Remember Bowling Green!

(By Cyril Blubberpuss, Conservative-American)

(To: letters@theatlantic.com)

Huzzah, hear hear and other archaic exclamations of joy! It's about time someone got this narrative correct and assigned blame on the other side! Three cheers for the Atlantic and for Ian Bogost for his blast of fresh air regarding the hideous mistreatment of white Catholic schoolboys at the hands of bloodthirsty Indians and black Hebrews!

     It is not the first time history had been made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King in 1963 showed his gratitude to the man who freed his people by having a demonstration on the very steps of that memorial where he talked about a dream he had once. And now here we are 56 years later and fighting the same battle- Ensuring that Caucasian-Americans get the same Affirmative Action rights as everyone else!

     Your man Ian Bogost rightfully said that we cannot afford to blindly trust in viral videos. If we are to continue doing this, anarchy would reign supreme and valuable context would be defenestrated with the industry of a stockbroker during Black October 1929. In fact, I myself do not believe videos ever tell the whole story.

     Take the Michael Slager tape, for instance. Surreptitiously hiding behind a tree, some gangbanger took it upon himself to film a police officer in the commission of his duties. Those duties included shooting Walter Scott in the back six times as he fled the scene. On its face, I'll admit, yes, it looked bad. But if we had been given another opportunity for context, say, the entirety of Walter Scott's lawless life being committed to videotape as on The Truman Show, eventually we surely would have seen something that could've possibly warranted a Judge Dredd death sentence decades down the road!

     Instead, what we were given was a brief cell phone video of a black man being shot in the back then the man who killed him planting evidence, nervously laughing about the adrenaline coursing through his system to his immediate superior and him telling Slager over Scott's rotting corpse that everything would be all right. There are countless ways to interpret that!

     We would have never known about Scott's busted tail light and back child support which, back in the day, certainly meant a death sentence for a black man in a sundown town! Now a good man is rotting in prison because of some wouldbe James O'Keefe. And don't even get me started on the police dashcam video of Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times in the back.

     Van Dyke now has paid the "ultimate price", as his poor wife said, and is in prison because of a few minutes of videotape the Chicago PD and Mayor Emmanuel didn't even want to release because it cast their man in a bad light. I mean, at first glance, a cop shooting 16 times in the back a teen holding a small knife and walking away from him can look quite prejudicial. How do we know after the video cut out, McDonald didn't suddenly leap back to life and lunge at Van Dyke as he'd claimed?

     We have the same situation here with the staring contest obviously won by Nicholas Sandmann, the brave young man with the MAGA hat. His unnerving grin and fixed gaze at Nathan Phillips surely bespoke of blind fear because the poor lad didn't know what else to do after he was terrorized by those Black Muslims that no one but his sharp-eyed mother saw on those countless videotapes.

     I mean, how were we to know that those Indians on the March for Life Day wouldn't have suddenly produced tomahawks, spears, bow and arrows and various and sundry other implements of minor destruction and decided to get revenge for Wounded Knee? As with Bowling Green, it could have been another failed rebellion like the Indian takeover on Alcatraz or even another Little Big Horn!

     So, congratulations for poo-poohing the lack of context given to the American public through those countless hours of video shot of this non-incident and for declaring that "both sides do it". It's about time those Indians began answering for their part in the Indian Wars of the 1870s and making reparations to white America like, say, the forfeiture of their land and allowing us to build leaky pipelines through them!

     Sincerely,

     Cyril Blubberpuss, Conservative-American