Where are the Nephews and Nieces of Uncle Sam?

On Independence Day I watched James Cagney singing and dancing in the black and white, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and then on cable news Black or White Michael Jackson singing and dancing on video—days before his premature death. I thought of…Change signs.

A disturbing image of Uncle Sam’s premature death flashed before me: On what might be his deathbed, propped up with sequined pillows, his beard poking out from a small veil covering his nose, Uncle Sam has one gloved hand resting on his crotch, the other holding a pocket-sized U.S. Constitution from the Heritage Foundation. Obviously conflicted, he rests fitfully. His prognosis is not good, but Uncle Sam still has life in him—a full recovery?

I think of his nieces and nephews. Do we know where they are these days?

We know they walk deserts in Iraq, valleys in Afghanistan, and corridors in the Pentagon. They’re wheeled through wards at Walter Reed and they step off busses at Fort Benning and Parris Island. Nephews and nieces of Uncle Sam live in towns named Guntersville and Temple for sure, Montpelier and Berkeley perhaps. They talk with us freely (as of now) on hundreds of radio stations, they write best-selling books without the benefit of book reviews, some of them appear on at least one cable channel and many Internet web sites. They were rare in newspapers…now newspapers are rare. They have distant cousins who recently stood strong in Iran and stood up in Honduras. They are all around us, mostly ignored.

What does it take to be a real live nephew or niece of your Uncle Sam? Must you have been born on the Fourth of July? No. Must you be real? Yes. Be Live? Alive…mostly, but our deceased cousins can inspire us even today. You could have been born on any day and in any year—from 1901 like our sole surviving WWI veteran to 2005 like a girl named Olivia—or any place on earth. Millions of Poles (and then millions of other East Europeans) longed for the ideals of Uncle Sam in the 1980s and Ronald Reagan responded…Solidarity won in Poland…the Berlin Wall fell, Germany re-united…and the U.S. media still gives credit—not to the real live nephew of his Uncle Sam—to Gorbachov for failing to save Communism and Stalin’s Dream.

American Dreams differ from Stalinist Dreams—please forgive the obvious—but we must consider the 535 members of Congress, that one Chief Executive, and those 9 Supreme Court Justices. They are in charge of just one of our governments: The one designed in our Constitution to be the least influential in our daily lives. Many of these federal employees are confused beyond belief, or the truth is beyond them—perhaps above their pay grades.

There are now 50 other state governments meant to be more influential in our daily lives (or 57 states as our one Chief Executive remembered them while campaigning—Hint). How many of our 548 federal leaders can claim to be real live nephews and nieces of their Uncle Sam? Some? Okay. The one you keep electing? Sure…. And how about those Global Warming lobbyists in the administration, or the tax cheat in charge of—unbelievably—the IRS? How about the score of White House Czars…any of them nephews and nieces of Uncle Sam? What do they even think of Uncle Sam? I understand the young man put in charge of General Motors is just a decade or so out of high school, where surely he learned to love Uncle Sam’s America.

Sadly in Washington, in the classroom, and on television, the old man (Uncle Sam as well as Reagan) is mocked or ignored as much as possible. Symbols of the Old America make way for emblems of the New America: The Ghost of Michael Jackson Wants You! MJ seems to be all the news this month, though he died last month. [Hold the presses. As I write this SP took over the news with her announced resignation as Alaska’s Governor—say what you will about her, if it’s not been said already, but Sarah Palin is a real live niece of her Uncle Sam.]

Can our poor republic possibly thrive under this new Jacksonian Democracy—where distracting the masses is fundamental while Congress votes to change everything? When enough of us are preoccupied others rapidly erase the Old America, right there at the front of the classroom. We should consider it worse than war when teacher unions, administrators and school boards cheer on tossing out Uncle Sam’s Traditional America in favor of—Some New Theory About America. America is defined by its history and in five years the textbooks will give more mention to Michael Jackson than Ronald Reagan.

“Students don’t learn what teachers don’t teach.” (I never learned the source.)

 The very idea of Uncle Sam—a rallying symbol of responsible, individual Americans to provide for the common defense or promote the general welfare—is ignored on the television news at 6:00 and 11:00 pm and again on the floor of the House—at 3:00 am. Only a long legislative bill that goes unread before the vote can save us. Who outside Congress believes that?

There are middling officials and awful media changing Uncle Sam into Uncle Joe, as Franklin Roosevelt called Joseph Stalin. Do you think our young people leaving public education understand that what Stalin did to Europe and the world dwarfed what Hitler did? There are no realistic video games of man-made famine, show trials or mass political executions, just games featuring the Soviets and Americans side-by-side fighting Nazis. Do first-year teachers, having graduated from Colleges of Education know that socialism plus reality equals Stalinism? If the Left had really wanted to insult President Bush they would have called him Stalin, not Hitler. But in their world (the world of public education, media and Hollywood) Stalin is not insulting: Deep in their Left hearts Stalin had the proper world vision—and Uncle Sam was wrong to fight it.

Why has there never been an anti-Stalin movie come out of Hollywood? No Right-thinking actor, say, Jon Voight, could accurately portray George Washington as a power-hungry tyrant. Just as no Leftist actor, such as Sean Penn, could play Joseph Stalin as anything but a murderous bureaucrat. By the way, we could all use a good bio-pic of Winston Churchill, but only about a third of Britons recognize his name anymore…

Several years after James Cagney danced away in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Churchill sought to convince FDR that socialism was dangerous to Western Civilization. The two men had schemed to create the Atomic Bomb without telling Uncle Joe, but by 1944 Soviet spies had infiltrated high places in Los Alamos, Washington and London. Some Allied decisions made in Washington and London were not made in the spirit of Uncle Sam or King George, but Uncle Joe, infiltrated all the way from Moscow. Never heard of Venona? Please read all about it. These declassified Soviet telegrams were released in 1995 and ignored by the media and public educationalists. They are now in book form and on the Internet. Venona teaches historical lessons that matter even today, especially today: Our government is not immune to damaging influences…

Other oft cited sources, highly placed or deeply buried—library books—prove that Senator McCarthy was five years too late to expose communist agent Alger Hiss and five decades too early to uncover liberal operative Barney Frank. Alger Hiss passed secrets to Moscow beginning in the 1930s and in 1944 he headed the State Department office in charge of developing the United Nations—by 1951 the statute of limitations for treason had expired (seriously), so Hiss went on trial for perjury and then to jail for lying about being a communist. He lived until 1996, denying his guilt to the end, portrayed as a victim of Uncle Sam’s anti-communist hysteria. He remains a hero to the Left.

Barney Frank kept secrets about governmental financial institutions he oversaw and then fought against their reform, remaining in charge of the same Finance Committee that refused to halt a financial meltdown—he has not yet gone to trial. The Alger Hisses wanted then and the Barney Franks want now, for Uncle Sam to fail. Six decades apart, they have both altered the American Dream, and our school textbooks portray McCarthy as the biggest enemy of freedom ever…

Senator Joseph McCarthy was a real live nephew of his Uncle Sam, though a gruff one, and President Ronald Reagan was a thoroughly grand nephew of his Uncle Sam.

Not many Americans know Reagan was fighting communists in Hollywood back in 1946, when he slept with a pistol and was still a Democrat. He voted for Eisenhower and eventually switched to Republican because the Sixties Democrats openly embraced the ideals of the Soviet Union. Reagan had raised money for Eastern Europeans suffering under Soviet domination; he gave speeches on TV and across the nation promoting American ideals, denouncing communism; he was twice elected Governor of California and first called for the Berlin Wall to come down in 1967. Reagan performed diplomatic missions to Europe as a private citizen. The KGB, unable to find dirt on the candidate in 1976 or 1980, feared his election. How do the textbooks from your local school board treat Ronald Reagan—as a bumbling, lucky actor? How about Uncle Sam—as a meaningless cartoon…or at all?

History created today as the study of history creates tomorrow. We should educate more nephews and nieces of Uncle Sam about the American Dream before they suffer the deficiency of spirit in Stalin’s Dream…without ever knowing why.

Whether events are denied or revised, history as a weapon is a dangerous thing, and we’ve been assaulted for generations.

Congress wants to spread the poverty mindset and educational system of Washington D.C. (the only city Congress is actually responsible for) to places named Guntersville, Temple, Gainesville and Arlington. We don’t want it. 

We must eliminate 35,000 jobs immediately. The position of tax lobbyist in Congress is—like the tax code they live to alter—not really American. It’s not really fair. We simply need more relatives of Uncle Sam in Congress. This is America, that’s fair.

As a litmus test for candidates in 2010 and 2012, in order to bring nephews and nieces of Uncle Sam to the top, we should demand they debate the FairTax. Never heard of it? Please consider their website or the best-selling books on this well-researched replacement for government revenue. Congress can only destroy capitalism through the IRS; Soviet style spending together with a hyperactive tax code is bringing Uncle Sam and his relatives to their knees. Should we let the IRS destroy us or should we simply and legally and reasonably abolish the IRS? What would Jesus, Reagan or the Founders do? What would Lenin, Stalin, or the Communists do? What will you do…and your Representative?

            I propose we pass out FairTax.org signs to the 17,000 people attending the Michael Jackson memorial today. If they understand the FairTax they already support it. If they don’t understand the FairTax they might carry the sign anyway. It’s possible millions of people could support what they don’t understand. I’m thinking of…Change signs.

Phillip Hyyti is the author of the upcoming GI Crusoe trilogy. Educating Finn Larkin follows a WWII soldier, isolated for 60 years, as he sails home aboard a politically charged yacht in 2004 to find a strange America and a price on his head. Enticing Finn Larkin investigates the Selkirk Project (1944-1994) crafted by FDR and Churchill to re-generate Western Civilization fifty years in the future. Erasing Finn Larkin examines the GI’s second trip home in 2008 to find the mainstream media selling out traditional America and Marxism making great strides.