Thoughtful Buchanan Essay

[rsbs]

Reflections on the changes in America.

https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2017/11/03/their-america-and-ours-n2404076

we went from jailing and shooting communists to electing them.

[hardnox]

Pat's mostly reduced to picking at scabs to support himself.

A monument has three lives- the politics of when it was erected, the meaning it conveyed during its existence and the politics of the present.

In the case of Lee the answer is clear- those monuments were erected in the era of Jim Crow as symbols of white supremacy, pore 'ol Bob notwithstanding. That creates the context of the present.

I sorta think that the ruling on the cross is a bit overzealous but the same logic applies- it was erected in 1925 when crosses were once again burning across the nation- and well into the north- in our last major outbreak of nativism.

And, oh yeah, The War on Christmas, and the Russian Facebook Fake News that black people don't like Santa. I'm thinking those rooskies keep a couple captive American idiots in cages to use as test subjects.

[hardnox]

Actually they don't need test subjects. The WWW is open and they can just check places like this to find out what lights people up.

[r3020]

Once the book burners get started it's hard to get them stopped. they have no problem burning the American flag but the communist manifesto is sacred.

[hardnox]

Most of them already have been, or should be. I'm referring to those 1950-60s US History texts that portrayed the Civil War as a glorious contest between equivalent systems and happy filed hands singin' while they chopped cotton.

That was all spun that way in service of our Great Power aspirations- which had been met- and helped keep us together to fight the Nazis and Commies.

Those portrayals were about 90% slanted or false but they still underpin the mythology of The Folk about their exceptionalism.

[r3020]

So put you down in the pro book burner crowd.

[hardnox]

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a book, and, I'll generously offer you that the portrayal of those events that it offers is at least as accurate as those government approved texts that I referenced. The Mitchmeister banned it from Indiana schools and state universities.

And I guess that millions of copies of Das Kapital still exist in print.

Although I understand your need to cling to your false historical narrative and to stand straw men up in defense of it.