Brain Dead At Live Oak High

Yesterday was 5 May, Cinco de Mayo. The date does not commemorate Mexican independence. That comes on 16 September. Rather the Fifth of May is celebrated in one Mexican state and the US as a tribute to a meaningless military victory by the outnumbered Mexican army against the French invaders back in 1862.

For a number of reasons which center on the blooming of identity politics and its Siamese twin, the politics of victimization, the Fifth of May has loomed ever larger on the American folk horizon. Going back fifty or so years ago, Cinco de Mayo was no big deal at least in New Mexico, a state which, as the name makes explicit, is not without a certain Mexican heritage.

Times have changed. In California it has become such a major phenomenon that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, a burg south of San Jose gave five male students a stark choice: take off your tee shirt with its American flag or go home. To their credit the guys chose the latter course.

The bigoted officials justified their violation of the First Amendment rights of the students by averring that the American flags might, by their mere existence and display, so outrage students of Mexican ancestry that violence was a real possibility. Not only did this action on the part of timorous school administrators shred the First Amendment, it constituted an insult to the students of Mexican descent by alleging these folk had, shall we say, poor impulse control and low anger management skills.

At the same time the school wallahs had no problem with the wearing of tee shirts and other clothing displaying the Mexican flag. Apparently they were convinced that nice, Anglo kids could see the flag of our "neighbor to the south" without flying into fist waving, butt kicking rages.

The senior personnel at Live Oak High are far from alone in their warped view of people, history, and human dynamics. They are, in fact, in words and in actions, quite obviously members in good standing of the American hoi oligoi. Card carrying True Believers of the Blame America First movement which has infested so much of American academia for the past forty years with results evident throughout the political, media, and educational structures of this country.

Before catering to and thus reinforcing the nasty and destructive nature of identity and victim status politics, the learned administrators of Live Oak High should get a grip on the history of the French adventure in colonialism in Mexico between 1861 and 1867. The same advice applies to the legion of "advocates" who noisily praise Mexico and Mexicans while damning the US and Americans.

In 1861 Napoleon III of France decided the time was ripe to overturn the Monroe Doctrine. To this end he used the default on Mexican bonds ordered by President Juarez. The French Foreign Legion and a few elements of the long out of practice French army were dispatched to collect the debts and raise the flag.

There was one reason and one reason only that Nappy the Third felt up to the task of carving a new French Empire in the Western Hemisphere. The US was preoccupied at the time in a fracas variously called the Civil War and the War Between the States. Absent this preoccupation there would have been no French invasion.

In the early months of the invasion the poorly organized and commanded French force of some 8,500 men had a meeting engagement with the roughly 4,000 man Mexican army detachment at Puebla. The Mexicans won--or, more accurately, the French lost--that May Fifth. Not that the loss mattered, the French flag did eventually fly over Mexico City as Nappy installed a distant relative, Maximilian, as emperor.

The reign of Emperor Maximilian I did not last long. The Big War Up North came to an end as all wars must. The French military attache watched the two day long Grand Pass in Review, first the smart looking and marching legions of Grant and then the shambling, hard bitten, hard marching and harder fighting warriors of Sherman's Army of the West. After Sherman's "Bummers" slouched by in the long, lazy ground eating gait of the experienced combat infantryman, the French attache advised his masters in Paris that the US not only had a first class army in Grant's troops, more it had a new breed of warrior who "could and would not be defeated."

With the military means readily available the US now reminded Nappy that the Monroe Doctrine still applied. Our SecState implied that we would enforce it with means of our chosing at a time of our choice.

Not yet the fool he would soon prove himself to be, Napoleon took the hint. The French withdrew. Maximilian having far more guts than good sense did not do likewise. As a result he died well (issuing the commands himself) before a Mexican firing squad.

Neither the officials of Live Oak High nor the assorted ever-so-concerned advocates may like to admit the truth. Neither may the hypernationalistic sort of Mexican. Yet it is unmistakable. Ejecting the French, ending their occupation of Mexico, was an accomplishment not of the Mexican army and patriots but rather the credible threat of American action in support of the Monroe Doctrine.

Not to put too sharp a point on the knife: They might be speaking French south of the Rio Grande were it not for the Monroe Doctrine and Sherman's Army of the West. Both of these were Hecho en Los Estados Unidos.

Of course it may be too much to expect that credit be given where credit is due in the final defeat of the French--a defeat which did not occur on 5 May 1862 but nearly four years later--and fly the American flag. After all the same people who sent the boys home for doing so also don't acknowledge another "inconvenient truth." When the US won the war with Mexico it took only very little territory and almost no Mexican citizens outside of California (and not very many there) despite the fact that the war was both provoked and started by the Mexicans.

Don't you just hate it when history didn't go the way your beliefs of today would like it to have gone?