Dakota Beacon

William Murchison writes in American Conservative about the decision at Washington High School in San Francisco to paint over a Depression-era mural depicting Washington.  I wonder how long it will take to re-name Washington High School . . . and maybe “San Francisco” is offensive to Muslims and must be changed - maybe to “Saladin, California”?

When you were a kid, did you see Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland"?  Do you remember when Alice was down the rabbit hole in a wilderness and the weird little robot-like dogs had followed behind her, sweeping away her footsteps and thus the path to where she had come from?

We have a modern-day version of this going on today.  Our past is being erased much faster than we can shore it up.  It began with the states formerly in the Confederacy being criticized and attacked for any reference to that part of their past by images of the old “Stars and Bars” battle flag in their state flags.  Many dumped their flags in sudden shame. We should have challenged that kind of thinking back when it was just flags. Flags can, after all, be reinstated when sanity prevails and people decide they want to know their past, good or bad.  Then it was mascots. The erasing of our sports and school mascots were part and parcel of the War on Humor. A nation which used to have the capacity to laugh at itself on occasion and celebrate our diversity by recognizing that we are not all alike began to transform itself into a prissy, self-censoring bunch sitting with our hands in our laps and our ankles crossed with phony smiles pasted on our faces like a group photo of your third grade class.

It has moved on.  We have seen the toppling of our statues of famous Americans.  These might be seen as villains or heroes, depending on who they were and who you are and what the truth is of what they were a part of.  We could look at Andrew Jackson from many perspectives - he fought Indians and drove them westward (bad if you are a Native American); he beat the British in the Battle of New Orleans (good if you are an American patriot or happen to live in Louisiana); he kept slaves (bad); he filled his administration with his rowdy hillbilly friends (bad if you were a well-groomed, ambitious Easterner shoved out of the way by them, or the cleaning staff at the White House, good if you yourself are a rowdy hillbilly or like the idea that you can get rid of undesirable appointees without Civil Service roadblocks).  We could look at Robert E. Lee as a Confederate general (bad?) or as a patriotic American military man whose loyalties were torn by a war he didn’t want (laudable). Grant was a Union general (good) but a drunk (bad). Sherman was a Union general (good?) but he destroyed much of the South in his own version of the Punic Wars (bad, very, very bad). George Washington was a slaveholder during a time when this was a custom (bad) but he was a great leader whose humility and devotion to his country inspired trust among not only his own countrymen but worldwide (very good). Lincoln was the president who “freed the slaves” (good) but left them without shelter  or means of survival (bad) and oversaw a possibly unnecessary and wrenchingly costly (500,000 dead) civil war (very, very, very bad). Thomas Jefferson was rumored to have taken obscene advantage of his favorite female slave (rottenly bad if true) and kept slaves (bad for sure) but from his pen came the Declaration of Independence, a profound and beautiful statement of man’s rights and dignity (this is really good).  

I could go on and so could you, but the point is that our heroes are not saints and have all had human flaws, sometimes poor judgment, sometimes they didn’t rise above the mores of their times.  Some might have actually been, on balance, “bad guys”. Regardless, they are a part of our dynamic and colorful history. We need to know them and know about them, we need to talk about those judgments and those flaws, what they did right and what they did wrong.  All of this destruction of monuments and statues has gotten out of hand. It is not helping anything. Isn’t it better to let a statue of Jackson spark a conversation about his heroism and intelligence vs. his numerous mistakes? Wouldn’t this bring up in conversation matters of “right” and “wrong”?  Challenge our generations to think about these things? One thing we know is that the empty pedestal where it once stood teaches us nothing. If this goes on we will end up losing the statue of Sacagawea - some would call her a “traitor” for dealing with Lewis and Clark, and W.C. Handy, whose music would be an affront to Muslims.

In Staten Island there stands a monument to Jesse DeForrest, a Huguenot refugee from France.  He lived for a while following the terror perpetrated by the French against his religion, in the Low Countries, in Brabant.  A highly skilled craftsman, he sought to establish a colony or homeland for his fellow Huguenots. Failing to find support in the American colonies, he went to Brazil, where he died of a fever.  There is a monument to him in New York only because his family became important there after his death. Jesse DeForrest never made it to North America himself. His monument is to the Huguenots who came later, among our early political refugees.  It is important for its insight into our history in Colonial America.  We learn about religious freedom from such a monument.   We learn from our monuments and statues why people came to America, whether they succeeded in realizing their dreams or not, where they came from, what they did - right or wrong - when they got here.  No worthy purpose is served by obliterating them.

As a nation loses its collective memory we are like Alice, not knowing whence we came or how, our ancestors mere shadows of whose existence we can only be certain because we are here now.  Their struggles and mistakes, their conscience and thoughts are obscured and lost. Our history can no longer teach us anything. This alienation from and loss of our past is really scary.  How can we go forward without knowing our past?

I’m a musician.  I play the harp regularly for Alzheimer's patients.  Those whose affliction is advanced struggle to remember something said two minutes earlier.  They often ask the same question again and again and they do want to know the answer but their past is erased for them as soon as it happens.  It is frightening.

Today is Columbus Day (although “observed” on Monday).  In Grand Forks, the leftist bastion of North Dakota, the City Council voted to throw out “Columbus Day” and replace it with “Indigenous People’s Day”.  This kind of sop is what I mean. We are erasing history for some sort of muddled, meaningless gesture intended to hit back at Western culture in any form.  I would be willing to bet the farm that none of those voting on this had a clue about the actual history of Christopher Columbus, who he was, his own history, what he did (or didn’t do), but simply made the shallow mental note that he was European.  ‘Nuff sed. They might have learned something had they taken time out before voting on this to arm themselves with a little factual information. If they are too lazy to do any research on their own, I could recommend Michael Knowles’ interesting and brief history of the man and his times.  I hereby recommend it to you. This is not an attack on our “indigenous peoples”.  We might better choose one among them whose history is important in our story and honor that person - separately from Columbus.  No one is even thinking of doing that. Maybe because those promoting the trashing of our existing historic Americans don't care so much about honoring indigenous Americans as actual people as they are in substituting a faceless, meaningless group for anyone who does have a story to tell.  Perhaps because it would have meaning and the real agenda here is to strip us of anything meaningful in our history.

The bottom line is this.  No one has the right to take our past and our country’s collective memory from us.  No one has the right to destroy our monuments, obliterate our paintings, tear down our historic sites, blot out our state flags - not even Nikki Haley.  These artifacts and this history belongs to us. Let us stand up and protect them. When the madness passes it would be nice to have something to show our grandchildren someday about who we were and where we came from - after all, this is our diversity.  Removing our statues, erasing our history, this is a form of ethnic cleansing.  Much like Stalinist Russia did.