The Wonderful Wizard of Wounded Knee.

I'll keep this in mind when I write my children's novel.

Though srsly. The biting sarcasm in the two editorials by L. Frank Baum (more readable versions available here.) is apparent at least to me. Even if it has more than an undercurrent of sincerity, it's hardly the touting hatespeech the first article would make it out to be. If anything, it's a hardline pessimist (and if you don't think the man was a hardline pessimist, re-read the Wizard of Oz) view of the situation in which he was living at the time. He had no way of knowing that Political Correctness, the Holocaust, Civil Rights, Tolerance, and other such buzzwords were going to take ahold of this country, and even if he did, I think he would have snorted at them as the raging hypocrisy which they often are-- if you're taking the Nationalistic view, and I get the impression he was. As a people, the (collective) American continues to be guilty of running in and making a mess of other people's affairs-- to the point where a man like Baum might say of the Muslims, as of the Indians, that the only way to deal with them is to eradicate them all, (even if one can understand their viewpoint).

So, is he being assy? Yeah.

Is he being a OMG!RACIST!HITLAR!HATEMONGAR?

Not really. Not by himself, anyway.

In conjunction with a powerful panzerkrieg-like engine of expansion in the form of a rolling, lockstepping army and driven leadership...

...oh wait.

Still, Baum's no Minister of Propaganda, and Der Amerikaner Feel RILLY bad about all That Stuff nao, and yeah, right?

Well, I suppose we'll see, won't we?

~K.

(and as is fairly clear, ja, das Kainenchen happens to inhabit an American-born fleshsack the now. Hence the EngsDesutche. So there.)