I never tied together the Haudenosaunee Confederacy with the fact that the early colonists lived so closely side by side with them. I feel embarrassed but also angry that this is not taught more. If these elements are true, we should all know them. (Are they true? I'm a skeptic by nature but I have a yardstick that has served me well: if I encounter new information in a source, I consider what that source says about topics on which I consider myself informed. Perry passes on all respects. Still, I will strive to better inform myself on this in the future). The U.S. could not have been possible without the centuries-old experiences and perspectives of the Native Americans.

Part two covers the Revolution through 2016-ish, creation of political parties and their switcheroo over the decades, the genocides. Less new material here, but still informative and well written.

Part three is the Apocalypse and is where Perry's insights shine. He likens the orange traitor to the Trickster God from so many mythologies: chaos personified, disruptive, destructive, but a necessary force of nature and one we can choose to learn, recover, and rebuild from. (The key word of course is “choose”. We can also choose denial or woe or even to further the destruction). I've always seen the traitor more as Windigo, as insatiable destructive greedy hunger, but there's a lot to be said for this angle. I'll settle for him being both. Rebuild we must: life will never be the same, we cannot undo the suffering that's been inflicted, but we can and must work together to build something better. Can we?

Perry writes in spring of 2020; I'm writing this in November. We now know that Biden and Harris won the election, but we don't know if they'll make it into the White House. We don't know how much more destruction the traitor will wreak, or how violent he will get in his attempts to avoid the prosecution and bankruptcy and humiliation that's coming to him in January. We do know, though, that the US has dodged a bullet: the possibility of an actual lawful win by the traitor. This offers us hope, and brings us to part four, which is so rich that I'll just stop here and hope that you buy your own copy or borrow mine.

OK one small postscript: I almost stopped reading on p.4, a grammatical then/than mixup. That's sloppy, as is the multiple misspelling of duel (Burr/Hamilton) as “dual”. Don't quit: those are really the only mistakes, and the book is too damn good and important to abandon because of them.