Dakota Beacon

The relentless march towards the gray horizon continues as we jettison our culture, one statue at a time, one book at a time, one movie at time.  Even our commercial landscape is being cleared of all its history.  What is the point?  To sweep aside all reference to our past?  To eliminate all reference to the human element in our world?  Is it just part of the effort to clear-cut America to make way for the soviet life to come?  We could just say these  incursions are “minor” - there is a lot else to occupy our thoughts and our time, what with riots, with economic devastation, lab-originated viruses and other artificial sources of death and destruction, but we should pause and pay our respects to those everyday symbols of a happier time when people were proud of their accomplishments and were honored for them (and usually well paid for them) rather than the color of their skin.  

Our grocers’ shelves are full of a lot of our folk culture icons.  We have the exotic and mysterious, of course, like Mr. Clean, whose DNA would probably exclude him from the usual run of the human race, but most of them are homey sorts of figures, somewhat whimsical in some cases.  Only of late we are seeing the terrorists and other scolds on the left turn from statue-toppling and monument-defacing to raiding our supermarkets for signs they would attempt to exploit to undermine our peace with each other.  There is nothing anywhere under the sun or moon which is not “racist”.  

To make an example showing the silliness of our culture police, Project Veritas’ founder, James O’Keefe, while still in high school, decided to register a complaint against his school cafeteria for providing Lucky Charms, citing the racism, exploitation and cultural appropriation involved in using a ridiculous mythical leprechaun with “Irish” characteristics to represent O’Keefe’s ethnic heritage.  It was a sort of spoof in his case.  Today, however, we aren’t allowed to laugh - at this or at anything, it seems.

A few months back I lamented the mothballing of the pretty indigenous woman from the Land O’ Lakes logo.  Remember the Indian girl who sat surrounded by the beauties of nature with the clear blue lake in the background?  Gone now.  I thought that was too bad - in the case of the native Indian culture so little remains and it is a rich and fascinating legacy.  Like a book cover, the symbols, such as the “Fighting Sioux” warrior that used to represent a hockey team (actually the name was an honor bestowed upon the university by the tribe), images like the Land O’ Lakes girl reminded us of a past all too quickly disappearing.  

Now we stand by and watch while a parade of commercial giants fall into line, lashing themselves for imagined “racism” in a flurry of re-naming and re-imaging of well-known products.  Aunt Jemima got fired.  Most of us have a very positive image of Aunt Jemima.  Her picture on the package projects confidence and we know she knows how to do pancakes.  Not any longer, though.  Yet there seems to be no call to kick Betty Crocker out.  Betty is the very image of matronly good cooking.  Would you turn down a dinner invitation from Betty?  Neither would I.  We’d be missing some good eating.  Why is it “racist” to have a positive, motherly Aunt Jemima and no issue with a positive, matronly (if sadly “updated” and less charming, but then, so was Aunt Jemima) Betty Crocker?  They both cook and are supposed to be the best at what they do.  And what about their competition, Mrs. Butterworth?  Is she black or white?  Does it matter?  For the record, I looked this up.  Mrs. Butterworth is whtie.  Always has been.  But because the bottle is transparent and the syrup is a dark golden color people have mistaken her for black.  She is sort of like Rachel Dolezal, except she didn’t mean to.  Should she be ousted in the purge?  Maybe the thing is we should require only white maple syrup.  But that’s racist.   And also very unappetizing.

Uncle Ben will be fired next, probably.  Now, I have to ask, because I really am interested to hear the logic.  Why is it ok for the pasty-faced Quaker gentleman to sell oats but downright “racist” for Uncle Ben to sell rice?  They are both elegantly attired.  True, the Quaker guy has the hat and Ben doesn’t, but the hat was an essential part of the Quaker’s religion.  We have numerous white shills for commercial products - we have the Vermont Maid, a comely New England lass, white, who sells another brand of syrup.  We have Sun Maid Raisins, marketed by a pretty bonnet-wearing girl, her outspread arms displaying a container of the plump raisins.  It seems that we are offered certain wares by women and others by men.  Interesting?  The ladies sell syrup and raisins, the guys sell rice and oatmeal and other cereals.  

We aren’t only racist because we buy Aunt Jemima pancake mixes and syrups, we are racist because we buy Rice Krispies - Snap, Crackle and Pop, like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, like Cap’n Crunch.  Snap, Crackle and Pop are now just a bunch of “white boys”.  If they were a bunch of black boys we’d be racist for buying them too.  I also checked on the Keebler Elves.  They are not “gnomes”, “fairies” or “leprechauns”, “sprites” or any kind of foreign shoemakers.  They are a purely American strain of elf, according to the company.  Make of that what you will.  Sounds like trouble to me.  The Three Musketeers, who sell the malt nougat and chocolate-covered candy bars are well-known white guys, though, if French royalists.  Too bad they got rid of the images.  The effort to “update” the Three Musketeers didn’t work that well.  Go figure.

The little Dutch girl who chases dirt with her broom is a sort of stereotype.  The little white girl with the braids who carries an umbrella in the Morton Salt ads because “when it rains it pours” (never made sense to me either) could be axed because they are white, I suppose.

The Santitas girl, the beautiful purveyor of tortilla chips will have to go.  Where does this end?  In those generic packages we used to see in the late 1980s?  The black-and-white boxes that invited us to “generic” (meaning “second-rate”) non-brand-name macaroni or baking soda or whatever?  Chef Boyardee is real - an Italian immigrant chef who popularized Italian dishes in the U.S., and so is Barbados-born Chef Frank White.  His picture is on the label of Cream of Wheat.  The little girl we see on the Creamettes package, died in 2004, at age 89.  She was the daughter of Creamettes’ Minnesota founder and eventually head of the company.  

Were any of these icons real people?  In the case of Uncle Ben, it is said that the image was created from two entities - a farmer, whose rice was known as the “best” and a distinguished-looking maitre d’, neither of which profession is the realm of the dispossessed or downtrodden, and both of which are honorable work. I don’t know who inspired the little Dutch girl, and I sure don’t know who the real Cap’n Crunch or Snap, Crackle or Pop are or who is the real Lucky Charms leprechaun.  There was a real Dinty Moore.  He was an Irish New York saloon keeper whose actual name was James Moore, made famous in a comic strip.  He was a successful restaurateur.  The little white sailor boy on the Cracker Jack box was real - the grandson of the German immigrant who created the snack; he tragically died at age 7 of pneumonia.  Buster Brown was based on a real boy too - a rich white kid known as a prankster.  His girlfriend was “Mary Jane”.  They were always underfoot (pun intended) as they were icons of a shoe company.  Imagine the scandal if they had been black.  It has become insane. 

 As regards Aunt Jemima, she was based on a real person.  Nancy Green was born a slave, true.  But she was freed.  It seems she was an incredibly gifted cook and became famous for her pancakes and syrup.  Because the milling company that hired her paid her very well she was free to do much charitable work.  She founded the Olivet Baptist Church and was a chief mover in many anti-poverty campaigns until she died in a freak accident.  Hers was a classic American success story.  Yeah.  I think in the interest of “race relations” she ought to be deep-sixed.  I mean, we can’t have successful black Americans ruining the narrative, can we?  Maybe we should ask the companies, instead of firing these icons and obliterating their images, to print a brief biography on the package, so people will know these were people who contributed so much to our well-being.  

Before we are done with destroying every aspect of our culture we will end up in a colorless, gray nothingburger world without any context, without any cultural references of any kind.  Just what we needed.

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