The Land of Propaganda

This piece was first published on Substack on July 4, 2023.

For as long as I can remember, my mom started every November with reading a book called “Stories of the Pilgrims” by Margaret B. Pumphrey. We were homeschooled, and she would read out loud in the morning while we sat around the kitchen table coloring. The book began with the Puritans hiding and having church in secret. It followed them in their escape to Holland before crossing over to America in the Mayflower. It described the first Thanksgiving as a celebration of freedom to practice their faith.

The history of the United States according to conservatives never looks beyond the simplicity of these stories written for white Christian children. Every 4th of July, my family would celebrate with abandon our freedom to worship god. We watched the Schoolhouse Rock videos as part of school, too, and they were equally simplistic: the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against taxation without representation, and “that’s not fair,” it explained.

In this narrative, the history of Indigenous people is glossed over. The native people on this land just mysteriously died off. There weren’t that many of them anyway to begin with, I was told.

Likewise, slavery was hardly mentioned. I remember reading more about it on my own in books from the library than being told about slavery by my parents. Anyway, white northerners ended slavery because it was wrong, and Lincoln was the hero who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. My dad read a book about Lincoln out loud to us over breakfast.

Questioning my upbringing happened in layers. At first I wondered if there were solid answers to my theological questions. Then I started to see the connection between the patriotism and the religious fundamentalism: they were the same flavor.

I stopped feeling so patriotic when I saw the reactions of the people around me to the death of Mike Brown in August 2014. The event was so horrific, and while I was enraged and wanted to join in the protests, there were so many people expressing doubts about the reports. Nearly nine years later, the police have only been emboldened and encouraged to kill the marginalized with little, if any, consequence.

The truth about this place we call the United States of America is that it was founded on the darkest terms of genocide, slavery, and war. What was downplayed or ignored in my homeschooling doesn’t get much more coverage in public schools, either.

Today, the marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color continues. Slavery is not over, it is simply hidden behind the walls of prisons. The prison-industrial complex is highly profitable for a wide variety of corporations. Poverty and immigration are criminalized, not solved, when people try to better themselves in this country. Capitalism is lifted up as a provider of opportunity but it serves only to exploit and oppress.

Christian indoctrination and American exceptionalism are both major elements of the propaganda machine. I grew up hearing that “other countries feed their people propaganda” in the same breath as “we are the best country in the world!”