Radical movements never end at the original demands.
Let’s harken back to a simpler, more innocent and yet paradoxically more emotionally resilient time, shall we? Particularly the Fall of, say, 1988. Imagine a fine autumn day on the great plains of Illinois. The sun blares down through the azure dome of the wide Midwestern sky to warm the faces of 75,000 fans crowded into the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium. (Yes, back then we filled the place.) A sea of orange and blue shimmers in the stands and the roar “I-L-L! echoes from one side of the stadium, followed by the obligatory response of “I-N-I!” from the other. Colorful pennants orbit the arena, swirling and snapping in the warm breeze.
It’s halftime during another Big Ten football Saturday at Urbana-Champaign and a celebrated ritual dating back to 1926 begins again. The Marching Illini band parts with military precision, clearing a path for a lone figure who seems to just materialize in the end zone and strut proudly to the center of the field. He is barefoot, clad in buckskin and leather tassels, his face painted bright orange and blue, and he wears an impressive headdress of eagle feathers.
Chief Illiniwek bows to the throng of admirers as the calling of “Chieeeef!” fills the stands. Our beloved mascot then dances to Native American music. He skims across the field as he twists and turns and gyrates. It’s quite a feat of athleticism in fact. Then he suddenly leaps, touches his toes in an aerial split, and lands, bare feet together on the turf. He stands and raises his arms up like a bishop bestowing a benediction, as the band belts out the Illinois anthem and we all join arm in arm and sway back and forth while singing: “Hail to the orange. Hail to the blue. Hail Alma Mater ever so true. We love no other so let our motto be: ‘Victory Illinois…Var-si-ty!” There is no mockery here. We feel no emotion but respect for and communion with the Native American tribe whose namesake we at the U of I adopted as our own.
I recount this little snippet of my youth because it ties into a larger movement building momentum for quite some time; it’s one that seeks to upend national tradition and even identity. A college in the heartland losing its mascot to p.c. sensibilities is just one of countless outbreaks of this spreading disease. And the latest, and most powerful wave of social justice fanaticism has injected the drive to stamp out so many vestiges of our national identity with “woke” steroids. It’s become obvious by now that the pretext of the BLM “police reform” has served as cover for the larger forces of bitterness, divisiveness, hyper-sensitivity, and outright nihilism rampaging through our country with impunity. One wonders how is it that what were, ostensibly, protests against specific acts of police brutality has now expanded into a movement to wipe out every memory and tradition and historical figure before Rosa Parks? When exactly did expressing outrage over an obvious murder of one man by one cop morph into a crusade to upend the entire American experience root and stem and replant it in this new woke Year Zero?
Those of us who went to the University of Illinois back in the day might have seen this coming. Mascots, and the “offense” they give to select groups of self-appointed aggrieved, have been the canary in the coal mine for some time. That story I told you? No more. Chief Illiniwek and the halftime ritual that was one of the traditions that actually sold me on my alma mater? Gone. Buh-bye, Chief.
In fact, this college football season – if it happens at all – will mark the thirteenth year of the Chief’s banishment from our campus by the NCAA for being a mascot “hostile and abusive” to Native American sensibilities. (His last official performance took place in February 2007 at a home basketball game.)
How did this come to pass? It’s interesting and relevant to today in that it is a revealing microcosm of the greater movement of wiping out monuments and memories occurring nation-wide. And how quickly, frighteningly so, attitudes can shift and lurch suddenly and violently leftwards almost overnight.
Apparently those who took it upon themselves to speak for an Indian nation long vanished found Chief Illinwek’s very existence so traumatizing, so insulting, that they forced the NCAA to coerce my school into killing this 80-year tradition or be banned from hosting any post-season activities. So the political correctness wave that would eventually build to a tsunami washed over my school, sweeping away a most cherished tradition when it receded. Courtesy of those who took it upon themselves to feel offense on behalf of others.
Nor did the leaders of this anti-Chief movement, like those tearing down statues today (more on that in a moment), have any grasp of the history of the very people for whom they assumed the mantel of feeling offense. Forget that the tribes of the Illinois confederacy were wiped out or displaced by the end of the eighteenth century by more powerful Native American enemies. Were any of the student protesters driving the movement to eradicate the Chief even descended from the Illini? Not to my knowledge. But, as we have learned from so many wealthy progressives who live in sheltered, often racially homogenous leafy neighborhoods far removed from the disastrous consequences of their own enlightened attitudes being translated into policy imposed on others, one’s direct standing on an issue matters little when there’s a p.c. crusade afoot.
The speed of the change in attitude was quite breathtaking where Chief Illinwek was concerned. For decades the closest living descendants of the confederacy, the Peoria, who were relocated to Oklahoma in the nineteenth century apparently never had an issue with the Chief for over seven decades. As late as 1995, Don Giles, then Chief of the Peoria Tribe, said, “We’re proud that the University of Illinois…is drawing on that background of our having been there. And what more honor could they pay us?” But just five short years later, in 2000, the tribe’s position radically changed after the new chief, Ron Froman, met with several Native American student groups at the U of I. Froman apparently just needed to be told that he was offended, and even offered this historically dubious viewpoint: “I don’t think [the Chief’s creation] was to honor us, because, hell, they ran our butts out of Illinois.” That the Illini were wiped out by rival tribes which included the Sauk, Fox, Sioux, Chippewa, Ottawa, Cherokee and others well before any white men could “run their butts out of Illinois” matters little when there’s a opportunity to manufacture synthetic outrage to help the indignation industry churn out its favorite product: identity politics.
We are seeing that same radical shift in attitude now, with monuments being torn down all over the nation. Mascots aside, the movement really started off with the drive to banish Confederate memorials from the public square. This is a legitimate beef in my view. I cannot imagine being an African-American in 2020 having to every day pass by bronze or stone celebrations of the men who, had their side won the Civil War, would have happily overseen my continued enslavement. Indeed, men who fought to win independence for a new nation that referred to itself as “The Slave-Holding Confederacy” and made no bones about the fact that its government, as its Vice-President shamelessly declared, was “based upon this great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” So, sure, I totally get that.
But, as with so many movements, it never ends at the original demands. The first question that would be asked by the masked marauders after they banished every mascot and tore down every last Confederate statue would be, “alright, who’s next?” This is because for many of them, the idea of “offense” is but a pretext to exercise their nihilistic impulses. It’s not mascots or the Southern Confederacy they hate per se. It’s the United States itself, our laws, our system of government, our mercantilism, our national pride, our civil rights, our traditions and history, our very essence. We know this because we already know the answer to “who’s next?” Everyone! As the leader of the murderous Red Legs proclaimed in The Outlaw Josey Wales: “Doin’ right ain’t got no end.” (This wholly un-self-aware line elicited a mocking belly laugh from the wise old Granny listening from her porch. As it should have.)
And as we have learned, the mob’s zealous sense of moral supremacy is only matched by their shameful ignorance of the country that someone, or some institution, has taught them to hate so much.
The woke crowd is so militant in their anarchism that goes far beyond just protesting police brutality, or even “systemic racism” that they are literally upending or defacing statues of anyone who chose to be born before 1965. And I do mean anyone. Consider this. In Boston, a monument to the 54th Massachusetts, the first African-American Union regiment armed and sent into battle in the Civil War, men who literally fought to preserve their own freedom, was recently defaced. One might argue “yeah well they were only allowed to be led by white officers so it’s still a symbol of systemic—” Yawn! What these historical ignoramuses do not consider is that the white officers who volunteered to lead these men of color, from the idealistic Col. Robert Gould Shaw, son of a wealthy Bostonian who could have pulled the right strings to keep his son as far away from the front as possible, down to the company commanders all knew full well that if captured on the battlefield, the Confederates would not extend them the courtesy of prisoner status. Rather, the Confederate government had made it very clear in written proclamations that any white Union officer caught leading black troops would be considered leading a slave revolt, and summarily executed. Other than carrying the regimental flag, there was probably no more dangerous duty in the Civil War than being a white Union officer leading black troops in combat. And they knew it. Yet they stayed, despite offers of transfers if they so chose. How many of the masked men who attack statues in the dead of night could have mustered even one iota of such courage or conviction to the cause of advancing racial justice?
Not to be outdone by their laughably foolish compatriots, another woke mob actually vandalized a monument to, ready for this one?…Frederick Douglass! Did any of these vandalizing buffoons even know who Douglass was? And why not? In their entire drift through our K-through-college graduate education system did they never learn of this extraordinary man who went from being a run-away slave to becoming the national face of abolition in the North? A man who met with presidents, governors, congressmen, and tirelessly, passionately lobbied for equal rights for his black brothers and sisters. Indeed, the first black man to receive a vote for President at a major political party convention (Republican). This man was, in fact, the absolutely antithetical embodiment of racism, then as well as now. They are like the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, when presented with the evidence that the woman they’d captured was not a witch, nevertheless screamed, “Burn her anyway!” Yeah. Actually a part of me hopes that those fools who attacked the memory of Mr. Douglass had no idea who he was. Ignorance can be fixed with a few updated history texts and curricula. But if they did know him, and decided to burn him anyway then something much more seismic and existentially threatening to the very fabric of this nation is afoot. And it must be taken seriously.
Two generations of unrelenting and unchallenged leftist indoctrination in our schools, our universities, our media, our culture, have culminated in the scenes of brave African-American freedom fighters and a famous run-away-slave-turned-vocal abolitionist being attacked by people who claim to do so in their minority group’s name. There is something so unbelievable in this that one would think these stories ripped out of Babylon Bee or The Onion. If only.
Again, those in my college experienced the first red and itching lesions of the woke psoriasis now spreading across the body of this great nation back when The Chief became persona non grata…for giving offense to those no longer even here.
But not all is lost. Common sense does still sprout up here and there. Fortunately for the students of Florida State University, their Indian symbol, Chief Osceola, was allowed to live by the NCAA. Why? Because (get this now) the Seminole Tribe of Florida, who are still alive and well, find nothing offensive about him. Who could have imagined that?
This does not mean that sensibilities, if wide-spread and reasonable, should be ignored. As I said, I do believe Confederate monuments fall under this category making them worthy of public re-examination and removal if it is so voted. And even where Native-Americans are concerned, are there some monikers that may be insulting? Is the term “redskin” the equivalent of deeply offensive “darkie” in the eyes of Native-Americans? After all, is it not often the Indian yin to the white man’s “paleface” yang? Polls are ambiguous, and one can find any to support the notion that it is or is not. But in the realm of re-naming the Washington football team, especially one that represents our nation’s capital and thus all Americans in a way, maybe a compromise ought to be reached. My suggestion is to rename the team the Washington Red Tails, in honor of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black World War II fighter group who brazenly painted the tails of their aircraft scarlet to announce their presence before serving up a helping of pain stew to Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Not only does it honor a group that all Americans admire, but it even keeps the “Red” in the name. At least we can talk about it without burning down FedEx Field.
That would be a rational approach. Indeed it would be a way to both honor our past, and celebrate our more diverse present. But rationality is the farthest thing from the mob’s mind. At first I would have called those who feel moral imperative to deface and destroy that which they do not understand, and do not care to, but just know that it offends them somehow, cry-babies. But that doesn’t give this new wave of social upheaval enough import, for it is much more of a threat to our national fiber than that. Any student of far-left or far-right revolutions, two sides of the same coin, whether they originated in Munich, Petrograd, or Beijing, knows the pattern. The similarities in tactics and rhetoric between the fascism/communism of old, and the masked thuggery of today are eerie: public denunciations, cancelling out those they brand as enemies of the movement and ruining their lives, weaponizing the law in an uneven application to punish political adversaries, street violence, total disregard for the rule of law in order to achieve a new cultural Utopia. And those who have actually read a history book, which I can say with 99% confidence does not include the members of the woke mob, know that this pattern never ends well. Nazism begat the Holocaust. Stalinism the Gulag. Maoism the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward. Throw in the Khmer Rouge for good measure and you have some pretty in-your-face lessons coming at you. But that is neither here nor there. There’s work to be done. A country to be erased and redrawn in the image of the many ‘isms’ that make up a faculty lounge lexicon.
So what was the canary in the coal mine of my university losing its mascot? What did Chief Illiniwek’s eradication portend? It showed that we have unleashed a wave of criminally uneducated, un-challenged children upon this land whose ignorance is matched only by their sense of absolute righteousness in their cause. And worse, those of us who managed to break free of the event horizon of the education and cultural indoctrination black hole are nevertheless left with a wariness to tread lightly and leave no offending footprints should someone, somewhere, with time on their hands and a Twitter mob at the ready, come a-calling. How can this but stifle healthy debate–which is the life-blood of a free people.
I may be labeled as racist for even expressing in an open forum these sentiments, but I’ll just call you an anti-German/Irish bigot and be on my way. Oh, and perhaps I’ll petition to ban any future airing of The Godfather for using the offensive term “Kraut-Mick.” Too bad if it’s your favorite movie. I have feelings to consider.
When I first pondered the Chief’s demise in 2007, I thought that maybe I was reading too much into what was then a novel p.c. wave. But now I know better. I see the anarchy across the land with its totalitarian proclivities as the demise of this nation should this dialogue-crippling and balkanizing movement continue. Thirteen years ago it targeted a venerated tradition at an island of learning in a sea of corn and soybeans that was doing no harm to anyone–save those who seek to re-create this country in their own narrow and paradoxically intolerant image. Now the dam has burst. And the wave has come to wash us all away. But even in my last drowning breath I will defiantly cry out: LONG LIVE THE CHIEF! And if this offends you, well, as Dennis Leary says: “Life’s tough. Wear a helmet.”
Brad Schaeffer’s is a commodities trader and author. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, and others. His acclaimed World War Two novel Of Another Time And Place [Post Hill/Simon & Schuster, 2018] is available for purchase or kindle/audible download.