Newt Gingrich and Andrew Jackson’s Clear-cut Ideas

It was a win, win, win for Newt! proclaim the people who are paid to proclaim. A GOP debate, where the white-haired man was on fire, the debater, with a holy vitriol tempered by hard-browed realism. Cut to the camera on the crowd watching, and their ecstatic gasps, hands clapping above their heads.

Some of these are the humans who booed down Ron Paul when he suggested the Golden Rule as a good mindset for foreign policy decisions. And they cheered instead, some even getting on their feet in excitement, when Newt said “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies–kill them.” Mitt Romney, eager to share in the love sent Newt-wards for this, agreed: “Speaker Gingrich is right. Of course, you take out our enemies, wherever they are.”

I live in Nashville, Tennessee, home stomping-grounds of Old Hickory. And so I have learned about some of Andrew Jackson’s clear-cut ideas, and some of his killings.

Andrew Jackson’s story is complex and nuanced, and even heroic at moments. I don’t intend to deny that when I suggest that the name Andrew Jackson should first conjure up a wealthy slave-owner and poster boy for genocide. Whatever else he did, over the course of his life Jackson profited off of the coerced labor of nearly 300 human beings who were held in his ownership. Whatever else he did, Jackson was responsible for forcing the original occupants of the southeastern US off of their landbases.