Gimme’ a Co-Cola

Excerpt from an Unpublished Memoir

By Anthony King

© Copyright 2013 Standpoint Communications Corp

All Rights Reserved

may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission

Co-Cola (Coca-Cola, to the Northerner) was considered the soft drink of record in the South, while coke (little “c”) denoted the generic panoply of carbonated beverage, as in, “What kind of coke would you like; I can offer you a Co-Cola or an Orange Crush?”

Dope was also a universal synonym for Co-Cola, as in, “Whew, I’m white-eyed, I’d give anything for a cold Dope.” Now, the derivation of this street talk was plain and simple: when Atlanta pharmacist John Styth Pemberton first concocted Coca-Cola back in 1886, he knew a thing or two about pick-me-ups. For that, he included three parts coca leaves to one part cola nut — lining up with many so-called patent medicines containing cocaine, which was, after all, perfectly legal. In fact, cocaine content was routinely flacked as a benign substitute for alcohol.

Well, in 1903 the New York Tribune published an editorial linking the narcotic content of Coca-Cola with the rise in black urban crime, calling for legal action against the Atlanta corporation, which, by then, manufactured and marketed the beverage in every state and territory of the United States. Notwithstanding the unmistakably racist premise of the Tribune’s allegation, Coca-Cola found itself in a P.R. maelstrom. Shortly thereafter, the syrup recipe was changed to include only so-called spent coca leaves, which imparted only flavor with little, if any, narcotic content. Coke’s advertising also took a hard shift from its medicinal claims to the cheery exhortation: “The pause that refreshes”.  Nonetheless, it never shook its narcotic moorings in the vernacular of the rank and file Southerner, as in, “The Dope Wagon ain’t run in over a week, and the store’s run plumb out of Co-Colas”.

The term “pop” for a carbonated soft drink, was a term altogether unknown in the post-war South. In fact, the first time I recollect hearing the usage was in 1966 when I was a freshman in college, owing to the heavy contingent of Northeasterners among the student body. I recall the hilarity of the first time being asked if I wanted a “pop” —  to which I instinctively ducked for cover, fully expecting a roundhouse punch in the face. To this day, I find the term a Yankified affectation and invariably feign ignorance of the appellation, to the raised eyebrows of the hoards of cultural interlopers.

All that noted, the general store in Resaca featured a cavernous drink chest containing every kind of coke known to man. The colorful bottles in exotic shapes were arranged categorically in a bath of chilled water which was circulated by a bubbling pump on one end of the box. You opened the cooler from the top and plunged your hand in the frigid water to fish out your selection. And Lordy was that water cold, by contrast with the hot, suffocating air in the store! The opener was on the side of the box. I collected bottle caps for their gaudy colorful appeal, and the proprietor of the store would save them for me. My favorite was NuGrape, a heavily carbonated syrupy grape flavor with an obligatory dollop of caffeine.

But Grandmother’s coke of choice was Dr. Pepper, which she purchased by the big wooden twenty-four-count case. They were kept on the back porch so she could maintain close inventory of the empties, which, of course, were returned for deposit in those days. She had bought into the Dr. Pepper ad campaign, hook, line, and sinker — a magnificent marketing coup to monetize the addictive double-whammy of sugar and caffeine. Even back then, their print media buy must have been horrific, as they  regularly booked the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Ten. Two. And four. — Dr. Pepper ads ballyhooed, with the illustration of a clock, the face of which was blank except for the times of 10-, 2-, and 4-o’clock — the thrice daily adult allowance of a ten ounce bottle. Even the “Dr.” part was an overt attempt to elevate the beverage to pharmaceutical status, although the period after the “Dr” was quietly retired in the 1950s after some heated go-rounds with the Federal Trade Commission regarding so-called “health claims.” Notwithstanding, Grandmother never missed a dosage.


Calhoun, GA 10/07/13

Trail of Tears Diaspora 1838-2013 (175th Anniversary)

DISCLAIMER: Shitepoke.com blog attempts to authenticate its content. Disclosure of substantive errors is solicited and will be acknowledged. Accordingly, readers are encouraged to explore and enjoy this content, in its own right, but to always obtain additional sources for historical or academic research.

On contemplating modern America's original sin - the Cherokee holocaust of 1838

Remembering the Trail of Tears Diaspora 1838

  

The problem of writing the social history of the Native peoples of the Southeast is formidable. One has to simultaneously represent both synchronic social and cultural systems and the diachronic change that transforms them. One has to both represent the exotic world of the Southeastern chiefdoms and the European world-system that impinged upon them as storms brewed in other men's lands’ and in time destroyed, dissolved, or enveloped by them. And we must do it with the merest fragments of archaeological and oral evidence. As cultural and social beings, the Native peoples of the Southeast have been fundamentally transformed by history several times over, as have we all. If the Native peoples of the Americas are ever to be more than moral fodder for various ideologies — whether left, right, or postmodern — they must find their proper place in the social history of the modern world. Since 1976 some progress has been made on this front by archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and historians, but much more remains to be done.            

Charles M. Hudson, 2000, Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History Emeritus, University of Georgia, Athens; authority on the history and culture of the indigenous peoples of Georgia and the Southeastern United States.

What we know of aboriginals in Northwest Georgia

Aboriginal native Americans belonging to the Muskogee tribe are the first historically documented modern human inhabitants of present day Northwest Georgia. While their archival culture dates from about 1,000 BCE, modern anthropologists estimate their ancestors’ arrival as far back as 10,000 BCE, contemporaneous with the first farming in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the birthplace of writing and the wheel.

According to Muskogean tradition: in the beginning, the earth was a water world, awash in a churning blue ocean. The only land was a solitary promontory called Nunne Chaha, composed of brilliant red earth. On the summit dwelled Esaugetuh Emissee — the Master of Breath — who created the first humans from fists-full of native red clay. Their progeny, everlastingly bearing the rich cinnabar pigmentation, would ultimately people the ever-expanding terrestrial planet as the waters inexorably withdrew.

While uncannily reminiscent of Genesis from the creation myth standpoint, geologists would no doubt concur that the Muskogean shamans practically nailed the earth science part, unlike Moses, who allegedly penned the Judeo-Christian version, featuring a primeval garden, a talking snake, a misogynistic smack down, and a homicidal child. But, hey, that was only the bollixed exhibition game. Ultimately the Abrahamic God Almighty, opted for a total do-over, commandeering a 480-year-old taxonomist-cum-mariner, by the name of Noah as his clean-up hitter.

And then came the Euros

While Hernando de Soto penetrated Northwest Georgia in a failed 1540 expedition, he mercifully died in the process, sparing North America the depredation of the Iberian onslaught which ultimately conquered and subjugated South America.

Fast-forward some 230 years, contemporaneous with the Declaration of Independence, The Great Valley, in present-day North Georgia, belonged to the Cherokee Nation, an intelligent and resourceful tribe that had already adopted much European convention, including the ownership of black slaves — to be fair — by only a handful of high-up clan leaders. After all it was perfectly legal. Why hold them to higher standards than white people?

New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, strategically sited where the Conasagua and Coosawatee Rivers converge to form the Oostanaula, near present day Calhoun, was a big-time center of government and commerce. Amenities included a weekly newspaper, printed in the Cherokee language by means of a brilliant phonetic syllabus invented by Chief Sequoyah — who already had English, German, and French under his belt.

Sequoyah (English: George Gist or George Guess) (c.1767-1843), inventor of the Cherokee Syllabary. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of a non-literate people independently created an effective writing system. He was also the namesake of California's giant Sequoia sempervirens redwood tree.

All that started to unwind in 1828 when gold was discovered on Cherokee land. While white men never needed an excuse, they now had a glittering reason to appropriate the Cherokee’s property.

And so it was in 1830 the U.S. Congress passed the enabling legislation: The Indian Removal Act. This gave then President Andrew Jackson, a rabid proponent of the bill, free reign to oblige the powerful moneyed interests chaffing at the bit to lay claim to all things Indian.

The Cherokee Nation, under the brilliant leadership of Chief John Ross (himself only one-eighth Cherokee), challenged the constitutionality of the legislation, all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 1832, in a landmark decision (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia) rendered by Chief Justice John Marshall, the high court declared:  … the forced removal of the entire Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homes in the South Eastern United States to be illegal, unconstitutional, and against [all previous] treaties made.

You see Marshall was a dreaded activist judge — translation: he actually presided over adjudication of the facts relative to the nuts and bolts of the United States Constitution and was not really into rubber-stamping a verdict kowtowing to screeching majoritarian sentiment and the bully pulpit of the President.

In utter contempt for the separation of powers, Jackson, had this to say about that: "[John] Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."

This seemed a tad backwards, as it is the President who swears to uphold federal law. But hey, we’re talking Indians here.

Despite the slam-dunk legal vindication, when Jackson — in the same year — was reelected to a second term by a landslide, the Cherokees, no political rookies, knew they were in proverbial deep shit. With the felonies of bigamy and murder already under his belt, pogrom was no moral obstacle to the preening and defiant Old Hickory.

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), with the felonies of bigamy and murder already under his belt, pogrom was no moral obstacle to the preening and defiant Old Hickory. Jackson was a tireless proponent of violence as resolution to conflict. Daniel O'Brien, author of The Five Most Bad-Assed Presidents of All Times, sums up Jackson's deportment in a stunning economy of words: "He was a fucking lunatic."

But Jackson was not alone in his fervor to rid Georgia of the Cherokees. Governor Wilson Lumpkin who took office in 1831 was famously anti-Indian. Under the patrician guise of noblesse oblige, Lumpkin was piously convinced that the two cultures could not live together peaceably. 

His justification in this contention was that white people would continue to take advantage of the indigenous — not exactly a ringing endorsement of the rule of law. He did magnanimously opine that once removed to Oklahoma, the noble savages might acculturate themselves and apply for statehood on their own at some distant point in the future — cold comfort to the Cherokees for what was about to happen.

For starters Lumpkin rammed through legislation in 1831 to subdivide all Cherokee Territory in Northwest Georgia — some 6,500 square miles — into ten separate counties, officially annexing the land into the state, in bald-face defiance of The Supreme Court of the United States. But Lumpkin could have cared less, as president Jackson had his political back-side.

Georgia Governor Wilson Lumpkin (1783-1870)

 

Map of Northwest Georgia circa 1830

 

State of Georgia's 1832 Annex of Cherokee holdings in Northwest Georgia, subdivided into ten new counties, in bald-face defiance of the Supreme Court of the United States. Between 1837 and 1857, these counties were further subdivided to create Catoosa, Chatooga, Dade, Dawson, Fannin, Gordon, Milton, Pickens, Towns, Walker, and Whitfield Counties. (Cass County was renamed Bartow County in 1861, and Milton County went bankrupt and was annexed into Fulton County in 1932.)

But Lumpkin's legislative centerpiece was the Georgia Land Lottery and Gold Lottery Acts of 1832, the final of seven separate uniquely state-sponsored larcenies between 1805 and 1832 which divvied up and retitled some 45,000 square miles of Indian land to white European settlers, more than three-quarters of the present state of Georgia.

This last tranche of contiguous Northwest Georgia totaled some 285 million acres, composed of 160-acre land lots and 40-acre gold lots, so designated as the state deemed deposits of gold to be likely, thus upping their relative value.

Those allowed to participate in the lotteries were required to pay a fee – $18 for a 160-acre land lot and $10 for a 40-acre gold lot — according to the qualifications below. Each lot was numbered, committed to a slip of paper, and placed in a barrel. Because there were more persons qualified to draw than the number of lots, the barrel was inflated with blank pieces of paper compensating for the total participants. Those drawing real lots were deemed fortunate draws. Those drawing blank pieces of paper were out of luck.

1832 Land Lottery Eligibility

·       Bachelor, 18 years or over, 3-year residence in Georgia, citizen of the United States — 1 draw

·       Married man with wife and/or minor son under 18 and/or unmarried daughter, 3-year residence in Georgia, citizen of United States — 2 draws

·       Widow, 3-year residence in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Wife and/or child, 3-year residence in Georgia, of husband and/or father absent from state for 3 years — 1 draw

·       Family (one or two) of orphans under 18 years, residence since birth in state — 1 draw

·       Family (three or more) of orphans under 18 years, residence since birth in state — 2 draws

·       Widow, husband killed or died in Revolutionary War, War of 1812, or Indian Wars, 3-year residence in Georgia — 2 draws

·       Orphan, father killed in Revolutionary War, War of 1812, or Indian War — 2 draws

·       Wounded or disabled veteran of War of 1812 or Indian Wars, unable to work — 2 draws

·       Veteran of Revolutionary War — 2 draws

·       Veteran of Revolutionary War who had been a fortunate drawer in any previous lottery — 1 draw

·       Child or children of a convict, 3-year residence in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Male idiots, lunatics or insane, deaf and dumb, or blind, over 10 years and under 18 years, 3-year residence in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Female idiots, insane or lunatics or deaf and dumb or blind, over 10 years, 3-year residence in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Family (one or two) of illegitimates under 18 years, residence since birth in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Family (three or more) of illegitimates under 18 years, residence since birth in Georgia — 2 draws

1832 Gold Lottery Eligibility

·       Bachelor, 18 years or over, 3-year residence in Georgia, citizen of United States — 1 draw

·       Widow, 3-year residence in Georgia — 1 draw

·       Family of orphans, 3-year residence in Georgia, citizen of United States — 2 draws

·       Married man, head of family, 3-year residence in Georgia (officers in the army or navy of the United States, 3-year residence not required), citizen of United States — 2 draws

But Lumpkin wasn’t done yet. Under his executive order, the Georgia militia proceeded to seize New Echota, forcing the Tribal Council into exile in East Tennessee where they attempted to conduct business for the next three years. Meanwhile, white lottery winners poured into Cherokee land by the thousands.

And, indeed, President Jackson was not done yet either. He cut a deal with an old Cherokee buddy by the name of Major Ridge — who, with some few hundred Cherokees, had thrown-in with then General Jackson in the Creek War back in 1813.

Ridge, a wealthy slave-owning planter, presented himself as the official representative of the Cherokees, whom he certainly was not — not that it mattered to Jackson. When the U.S. government sets out in bad faith, there are no historic limits to the treachery. 

Cherokee turncoat Major Ridge (1771-1839) rubber-samped the scandalous treaty to broker $5 million in move-money - for which he paid dearly, as he was promptly assassinated by a gang of young Cherokees on his first trip back to Georgia..

And so it was, in 1835 the Treaty of New Echota was penned, swapping the lush Great Valley for a large tract of property in the northeastern corner of unincorporated territory which is now Oklahoma — considered worthless prairie — plus $5 million (less than $300 for every man woman and child) in move money, which Ridge, in another act of selflessness, agreed to broker. Since CNN was about 150 years away, the rank and file Cherokee was in the dark as to this spectacular larceny.

In 1836 Jackson rammed the treaty through Congress by a margin of one vote, effectively trumping Chief Justice Marshall’s earlier ruling. When word got out, 16,000 royally pissed-off Cherokees signed a petition of protest which was delivered to Congress in an impassioned letter by John Ross on December 28, 1836 — a remarkable accomplishment in those days. 

Cherokee Chief John Ross (1790-1866)

Ross’ majestic phrases read from the floor of the House of Representatives stand alone in their eloquence.

… By the stipulations of this instrument [Treaty of New Echota], we are despoiled of our private possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped of every attribute of freedom and eligibility for legal self-defense. Our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family! We have neither land nor home, nor resting place that can be called our own. And this is effected by the provisions of a compact which assumes the venerated, the sacred appellation of treaty …

… We are overwhelmed! Our hearts are sickened, our utterance is paralyzed, when we reflect on the condition in which we are placed, by the audacious practices of unprincipled men, who have managed their stratagems with so much dexterity as to impose on the Government of the United States, in the face of our earnest, solemn, and reiterated protestations …

… On your kindness, on your humanity, on your compassion, on your benevolence, we rest our hopes. To you we address our reiterated prayers. Spare our people! Spare the wreck of our prosperity! Let not our deserted homes become the monuments of our desolation! But we forbear! We suppress the agonies which wring our hearts, when we look at our wives, our children, and our venerable sires! We restrain the forebodings of anguish and distress, of misery and devastation and death, which must be the attendants on the execution of this ruinous compact …

But, the Cherokees were out of luck, Jackson having, at last, gotten what he was itching for.

A few hundred stoic Cherokees, knowing the jig was up, voluntarily moved to Oklahoma, including Major Ridge who promptly collected the move money — a bad move on his part, as he was promptly assassinated by a gang of young Cherokees on his first trip back to Georgia.

The remaining Cherokees dug in their heels in defiance of the bogus treaty — adopting the position that they had been screwed over, inside and out. In 1838, Commander-in-Chief Jackson, decided to play hardball. In the ensuing genocide, 17,000 aboriginals — men, women, and children — were rounded up like livestock by a stunning overkill of 7,000 Federal troops under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott. Deemed the Trail of Tears, over 4,000 Cherokees died en route to Oklahoma.

Private John G. Burnett, a deployed mounted infantryman, noted in his journal: … I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into 645 wagons and started toward the west … On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure ...

Trail of Tears route maps tracing the various routes Cherokees were evicted

And there you have it: if not the nadir of U.S. history, one would be hard pressed to one-up it in terms of unrepentant depredation.

But the U.S. of A. wasn’t done yet. Cherokee Nation sovereignty and tribal government in the Oklahoma Territory was promptly dissolved by fiat in 1907 when Oklahoma became a state. It would take until 1934 and endless court fights to attain reservation status — the unofficial American gulag.

That their Oklahoma reservation later proved a mother lode of high grade crude — black gold — is living proof that God has a sophisticated sense of irony. That this American Holocaust took place, gave me an early object lesson in civics: if you’re a fan of social justice, you had better asterisk that all-men-are-created-equal nonsense they spoon-feed you in grammar school. 

Best I can tell, from my read of U.S. history and my personal hands-on experience — there is precious little self-evident about those so-called truths. By point of fact, craven politicians are itching to put the Bill of Rights up for majority vote — and will do so in a New York minute if not watched like a hawk.

And thus - on this Memorial Day 2013 - we commemorate the 175th anniversary of the infamous Trail of Tears: E Pluribus Unum.

Shitepoke.com May 27, 2013

Calhoun GA

Rome's Investment in the Americas Hits Pay Dirt

DISCLAIMER: Shitepoke.com blog attempts to authenticate its content. Disclosure of substantive errors is solicited and will be acknowledged. Accordingly, readers are encouraged to explore and enjoy this content, in its own right, but to always obtain additional sources for historical or academic research.
 

This week pundits applauded the 118 Vatican Red Hats for selecting Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the 266th pontiff over its billion communicants. While the stilted white-smoke rigmarole is billed as the earthly machinations of the Holy Trinity, it is of course, the most vulgar of politics, calculated to insinuate the greatest pay-off in the global collection plate, commonly known as the Roman Catholic Church.

After a putative 2013 years, the prelates loosed their European bonds, held their collective upturned Holy Roman Empire noses, and anointed a Cardinal from the Americas. But it was a politically safe decision. You see Bergoglio is Italian by family and culture. So the putative leap of faith wasn't, in fact, much of a leap at all:

After a half-millennium investment in Western world human capital, it was was pay dirt time - time to cash in on the stunning demographics of Latin America fecundity. But I get way ahead of myself.

The stunning fecundity of Latin American Catholics has created a sea change in Roman Catholic demographics - and consequently potential cash flow.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Rewind 499 years.

In 1514, at the callow age of 18, Hernando de Soto signed on as cabin boy to 74-year-old Pedro Arias Dávila, who at the behest of close friend and consort to Queen Isabella I of Spain, launched a flotilla of 19 ships and some 1,500 men to present day Columbia — the single largest colonial European expedition ever undertaken to the then-new world. 

Hernando de Soto 1496-1542

From that point, de Soto’s career sustained vertical takeoff. As it turned out, Dávila would become overlord of virtually all Spanish Colonial holdings from Peru to Nicaragua, where he died in splendiferous retirement at the age of 91 (Methuselahan by 16^th century life expectancy), the direct beneficiary of untold riches, unrepentantly plundered from the treasuries of aboriginal societies, under the banner of the cross and the approbation of the Spanish throne.

Upon Dávila’s death in 1531, de Soto threw in as captain with Francisco Pizarro — again some twenty-five years his senior — in perhaps the most horrifically shameless chapter in European colonial annals: the conquest and looting of the Inca Empire, situated in present day Peru.

Upon returning to Spain in 1534, de Soto was accorded procuring credit for the Inca conquest. As honorarium, in addition to a so-called mounted soldier’s share of untold booty across South and Central America, the King of Spain, Charles V, awarded de Soto 724 marks of gold (about 83,000 troy ounces) — worth, give or take, $75 million on today’s market — not a bad net worth for a 38-year-old. But Charles V — titular Holy Roman Emperor and divine attaché to then-reigning Pope Paul III — had other things in mind for young de Soto.

It seems Charles, a Flemish-born prince-king — who never learned to speak fluent Spanish after inheriting the crown as a teenager, on his daddy’s side — had been badly burned by a succession of failed expeditions that had proved a sieve to the royal treasury. The worst of which was a rookie conquistador, Pánfilo de Narváez, who in 1527 managed to lose all but four of his entourage of 600, including troops, officers, spouses of officers, and slaves. 

So it was, in 1539 Hernando de Soto launched his first, and mercifully only, expedition into the present day United States. Inexplicably, he decided to rely on the prior reconnaissance of Narváez. 

After meandering up the Florida west coast and looping inland through present day Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, he wound up hopelessly lost somewhere along the Mississippi-Louisiana border, where he perished in 1542. His failed expedition fell apart and finally made it back to Mexico City. For that clodpoll decision on de Soto's part, providence indeed blessed North America.

For had de Soto succeeded in his mission, we might very well be speaking Spanish today, denizens of a hemispheric Latin America, composed of a shabby patchwork of bled-out, over populated, chronically impoverished, and systemically corrupt tin-pot dictatorships.

Speculative route of Hernando de Soto's final excellent adventure. Having billed himself as an immortal Sun God, his entourage was no doubt chagrined at his earthly passing - probably of malaria. To quell insurrection among the remaining troops, his lieutenants purportedly wrapped his body in a blanket and sank it in the Mississippi River in the dead of night. Those left, beat it to Mexico City, ending the venture.

Nonetheless, the Iberians managed to conquer and subjugate virtually all of Central and South America.

But the conquistadores did not act alone in their crimes against humanity, for they enabled an equally virulent co-conspirator – The Roman Catholic Church. 

Not content with the occasion to proselytize and indenture an estimated 30 million¹ aboriginal recruits in the name of Christ, the merger of the Vatican and the Spanish throne provided ever more license to depredate natives and their own countrymen alike.

The enabling liturgy was the Requerimiento, a burlesque piece of Roman Catholic dogmata asserting that God almighty, through his intercessory the Pope and Vicar of Christ, held authority over the all the earth, and that the Inter Caetera — a Papal Bull of 1493 by Pope Alexander VI —ceded title over the Americas to the Spanish throne.

Now to be perfectly balanced, the Requerimiento was supposed to be delivered aloud to the subject natives, affording them the coveted opportunity of accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. More often it was recited from the bow of a moored ship, empty beachhead, or at best to a gaping uncomprehending assemblage of aboriginals, shall we say, rather unschooled in courtly Castilian Spanish.

To the conquistadores the Requerimiento provided a tidy ecclesiastical – and political – loophole, framing American aboriginals in the godless state of having rejected the Holy Trinity. That the Native Americans were culturally clueless as to their transgression of failing to supplicate Christ did not deter the pious and imperious Spaniards in the slightest. Accordingly, any death, destruction, or pillaging was, de jure, their own fault — the mortal consequence of fiat paganism.

As Richard Dawkins flatly observes in The God Delusion, a half millennium later: “What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which [they] make up the details as they go along. It is [all] just shamelessly invented.”

Pope Philip II (1527-1598) would ultimately unleash the legendary atrocities of genocidal maniac Tomás de Torquemada – Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition – on the new world colonies. 

Having presided over some 44,000 heretic trials on the European Continent, with more than 5,000 executions under his belt, in 1569 the first two field offices of El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición were established in New Spain (Mexico) and Peru.²  By 1610, royal bureaus of the Inquisition were installed in every Spanish colonial diocese, from Hispaniola to the Philippines.

Re-inactment of Spanish Inquisition tribunal

Universal and unrepentant Roman Catholic fealty was the joint papal and royal injunction. The prime transgressors in Spain, Jews and Muslims – hardly a factor in the new world – were summarily held accountable as enemies of Rome and the Spanish crown. 

For that, dragnet kangaroo courts for alleged infidels were conducted by minions of the inquisition, independent of, and unaccountable to, secular authority. Suspects were arrested and relentlessly interrogated without semblance of due process. The antidote for failure to voluntarily confess and repent was torture.

Routinely detainees would be placed naked on a potro, a bedlike frame with straps from side-to-side. Arms and legs were strapped with leather bands and tightened by turns of a wheel, inflicting excruciating pain. Typically, a detainee would confess his or her infidelity upon the first few turns. 

Alternatively, the medieval antecedent to water boarding might be administered by cramming a rag in the detainee’s mouth and saturating it with copious amounts of water. Reflexive swallowing would cause the prisoner's abdomen to become excruciatingly distended.

500 years' later, the George W. Bush Administration popularized waterboarding as a method of torture - no doubt reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

Failing that, a makeshift trial and public execution was the final solution for those who manifestly refused to submit to the inquisitors – and there were manifold thousands. For that, native Americans under Spanish conquest were terrorized, en masse, to adopt Roman Catholicism under the most outrageous contrivances of duress.

That Latin America stands preponderantly Roman Catholic today – the rank and file slavishly subservient to the stultifying and impoverishing dogma ­– serves as testimony to the innate depravity of the merger of church and state. 

Such is the atrocious legacy of the Iberians in the new world, indelibly writ in the embarrassing social and economic diametrics between the North and South Americas to this very day. 

But, alas, 500 years' of imposed human misery and servitude finally paid off for the Roman Catholic Church in the installation of Francis I.

As Julius Caesar might have said: Habemus Papam

Shitepoke.com March 16, 2013

Calhoun GA

¹ Estimated number of indigenous peoples in Latin America upon the arrival of Europeans: http://answers.encyclopedia.com/question/many-south-american-natives-were-there-before-coming-europeans-130159.html

² http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/037/6.html; http://www.bede.org.uk/inquisition.html