PrintApril 4, 2011
Stamp of approval?
A civilization that exalts and celebrates its rock-stars and movie actors over its soldiers and important leaders has forgotten obvious things and is beyond decaying...it has but mere decades left. If a country has lost its collective memory, it cannot know what it was that made it once great.
Have you looked at U.S. postage stamps recently? They are childish, silly, and racist. Growing up I remember that for years we would use stamps with the figures of Lincoln, FDR, Washington represented. You'd send a letter and you could not help but be reminded of to whom we were indebted and what it was that they did.
A 5 minute cruise of the USPS website shows that these kinds of men have been erased. Here is the line-up as of today:
Polar bears, lots of women and blacks no one has ever heard of. There's Julia de Burgos (who?), Mother Teresa (an Albanian saint), Oscar Micheaux (a black guy I never heard of), Kate Smith, Katharine Hepburn, Love, Pansies in a Basket, the Year of the Rabbit (Forever, a Navajo necklace, Anna Julia Cooper (a black woman I never heard of), Adopt a Shelter Pet, Butterfly, Tiffany lamps, Chinese bracelets, Kwanzaa, Mary Lasker (who?), Richard Wright (another black guy), playing cards, balloons, daisies, cherries, all the NFL Teams, Hollywood personalities, the Simpsons, and don't forget...you guessed it...the all-important-never-thing-that-one-cannot-know-too-much-about...wait for it... Negro Baseball Leagues.
Oh, and there is a stamp of the U.S flag and one of the Liberty Bell as well as one of Reagan and a white cartoonist.
That's it. Oh, and there's also some kind of Muslim stamp. No stamp that reminds us of September 11th, nothing of the landing at Normandy (everyone's including even Hollywood's favorite war), none of our aircraft carriers or the fighter jets of today, no Eisenhower, Grant (who liberated more black Americans than any black man ever did), Audie Murphy, Thomas Edison, George Patton, Lewis and Clark, or Chesty Puller.
It's almost as though a law had been enacted to prevent the intelligent representation of American History through its postage stamps.
