Milo Bringin' It

Our History Is Now

Lessons of the past are there for us to apply to what's happening now.

First they came for the illegals,

but I'm not an illegal, so I didn't speak up for them.

Then they came for the law firms and the media companies,

but I'm not a lawyer or a journalist, so I didn't speak up for them.

Then they came for the universities,

but I'm not a student or a professor or a researcher so I didn't speak up for them.

Then they came for the mayors and the governors,

but I'm not a politician so I didn't speak up for them.

When they finally turn and come for you and me - and they will because they always do -

who will be left to speak up for us?

A Project

Restoring something like this thing is a history lesson.

And the work this guy puts in to pull this off is impressive. But I always have to think about the men who designed it, and engineered it, and machined the parts - and the machinery used to make the tools that people used to make the tools. My brain goes a little crazy.

Then I have to think about the guy who sold it to the guy who would use it to make whatever he was making - the guys who shipped it and installed it - all the pieces and parts - material and intellectual and physical - and my brain just kinda goes whirling off into the ether.

The thing is 75 years old - and it was still working when he got it.

Because Buffalo Forge Company made shit to last.

Having To Refight It

There's a weird and ugly Lost Cause vibe about all this anti-woke, anti-DEI nonsense.

You can pull people's names off of camps and boats and buildings, and change the records so their presence in our history seems diminished. But you can't remove the people - not completely.

And you can't change what happened.

What they did, or what they said, or what others wrote about them - it's all part of what actually happened to make this country what it is, and what will continue to influence whatever it's to become.

Memory is a powerful thing, and we have to take some care to get it right.

So OK, let's pull down those statues that honor "heroes" of the Confederacy - because you're not a hero when you kill your neighbors in the name of preserving slavery.

Likewise, let's rename some of the military installations after people who weren't leading a violent insurrection aimed directly at the heart of the promise we made to ourselves that we would always keep trying to move towards that "more perfect union".

And don't try to tell me something like DEI is an attempt to change history too. It's not. There's a big difference between outright lying about what happened, and correcting the record to get us a little closer to understanding what really did happen.

If we let government arbitrarily tell us that what we remember isn't what we remember, we're not being educated or re-educated, we're being gaslighted - reprogrammed with a set of faulty instructions.

I've always gotten a kick out of learning about history, and it rankles my ass somethin' fierce whenever I learn that what they taught me in school was not the truth, or that they left out a few little details that would've made my thinking clearer and more objective.

Actually, Secretary Hegseth, Harriet Tubman was a war hero

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is wrong to consider stripping her name from the USNS Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman never formally enlisted in the U.S. military. She was a war hero nonetheless.

Many Americans know Tubman for her courage and sacrifice as conductor of the Underground Railroad, but fewer recognize her as a Civil War spy and military leader. Tubman was the first woman to lead a combat regiment during the Civil War, and in an opinion issued this year, the U.S. Army Office of the General Counsel acknowledged her as one of the few women who served as a soldier in the Civil War. Those contributions merit her the honor of her namesake, the USNS Harriet Tubman.

Now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to consider removing Tubman’s name from the ship, alongside others named after former Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. These vessels are part of the John Lewis-class of oilers named for civil rights leaders beginning in 2016. The ship named for gay rights activist and Navy veteran Harvey Milk was renamed in June. Hegseth is seeking to reestablish “warrior culture” in the military, but the removals would betray that culture. Under the Trump administration, the National Park Service also removed a portrait of Tubman and portions of text describing the history of slavery from a webpage about the Underground Railroad before later restoring them.

Tubman deserves to retain recognition of her immense contributions. As then-Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said upon announcing the ship’s name, “Our fleet benefits from having her name emblazoned on the hull of one of our great ships.” Often called the “Moses of her people,” Tubman was born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore; she escaped in 1849 and sought freedom in Philadelphia. She risked that freedom to return to Maryland more than a dozen times over the next 11 years and rescued 70 people, advising dozens more who freed themselves.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announces a U.S. Navy ship will be named after Harriet Tubman on Sept. 17, 2023, in Church Creek, Maryland. (MC1 Omar Powell/U.S. Navy)
Yet Tubman’s service during the Civil War is perhaps her most consequential legacy. After the U.S. military reclaimed Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, from the Confederacy in 1861, Tubman was sent on a critical mission to gather intelligence from the 8,000 formerly enslaved people who had escaped to Union lines. She was attached to Gen. Isaac Stevens’s headquarters and worked for Gens. Rufus Saxton and David Hunter, commanding a ring of Black men as spies, scouts and river pilots.

Tubman’s little-known mission came to fruition on June 1, 1863, when she guided three U.S. Army boats loaded with 300 Black soldiers from Col. James Montgomery’s Second South Carolina Volunteers, and a battery of White soldiers from another regiment, up the Combahee River into Confederate-controlled territory. Earlier, Tubman and her men had infiltrated Confederate plantations and identified the enslaved men who were forced to plant mines along the Combahee River to prevent Union access. With their help, Tubman’s men and the U.S. Army officers defused the mines. Those soldiers also rooted out Confederate forces, burned seven plantations— including the owners’ homes, barns, stockpiles of rice, and stables— and cut Confederate supply lines by destroying a bridge.

From those burned lands, hundreds of enslaved people flocked to the soldiers’ rowboats at the river shore. Fearful that the rowboats might capsize, Montgomery asked Tubman to calm the crowds. Using her strong voice, she started singing and was met with a joyful response of clapping and shouting. Seven hundred and fifty-six people were liberated that day; the U.S. Army did not lose a single life. The Combahee Ferry Raid is now considered the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history.

That Tubman was prohibited from enlisting in the U.S. Army did not stop her from risking her life for the enslaved, or for a nation that hadn’t yet recognized her rights as a citizen. Though she was not paid for her work, which also included nursing the sick and cooking for officers — she took in laundry to scrape by — her service with the armed forces helped make the Combahee River Raid one of the most successful campaigns of the war.

Harriet Tubman was a civil rights leader, but she was also a military hero who risked her life fighting for freedom, our nation and the perfection of our democracy. She earned the honor of having the USNS Harriet Tubman named after her. It should remain part of her legacy — and ours.

Some History

A liberal's super power is a decent memory.

81 Years Ago

"...all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable..."

-- The American Declaration Of Independence - Thomas Jefferson

In the face of threats and dangers that are meant to intimidate and conquer, the seemingly tiny, insignificant, individual people who decide to stand up and stand together have proven over and over that a certain invincibility is possible - it's just not something you get from yourself alone.

I'm just one guy - one voice - one vote. And besides, what's in it for me?

06JUN44

History

History teaches the lessons, and lets us retake the test as often as we want.

Tell Us The Truth

It is essential to share the unvarnished truth with our children.

Begin by explaining that the roots of civilization trace back to Egypt, a hub of advanced knowledge encompassing science, mathematics, philosophy, religion, and architecture. Emphasize that the earliest Egyptians were people of African descent, a fact that stands in stark contrast to the portrayals seen in Hollywood films.

Clarify that Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas and highlight that Mansa Musa of Mali was recognized as one of the wealthiest individuals in history. Inform them that Black Egyptians were pioneers of global exploration, having reached Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania long before others.

Illustrate that the concept of the meter was conceived in Egypt, derived from the measurement of a single drop of water, while the values of pi (approximately 3.14) and numerous geometric principles often attributed to Pythagoras and Thales originated there as well. Furthermore, the contributions of Imhotep, a remarkable scholar, have been largely overlooked in historical accounts.

Reinforce the notion that humanity’s ancestral origins were uncovered in Africa, and acknowledge that many groundbreaking inventions throughout history involved the contributions of Black individuals who have often been neglected in the narrative.

Encourage them to understand that Africa possessed written languages long before the arrival of ships and missionaries. Stress that unity is crucial for our survival and resurgence, asserting that concrete was invented in Egypt, not by later builders.

Dr Richardson

Dear MAGA

Just a quick note to all you guys with the tiny dick energy, who're always spoutin' off about how the Jews wouldn't have had it so bad if they'd just fought back.

They did. And your asshole forebears slaughtered them.

April 19, 1943

History Lesson

I was an on-again-off-again fan of John McCain. There was always something likeable about him, even though he was pretty much a total nepo-baby fuckup until he spent 5 years as a POW in North Vietnam.

He was the logical heir to Barry Goldwater (also on-again-off-again for me), but McCain seemed less like a Bomb-'Em-First-And-To-Hell-With-Asking-Questions kinda guy - way less than Goldwater anyway. For a while, you could count on the guy to go with his intellect and not his emotions.

That began to change as MAGA made inroads, and he began to feel forced to go along with it.

We'll forever have to wonder about 'what if' McCain had still been around to keep guys like Lindsey Graham on the right side of things.

Long sad late night bull sessions are waiting to be had by the PoliSci majors of the future.

From 10 years ago:

John McCain's prophetic words spoken 10 years ago...but nobody listened.
byu/yaponetsa inukraine

Nationalism

I remember being told in high school history that 'nationalism' was one of the causes of WW1. Everybody had it in their heads that they were the superior 'race'.

I also remember being told for my whole life - directly or indirectly - that being American was better than being anything else.

Dr Roy Casagranda:

@dairyofnomad Nationalism and Napoleon, explanation by Dr. Roy Casagranda . . . . #roycasagranda #nationalism #france #germany #nepoleon #europe #historytiktok ♬ original sound - Dairy of Nomad

Because Of Course

It may not be perfectly kosher to bash the NYT for not seeing Hitler's potential to become the world's worst monster way back in 1924. But I have no qualms about taking a giant dump on their heads for not learning the lesson.

When you don't stomp on these little weasels for their little attempts to fuck things up in their own small corner of the world, you're setting the stage for them to become great big weasels with great big plans to fuck things up for everybody on the whole fucking planet.

Word O' The Day

BTW:

Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrian female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.

Hypatia constructed astrolabes and hydrometers, but did not invent either of these, which were both in use long before she was born. She was tolerant toward Christians and taught many Christian students, including Synesius, the future bishop of Ptolemais. Ancient sources record that Hypatia was widely beloved by pagans and Christians alike and that she established great influence with the political elite in Alexandria. Toward the end of her life, Hypatia advised Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, who was in the midst of a political feud with Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Rumors spread accusing her of preventing Orestes from reconciling with Cyril and, in March 415 AD, she was murdered by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter.

Hypatia's murder shocked the empire and transformed her into a "martyr for philosophy", leading future Neoplatonists such as the historian Damascius (c. 458 – c. 538) to become increasingly fervent in their opposition to Christianity. During the Middle Ages, Hypatia was co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue and scholars believe she was part of the basis for the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. During the Age of Enlightenment, she became a symbol of opposition to Catholicism. In the nineteenth century, European literature, especially Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia, romanticized her as "the last of the Hellenes". In the twentieth century, Hypatia became seen as an icon for women's rights and a precursor to the feminist movement. Since the late twentieth century, some portrayals have associated Hypatia's death with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, despite the historical fact that the library no longer existed during Hypatia's lifetime.

On This Day

Happy Woodstock Anniversary everybody

55 years ago

Richie Havens was mesmerizing.

Today's Today

06-AUG-1945

Hashem Al-Ghaili

Today's Quote

Assuming there's someone around to write that history...

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

We'll go down in history

as the first society

that wouldn't save itself

because it wasn't

cost-effective.

Today's Today

Biden's speech from one of the sites of D-Day 1944 was pretty good - not great, but good. There were plenty of good solid moments.

But I think, because there wasn't much soaring inspirational oratory, what resonates for me is that he's just a guy standing up and telling us what's on his mind, and trying to do what we all know is the right thing.

That brings out the message that great things are often done by average, everyday people.

The men who fought and bled and died that day - and all the men and women who did the same all the other days before and after that day - were ordinary people standing up and putting their thoughts into action, trying to do the right thing.

That counts for something really important.

Blast From The Past

I just finished Profiles In Ignorance --Andy Borowitz

He mentions this from 1990, and points out the interesting pairing of Trump with Jack Kevorkian (Dr Death):

Trump: The Fall

Once a symbol of cocky '80s wealth, Donald Trump is now tarnished by marital scandal, mired in debt and negotiating with banks to retain control of his empire. Even if he succeeds, the Trump "mystique' may never recover.

You live by the glitz, you die by the glitz -A former banker and friend of DONALD TRUMP'S who approved some of his early loans.

For a high-rolling decade, Donald Trump was the King of Glitz. He built sumptuous casinos and gleaming apartment buildings, bought world-famous hotels and a fleet of planes--and plastered his name over everything. He presumed to lecture America on "The Art of the Deal"--and the book became a best seller. Like a modern-day Gatsby, he lived as lavishly as he spent: the 10-acre weekend escape, the 110-room mansion in Florida, the $29 million yacht, not to mention the jet-black helicopter. He reveled in celebrity, chumming it up with Frank Sinatra and Mike Tyson, schmoozing courtside at the U.S. Open, even buying a football team. And all the time he was mouthing off, picking fights with New York Mayor Ed Koch, telling people how he'd deal with the Japanese. "There is no one my age who has accomplished more," he bragged at 41. "Everyone can't be the best."

It's hard to believe that was only three years ago, just as Trump was becoming a national emblem of cocky'80s wealth. Now just as suddenly, he's become a national object lesson in how fast those heavily borrowed fortunes and the fame that came with them can fade. "The 1990s sure aren't anything like the 1980s," Trump said recently--and he should know. In just a few months, he's watched his marriage break up in the pages of the tabloid press. He's had to manage without two top executives who died in a helicopter crash last fall. There have been intensifying rumors about his business troubles: contractors who haven't been paid; stories of Trump nervously prowling the tables at his Atlantic City casinos to see how the high rollers were doing. Last month Forbes magazine, which for a decade has charted Trump's rise in its annual list of richest Americans, estimated that increased debt and a drop in real-estate values caused him to lose more than two thirds of his net worth last year--a nose dive from $1.7 billion to $500 million (page 40).

For months Trump denied that anything was wrong, and even boasted that the divorce headlines were good for business. Then last week came hard evidence that his financial woes are much more severe than he had let on. For several weeks, sources from several New York City banks confirmed, Trump and advisers have been meeting daily in Trump Tower with about 25 bankers and their lawyers to figure out how to renegotiate much of his hefty $3.2 billion debt. At least some of the lawyers are specialists in bankruptcy and corporate restructuring, according to banking sources. Some sources called the atmosphere cordial and said Trump had asked for the meetings; other reports had the two sides growling at each other. In either case, the talks conjured up a truly startling image: Trump, the self-proclaimed master of the deal, negotiating the terms of his financial survival with, as one observer put it, "stranger in business suits."

While the New York tabloids had their usual field day with the stories (UH-OWE! read the Post), Trump was uncharacteristically mum, declining to talk to NEWSWEEK. Only a day before The Wall Street Journal first reported on the meetings with bankers, Trump did attend a session of the American Booksellers Association in Las Vegas to promote his new book, called "Trump: Surviving at the Top," a title that provoked a few chuckles. The book is scheduled to be published in October but may be rushed out earlier now. Trump joked at a breakfast: "We may have to end certain chapters with a question mark. We may have to end the whole book with a question mark."

Few are predicting that the last chapter will be Chapter 11. Unless the talks break down completely, Trump seems likely to avoid the worst-case scenario: failure to make his next payment on bank loans and junk-bond interest this week, which could allow his creditors to force him into bankruptcy protection. Although he had already put the Trump Shuttle, his East Coast air service, and his yacht, the Trump Princess, up for sale, his spokesmen insist he will not have to sell other prized properties like The Plaza hotel to cover his debts (page 43). As the week ended, sources said, the talks were narrowing in a deal in which Trump could give the banks more collateral or a stake in many of his properties--an outcome that could cut down on his interest payments and perhaps even allow him to borrow more, but could significantly diminish his control over the empire. Banking sources also reported that Trump's lifestyle was on the table. "The boat, the mansions, the planes-they may all have to go," said one banker.

Yet even if Trump negotiates his way out of this immediate financial squeeze, his name will never carry the same mystique. Much of his success has been built on convincing lenders--and the public--that simply putting the word "Trump" on a building or an airplane would immediately increase its value. Now the name isn't just associated with "quality" (Trump's favorite word) but also with the whiff of marital scandal and the growing scent of financial distress. A real-estate broker, who says Japanese investors once called only to ask for "a Trump apartment," says some are now turned off by the divorce. Smelling blood, potential buyers for Trump's properties are sure to drive hard bargains.

Fickle as ever, the public is now just as hungry for tidbits about Trump's fall from grace as they once were for his pearls of wisdom (page 44). Raye Nelson, a retired teacher in Houston, says she used to admire Trump. "I read his book and I thought, 'What a wonderful young man to have done all he's done'." Now, she says, "it seems like he built his empire on sand rather than rock. I believe he just got greedy and needs to go back and acquire some more character somewhere." Even business associates are coming out of the woodwork to say, "I told you so." One lawyer and professed friend who has worked with him over the years insists Trump's troubles reveal what was behind the emperor's clothing. "Donald has never had the net worth he claimed," he says. "What he did have was trophy properties, brass balls and a big mouth. "

Ultimate humiliation: That people are now making fun of Trump's financial acumen may be the ultimate humiliation. After all, Trump was the self-proclaimed dealmeister himself, the man who built a reputation starting in the mid-1970s as a smart, risk-taking developer who could turn a seeming dog of a property into gold. His first big project, and the cornerstone of his New York empire, was the rebuilding of a dilapidated old hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. The city gave him a $120 million tax break and he got the banks to lend him $70 million. Up went the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which today is among his few properties showing a profit after paying interest costs.

Trump later erected Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue building that pushed him into national attention with its marble lobby and impressive waterfall. A mixture of stores and million-dollar apartments, it became an attraction that drew hordes of tourists-and became a resounding financial success.

The first signs that something might be awry in Trump's empire started surfacing, ironically, as the press started reporting on his personal problems earlier this year. His breakup with his wife, Ivana, and his reported affair with model Marla Maples attracted a blizzard of publicity, distracting him at a time when his newest, most expensive Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, was due to open. Says a friend, "As he found out, this kind of publicity can come back and bite you in the rear end." While Marla went into hiding, the spouses skirmished through dueling press releases and the public argued over whether their nuptial agreement was fair. (It gave Ivana $25 million, which according to almost any estimate was only a small fraction of Trump's assets.) Forbes magazine soon weighed in with its cover story putting his assets at only $500 million, and calculated that he was some $40 million short of paying his creditors each year.

Trump called those figures nonsense. Yet the impression that something was amiss grew stronger when he disclosed that he was considering selling the Shuttle, which he bought from Eastern only one year ago. The reason. he insisted: cash is king. He said he wasn't hurting for money but merely wanted to be ready to seize new opportunities as property values fell. He even insisted the marital publicity was actually helping his businesses by attracting curiosity seekers.

In some cases, it had the opposite effect, claims one banker. Japanese buyers, a mainstay of some Trump properties, appeared to shy away from some of his residential buildings. The Japanese, the banker says, "would tell us, 'We want something in a Trump building. We don't care what it costs.' Now, forget it. They don't like the publicity."

The roots of Trump's cash crunch go far deeper than a scarcity of Japanese apartment buyers. In his heyday, Trump's projects were largely in-and-out deals: he erected apartment buildings and sold units as condominiums, charging the premium prices his name allowed, and walked away with hefty profits. "He wasn't a cash-flow builder," says one of his former bankers. That changed when he bought such properties as the casinos, The Plaza hotel and the Shuttle airline. These were operations that required skillful management on a daily basis to produce profits. More crucially, Trump needed to generate huge cash flows to pay the enormous interest costs he incurred in borrowing to buy the properties.

Track record: Based on his track record, the banks opened their wallets to Trump, seemingly without undertaking the normal financial analysis. A lawyer who has worked with Trump says, "Donald Trump could have walked into any bank and said, "I want $25 million,' and nobody would ask for a financial statement. They'd say, "Donald Trump, $25 million? Done!'" James Grant, a business observer and editor, says the banks were feeding Trump's speculative purchases. "All this occurred," he says, "three, four or five years after it was clear to anyone that this same style of lending had brought ruin to the big Texas banks." Trump's major banks, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Bankers Trust and Manufacturers Hanover, declined to comment.

Not only was it the magical Trump the banks were lending on; it was a time when market values had been rising almost non-stop since the late 1970s. If the cash flow from the various properties didn't cover the debt payments, it didn't really matter. Like a homeowner, Trump could mark up the value of a building on paper and borrow against it through second mortgages. Trump also took out personal lines of credit that were unsecured and sometimes used them to make interest payments. "The banks," says a lawyer who has known Trump since his first project, "created their own monster."

The monster got bogged down when Trump miscalculated on a number of things--some none of his own doing. The real-estate market flattened, making lenders less willing to refinance properties based on speculative values. In April Trump reportedly tried to refinance his stake in the Grand Hyatt and a Chase Mahattan mortgage on Trump Tower, but deals went nowhere. By now, even banks that might have wanted to give Trump more money had become constrained; the savings and loan crisis had caused federal regulators to monitor bank ending practices more closely. Says one real-estate lawyer, "You can't do the 'wink and keep on lending' routine."Meanwhile, the Japanese stock market had plunged, drying up potential sources of financing there. Trump even tried raising money by selling his Princess yacht in a $511.5 million deal to Japanese investors that, too, fell apart.

Suddenly Trump found himself walled in by looming interest payments and a bunch of properties with large cash-flow demands. Chief among them are his three Atlantic City casinos, on which Trump had counted to support his other enterprises. Trump moved aggressively into Atlantic City in the mid-1980s, first with the Trump Plaza and then Trump's Castle. His biggest gamble came in 1988 when he engineered the purchase of the unfinished Taj Mahal from former talk-show host Merv Griffin. At the time itseemed like another brilliant Trump stroke. He paid a low-ball $278 million, leaving Griffin with the Resorts Internaional casino, which eventually ended up under bankruptcy protection. The Taj finally opened in April, adding about 20 percent capacity to the city's gaming business at a time when growth in the market was slowing considerably.

Despite the immense ballyhoo surrounding its opening, the prospects for the Taj's profitability remain unclear. In May it grossed $36 million, but analysts question whether the casino can maintain that level after the initial excitement subsides. It needs to rake in roughly $1.3 million a day to break even,analysts say. Trump has a more immediate concern on June 15, when he's due to make a $42 million payment to Castle bondholders. While he is likely to make that payment, some of his banks are described as worried. They are concerned that paying the bondholders might stretch too tight to make payments on their bank loans.

Underlying the casinos' problems is a management team in turmoil. Last October two of Trump's most respected casino managers, Stephen Hyde and Mark Etess, died in a tragic helicopter crash. Last month Jack O'Donnell quit as president of the Trump Plaza, Trump's most profitable casino, complaining that he didn't want to work for Trump anymore. O'Donnell didn't say much more until this week, when he learned of recent disparaging remarks Trump had made about the effectiveness of the two deceased executives. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, an embittered O'Donnell criticized Trump, saying he used the customer lists of the Plaza to feed the Taj Mahal. "Even if there hasn't been a violation of the law, and I think there has been, Donald is totally void of morals in business," he said.

As O'Donnell painted it, Trump sometimes makes decisions about his casinos on personal whims. In one case, Trump insisted on constructing a $1 million oyster bar in the Trump Plaza, despite his managers' contention that a retail store was far more profitable. The managers think they know why. Marla Maples had been known to order lots of seafood from room service, they said. Trump has said the oyster bar better complemented a nearby ice-cream parlor.

Trump's intense push for casino profits was never clearer than on one weekend in May. A Japanese high roller who had won $6.2 million in February was back playing at the baccarat pit at the Plaza casino. O'Donnell said an employee told him, " "Donald's in the pit carrying on. He's going to drive the guy out of here'." Trump was pacing near the gambler, who was winning at the time. It was a violation of an old gambling rule. Says O'Donnell, "When the customer is beating you, you never sweat it out, you never let on that it bothers you." As it turned out, the gambler eventually lost $10.3 million, but Trump cut him off before he had a chance to recover. Furious, the gambler left, O'Donnell says, in a limousine driven by executives of the competing Caesars casino.

Late paying: Trump has still more problems in Atlantic City. The construction manager who helped build the Taj contends he is late in paying more than $50 million to subcontractors. Trump's troubles have caught the attention of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. A spokesman said the division of gaming enforcement is examining his financial wherewithal on a day-by-day basis.

Trump casino officials hastily arranged a press conference at the end of the week to try to paint a different picture. Edward Tracy, who oversees all three casinos, insisted business was "fabulous." He confirmed that about 120 Taj Mahal employees had been laid off but denied reports that an additional 2,500 of the 6,500 Taj's workers would soon lose their jobs. Tracy also acknowledged that payments to vendors were knowingly delayed at times but attributed it to a cash-management strategy. As for Trump's money problems, Tracy stoutly denied that any of the three casinos are up for sale.

That's not the case for the Trump Shuttle, another disappointing acquisition. Trump bought the Shuttle from strikebound Eastern Air Lines for $365 million--with its market share less than 30 percent. Trump refurbished the planes and managed to bring the market share up to about 50 percent. But even then he couldn't turn a profit. The Shuttle, Trump executives realized, is extremely expensive to operate--thanks to standby planes and crews--and as a result is not throwing off enough cash to meet interest payments. After Trump announced he was thinking about selling the service (he even did away with free coffee), Pan Am said it was putting up its East Coast shuttle for sale. Analysts now think Trump would be lucky to get back the $365 million he paid.

Trump's experience with his "ultimate trophy," The Plaza hotel, is much the same. He paid a price, about $400 million, that analysts think was too high; then he spent even more bringing the property up to its former glory--all with borrowed money. The hotel now looks great, and revenues are up, but not enough to cover the interest payments of about $40 million a year. Earlier this year a confident Trump contended he had turned down an offer from the Sultan of Brunei for about twice what he had paid.

Trump's biggest frustration lies in a large, undeveloped tract on Manhattan's West Side along the Hudson River. After paying $115 million for it in 1985, Trump unveiled a massive development plan that would include the world's tallest building (150 stories) and residential housing. But West Side community activists, never appreciative of Trump's taste anyway, have tied up the project in a tangle of environmental protests. Meanwhile, Trump is incurring about $12 million a year in interest costs.

Long term: As his friends view it, Trump simply got caught in a economic downturn at a time when his wallet was stretched. His most recent projects, like The Plaza and the West Side development, all require substantial upfront spending--and time--for their value to improve. One builder portrays Trump as a Japaneselike businessman who was developing projects for the long term-only to be cut down by shortsighted bankers. As one executive close to Trump put it, "If we had two more years of the 1980s he'd have been OK."

Maybe so, but to others Trump is not a magician but a speculator who was bound eventually to get knocked down by debt and normal business cycles. Irving Fischer, chairman of HRH Construction, which has built Trump developments from the start, hails Trump's brilliance but also points out, "He took a 10-year run and rode the crest of the wave."

Of course, many Trump properties are valuable trophies--once you take away the debt he poured on them. If Trump is able to get fresh capital from the banks, he could use that money to buy back--on the cheap--some of the now deflated bonds he issued to build his casinos. That could save him millions in interest costs. Some properties, like the vacant West Side lot, he may want to sell outright; he may want partners for others. His problem now is that potential buyers know all this. "What Donald has to do," a friend says hopefully, "is to find people not out to screw him."

As for Trump himself, associates say he's holding up well under the strain and actually looks as r up as they've seen him in a long time. Says an executive, "He feels that anyone can be a hero when things are good. The test of a person's mettle is when things aren't so rosy. He's a good c, and this is the toughest deal of his life." Others say the diminution of his empire is bound to change him, perhaps even transforming him into a humbler, less publicity-hungry conservative businessman. One acquaintance suggests with tongue in cheek that Trump could surface from his bankers' meetings "with Billy Graham on his arm proclaiming he doesn't need fast cars, yachts, big houses, and announce he will build housing for the poor in the Bronx." If that happens, you'll know the 1980s are really over.

Today I Learned

I learned two things today.

1. Ft Lewis College was where some of my peers went because either they couldn't get in anywhere else, or they just wanted to hang out and ski, and make the 450-mile drive down to Tempe once in a while to score the good weed - the place that was once a somewhat infamous "indian school" that was meant to break kids of their indian ways and turn them into good little white people.
2. I learned that the 13 years of public school education I've always been rather proud of, didn't teach me one goddamned thing about any of this.

In my own fuckin' state. Nothing.

A small Durango college is trying to reckon with its dark legacy — and help students do the same

Fort Lewis College, which awards the most degrees to Native American students of any four-year college in the nation, was once a boarding school that used severe methods to “civilize” Indigenous children

DURANGO — On a breezy March morning, with the scent of sourdough perfuming the air, three Hozhoni Days Powwow ambassadors, one past and two present, gathered at Bread cafe for eggs and avocado toast and to talk about the year they’d just lived through, emotional and taxing.

Jordyn Begay, Selena Gonzales and Audrey Leonetti are students at Fort Lewis College, one of six Native American-serving nontribal universities in the United States and the only one in Colorado.

Begay is Diné from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, Leonetti is Yupik from Anchorage, Alaska, and Gonzales is “Mud Clan born from the Hispanic people,” also from a small community on the Navajo Nation about 35 minutes from Begay’s home.

The women were buzzing with excitement. Today was the culmination of the 58th annual Hozhoni Days Powwow, which celebrates Indigenous arts, culture and student scholarship. The Hozhoni Days Exhibition, a competition centered on students’ knowledge of Native American customs and beliefs, is a key component of the celebration. At the powwow in a few hours, the outgoing ambassador, Begay, and the incoming ambassadors, Leonetti and Gonzales, were going to be honored.

But a sense of melancholy set in as the conversation turned to the painful research project History Colorado, under order from Gov. Jared Polis and House Bill 1327, conducted into the abuses and deaths of Native American students at Colorado boarding schools at the turn of the 20th century. Chief among them was the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, which operated in Hesperus between 1892 and 1909, and later became Fort Lewis College.

For a year starting July 1, 2022, a team of researchers led by History Colorado’s state archeologist Holly Norton spent hundreds of hours examining thousands of archived documents trying to learn what became of children who attended Native American boarding schools across Colorado and to identify those who attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School.

Nine federally funded schools in Colorado at the turn of the 20th Century, along with others throughout the U.S., existed to strip Native children of their language, culture and customs “with the intent to destroy Native Americans as a legal identity — and thus incorporating them, and their resources, into American culture,” says the History Colorado report. Or, to use a phrase coined during the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver in 1892 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the notoriously punishing Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the intent was to “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”

At Fort Lewis, the methods for attempting to assimilate Native children were severe. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothes taken and their names changed, the report released Oct. 3, 2023, found.

Students at the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School
(Center of Southwest Studies of Fort Lewis College)

Under Thomas Breen, the Fort Lewis boarding school superintendent from 1894 to 1903, the school maintained a kindergarten class for children as young as 6 despite guidance from Washington that this was too young for children to be separated from their families.

Dangerous living conditions resulted in deadly illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Physical abuse was rampant, like that inflicted on two young boys forced to sleep in a coal shed on cold winter nights. In 1903, investigative reporter Polly Pry (real name Leonel Ross Campbell) broke a story about Breen sexually abusing and impregnating Native American girls as young as 14. Academic failures kept Native youth from competing with other American children. And while it was standard practice for sick children to be returned home, this was not always possible, and deaths occurred at Fort Lewis and Grand Junction Indian Boarding Schools, the History Colorado report says.

At Fort Lewis College in Durango, around 30% of students are Native American or Alaska Native. They come from more than 110 tribes and villages and receive free tuition based on a mandate created when the federal boarding school was transferred to the state with the agreement that it would become an educational institute that wouldn’t charge tuition for Native American students. Today, the school website says, “the college awards more degrees to Native American students than any other four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution in the nation — about 26% of all degrees awarded.”

Begay and Gonzales appreciate the opportunity to attend a college both affordable and near their communities in the Four Corners region. They also love the diversity and inclusion at the school, which supports multiple Native American and Indigenous student organizations, a Native American and Indigenous studies program, academic support for Native students, and a cultural kitchen shared by members of the Native-led Diversity Collaborative.

But the History Colorado project revealed what the women and others see as gaps in the school’s interactions with Native students. Leonetti and Gonzales say it hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School legacy. Begay says administrative support for Indigenous students fell short once the History Colorado report came out. And Sahalee Martin, who is Hopi and Chicana from northeastern Arizona, says the school needs to allocate more funding to its Native American population for things like Indigenous counselors its Native American Center, which “isn’t adequate for the amount of Indigenous students we have,” and “to make sure Indigenous students get what they need to succeed in higher education, because reconciliation is part of their mission statement and they should follow through on that.”

Heather Shotton, a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendent, citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the school’s vice president of diversity affairs, said Fort Lewis since 2019 has been doing “intentional work” around what it means to be a Native American-serving institution — before and after the History Colorado report came out — “with an emphasis on serving.” She said “part of that is telling our story” and “thinking about how we’re centering Indigenous culture and knowledge in the curriculum and the programming.”

But these students say the administration could have done a better job of “centering” them after the report’s release, given the gravity of the information they had just received. Martin says students deserve more in general, “especially at Fort Lewis, which has such a dark history of assimilation of our people.” The school is working to heighten its profile as a Native American-serving institution and create more support for Indigenous students even as they and their Indigenous faculty continue to grapple with a history that for decades was largely hidden and push to understand how that history informs them and the college.

Recognizing a doctored history

Another entry point for this story is the day in 2019 when Joslynn Lee, a Fort Lewis chemistry professor who is enrolled Pueblo Laguna and also of Acoma Laguna and Diné affiliation, bicycled past a panel beaming out from the clock tower in the middle of campus.

The panel showed photographs from the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School in which the students were depicted as being in good hands. Under a headline that read “Walking a New Road” the text described the school as “receiving high praise for its ‘extremely good literary instruction’ and ‘excellent work’ in all industrial departments.” It showed a boy’s baseball team, which did exist, and students in a classroom with their hands in their laps. “The children are all ‘well-clothed and happy,’” the panel read. A practical education was stressed.

Lee remembered seeing the same panels when she was a Fort Lewis student in 2002. She knew a different story, one in which forced assimilation, abuse and physical struggle were the norm. So she approached Fort Lewis College president Tom Stritikus to discuss removing the panels.

Their discussion turned into a year of talks with a “thoughtful community collective,” of Indigenous faculty, staff and student representatives, Lee said. It culminated with a public healing ceremony and removal of the panels in front of hundreds in September 2021.

Shotton said the panel removal kicked off a major effort “to reconcile the dark history of FLC” and emphasize opportunities to educate people “about the atrocities and continued impact of the boarding school era.”

But Leonetti and Gonzales, who enrolled at Fort Lewis after the panel removal, say the school could be doing a better job at relaying the history of the institution to prospective and new students.

Leonetti says she did not know when she enrolled that Fort Lewis is linked to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, or that historical reports indicate Native students died while in attendance and some of their remains are likely still on the original “Old Fort” campus where some classes are held. Ground-penetrating radar was used to examine the cemetery site and identified 46 graves believed to be children, more than the 31 children History Colorado’s archival research found who did not return home from Fort Lewis and are likely buried there.

Old Fort is 20 minutes from Durango in Hesperus. The 6,000 acres it sits on is owned by Colorado State Land Board and managed by Fort Lewis. A highly regarded farmer-in-training program operates there, and students from other school disciplines are often invited to visit.

Begay said as a Diné tribal member, she “traditionally isn’t allowed” to visit sites where her ancestors are buried. But during her first year, she went on a tour of the Old Fort without being told about the boarding school trauma. She says she went into one of the buildings and saw photos of the students and “was very emotional and I was, like, I don’t know why I’m so emotional. Then my first year was the worst year I’ve ever had because I was mentally, physically and emotionally not doing really well.

“So obviously I had to do a ceremony,” she said, referring to the traditional Diné healing ceremony for individuals suffering from emotional distress. During her ceremony, healers “told me where I went — I wasn’t supposed to go there.” (Other Native students, including Diné, have reported having positive experiences learning farming techniques at the 6,000-acre property.)

Leonetti said she had no idea about the boarding school when she arrived from Alaska last fall and was stunned when ​​an email from school leadership circulated that informed her, “Oh, by the way, Oct. 3, this report is gonna come out. I really, honestly didn’t know about it at all, especially being from so far away. Like, I wasn’t in the region to know that that had happened.”

Though three generations of her family attended Fort Lewis, Gonzales added that she was only “slightly aware” of the boarding school history and has been struggling with the History Colorado discoveries since they were released a few months into her freshman year.

Making Fort Lewis more inclusive

When Stritikus came on as Fort Lewis’ president in 2018, he entered a college trying to understand its history.

The school had a troubled past when it came to its dealings with minorities. From 1962 to 1994, for instance, its mascot was the Raider, a cavalry soldier wielding a flag and riding a horse into what one assumes is battle (notably, cavalry soldiers killed 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1862).

The mascot then became the Skyhawk, a concept combining the hawk, a raptor known for its soaring flight and sharp vision, and sky, a nod to the 247-acre campus’ 6,872-foot-high perch on a bluff above the town of Durango.

Spurred on by Lee and building on work Indigenous faculty and staff had been doing, Stritikus decided to dig into the college’s troubled past and create a new vision for Fort Lewis.

It started in 2019 with the establishment of the Committee on FLC History and a multi-year conversation about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and its historical impact on Indigenous students and communities. Fort Lewis also consulted with multiple tribes in the rewording of its land acknowledgement recognizing them as the original stewards of the boarding school and college lands “to give it a living perspective,” Lee said. The school’s board of trustees created a “resolution on commitment to reconciliation” that “supports and endorses a comprehensive approach focused on healing, maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, and caring for Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College.”

A tribal advisory council now provides opportunities to students from tribal nations and communities, explores opportunities to collaborate and partner with them, and keeps them up-to-date on the school’s reconciliation work regarding the federal boarding school history.

And there was the removal of the panels, which Lee ultimately gets credit for.

During this period “was the discovery of the mass graves in Canada,” Stritikus said. “That’s what set us on the course to really involve tribal nations more directly. To say, ‘Hey, this is not just Fort Lewis. You need to make this decision with us.’” This is why they backed House Bill 1327, which was signed by Polis at Fort Lewis, he said.

But none of these significant steps toward reconciliation prepared students for the History Colorado report.

Students, the report and Fort Lewis’ support

Begay remembers a heaviness enveloping the campus once the report came out. Students were invited to meet in the Native American Center with Shotton, Stritikus and faculty from in the Center for Indigenous Research, Culture and Language space. Faculty from the sociology department and representatives from the Sexual Assault Services Organization also came. The group went through the report in detail. It took four hours.

“It was very hard reading the report, knowing my people were the highest number to go to the boarding school,” Begay said. Navajo students outnumbered others by more than three times at the school. “That was the hardest thing because I didn’t think it was that many. It was also a very emotional day across the school and we were crying together.”

Begay texted her mother and then called her. “And I started crying because I was like, this is what they did to our relatives, Mom. This is what they done to us. And the first person I thought of was my grandma, who went to boarding school but she barely talks about it. She told me a few things that they did do to her but it wasn’t as harsh as what she was seeing her classmates getting. But I tend to see with my grandma how it definitely impacted her.”

“But I feel like the faculty were like, ‘Oh, this happened, but you guys have schoolwork,’” she continued. “And we were like, ‘We understand, we understand that.’

“But they also needed to understand that our people never came back and we are intertwined together,” she added. “Knowing we were experiencing that and knowing some professors were, like, ‘You still have a paper to do, you still have an exam to do.’ No, they did not get it.”

Leonetti said the day after the report came out, none of her teachers talked about it in class. “None of them even acknowledged it. I didn’t go to classes all day the day it was released, and I had one professor mark me as absent — even though there was a facultywide email sent out telling faculty to give students leniency. So I had to go talk to that professor and explain like, ‘Hey, I was kind of going through it that day. You’re supposed to excuse me.’”

And Gonzales said while the Native American Indigenous Studies and psychology departments gave her leniency that week, by the following week “it just, they just stopped talking about it. And then, I like to nag people a lot. I like to be very upfront. So every now and then, if we’re talking about a topic, I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, remember the boarding school? Remember when the report came out?’”

Fort Lewis College’s student-run magazine, The Independent, reported that two days after the report was released, administration established a “resilience room” where the school community could “reflect, relax and heal.” Free therapy sessions were offered through the counseling center. And in late October, Jennie Sturm, a geophysical archaeologist History Colorado hired to search the boarding school grounds for graves using ground-penetrating radar, came to Fort Lewis and held a listening session with students to go over her findings.

COVID kept Norton, from History Colorado, from attending but she said there was good turnout and the students were “very engaged.” School administrators “and Dr. Shotton, in particular” were “really concerned about the students and how they were experiencing this and what their perceptions and reactions were and to how best to care for them.”

Begay, Leonetti and Gonzales agree that Stritikus and the Indigenous faculty and staff have been available and supportive throughout the reconciliation process.

“When the president decided, when we all decided, to take the panels down, I remember a lot of my friends that are Native were, like, ‘Oh, that’s a win for us knowing that we’re slowly getting ourselves back, that Fort Lewis is finally listening to us,’” Begay said.

And with the boarding school report, Leonetti said, “I feel like Tom did a really good job. I talked to him the week that happened and he was very supportive.”

When Stritikus heard this feedback during an interview with The Colorado Sun on March 29, he seemed delighted.

“When we started this work, when I came on the campus, what I felt was that for as Indigenous as we were, in a school that had been doing Native American waivers since the beginning of time, the Native American students were not visible in the way that they should be. Thinking way back, this has always been about building an inclusive community for students, and a place where students could show up as their whole selves.”

“So the fact that students met with you and said they both appreciated what the president did but had critiques for the president, that’s awesome,” he added. “Because to me, that says no matter what, at the end of the day, we’ve created a culture where students get to share what they think, show up as who they are and voice their opinions. I’m elated that students are sharing their thoughts with people, as we’ve tried to create that culture from the beginning.”

And as for the school’s response to students in the aftermath of the release, Stritikus said, “our team, certainly on the week the report came out and the week after, did an incredible job of supporting students. So students who feel like, ‘wait a minute. We put this report on the shelf. What’s happening here?’ That’s a fair point we should listen to, but what I also always try to talk about is this is less about history. We’re not a museum. We’re not a historical society. We’re an educational institution.

“So the momentum that should be created from the report is that responsibility Dr. Shotton has so clearly laid out,” he added. “Fort Lewis has an obligation to build in the students those things that the boarding school took away — language, wellness, leadership and Indigenous ways of knowing.”

The mission will have to carry on without Stritikus. He has been hired as president of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His last act at Fort Lewis was presiding over graduation Saturday.

Lee said, “We’re still working through reconciliation as an institution and will even after Tom leaves. It’s in our board of trustees resolution and they are committed to supporting our Indigenous students even as anti-DEI measures are happening in other states.”

Moving through generational trauma into a brighter future

The History Colorado report says collectively, the “suite of negative impacts” inflicted on Native Americans through the federal government’s assimilation process “is often referred to as intergenerational trauma. This is a widely accepted concept that trauma experienced by an individual can be passed down to subsequent generations, psychologically, emotionally and even physically.”

Fort Lewis student Shenay Atene, who is Diné from Monument Valley, Utah, and a psychology major who graduated Saturday, said this trauma is sometimes expressed in drug and alcohol abuse among some Native Americans “and it can lead to everything else, and they can even pass away from it.”

One way Fort Lewis Indigenous students have coped through the reconciliation process is by creating art about their history and experiences.

Atene participated in an exhibit through the Center of Southwest Studies called As Seeds We Grow: Student Reflections on Resilience, which explored student identity and cultural resilience with consideration to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School history.

The United States has 183 Bureau of Indian Education-funded elementary and secondary schools and residential facilities, of which 55 are bureau-operated and 128 are tribally controlled. They are nothing like the boarding schools of the past.

Atene has a complicated relationship with boarding schools. From first through eighth grade, she attended Kayenta Community School in Kayenta, Arizona. She didn’t want to go; her father made her. He said he wanted her to be independent, but the experience was difficult.

Not in the way the original Native American boarding schools were in Colorado — not even close to that, she said. But as a little girl, she went to bed at night fearing someone would hurt her or steal her. Shenay’s grandparents attended the kind of boarding schools where students were punished for speaking their language. Speaking Navajo was discouraged when her dad, now in his 50s, attended.

Learning details about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and relating them to the fact that her parents sent her to a boarding school evoked emotional trauma that Atene needed therapy to process. “I didn’t necessarily need to work through it,” she said, “but to realize what I went through was hard.”

One way she healed at Fort Lewis was through facilitating a traditional sheep butchering on the Old Fort grounds. When reports of Indigenous child abuse started surfacing in Canada, she said, the kill became “much more meaningful.”

“The way the Navajo people heal is through community and that’s through food,” she said. “What better way to process the boarding school information than through traditional foods? Slaughtering a sheep on the old boarding school grounds meant so much more because they couldn’t have that. We really are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

In the As Seeds We Grow exhibit, she contributed the traditional Native American jingle dress she wore throughout her childhood, which went with her “from different states to different schools.”

She wore the necklace and belt she danced in starting at age 5. They among the few remaining items she has from her grandmother.

Three paintings she made recall her years in boarding school. The most powerful is called “The Nights,” about which she wrote, “There were always girls that cried through the night, but we never spoke about it with each other. It wasn’t until after a few months of being in Peewee Hall that I accepted that this was my life. This was our life.”

In March, she described the work she did for the exhibit as “healing.” But, she added, at home, where her pieces are now safely stowed, she keeps “The Nights,” which has dark swirls coming out of a door with a window through which she imagined she was being watched, covered with a sheet.

There is still healing to be done. And History Colorado has yet to fulfill its entire mission mandated by House Bill 1327. It is ordered to collect oral histories to help deepen what’s known about the boarding school experience. But Norton doesn’t know if the oral histories are needed.

In the report, she asks the state to “identify the purposes” of them, saying, “It cannot be simply a performative action.”

“Many people note that their parents and grandparents did not speak at great length about their experiences,” she said, cautioning, “oral histories must serve a greater purpose than simply recording the trauma of already victimized people, who do not owe the state their emotions or stories.”

New legislation currently under consideration requests an additional $1 million for History Colorado to continue its research through 2027.

Meanwhile, Atene graduated Saturday and now is off on a journey to become an Indigenous geriatric psychologist, a career she’s inventing to help the elders in her community. She said her experience at Fort Lewis was “amazing because of all the supportive staff and faculty. They helped me learn how to become a leader, embrace my past, and make it a useful tool when helping others.”

When she thought about the momentous occasion, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We’re Native in a Western educational institution. Who would have thought 200 years ago this would have happened? We’re our ancestors’ prayers coming through.”