So Steve Bannon is out. Was there any worse media bete noire in the Trump White House? But notwithstanding that, since he was fired by Trump, does anyone want a high/low bet with me as to when the media starts treating him like a cross between Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa?How can the most pressing national issue of the day – the tossing of every statue, monument, and plaque referencing the Confederacy – be so critically important when hardly anyone cared about it 30 days ago?? And to hear Nancy Pelosi call for the removal of every statue of a Confederacy member inside the Capitol is so rich. She’s walked past those statues for 30 + years but TODAY she calls upon the Majority Leader (a “Republican”) to effect their removal. What about when she was the House Majority Leader?
The Brits, whose population has a somewhat lower tolerance for nonsense and a much greater feel for history (despite press and media only slightly less aggressive than ours) have a major London traffic artery named for, and more than a few statues of, Oliver Cromwell, whose revolution ended in the killing of a sitting king. My favorite English holiday is Guy Fawkes Day, a national holiday celebrating the Gunpowder Plot, wherein Fawkes and his crew were attempting to blow up Parliament until some building staff accidentally came across the large cache of explosives. Both men were executed for their “high crimes” but in Cromwell’s case his dead body had to be exhumed so his head could be properly cut off. But Brits are not challenging their historical memorials, and they remain in public view.
Of course, the very thought of sanitizing our mixed history raises a very slippery slope. Why limit it to slavery and the Civil War? Why not deny historical recognition to the discoverers of the country and to the US Cavalry for any and all excesses relating to Native Americans? Why not toss Franklin Roosevelt based upon internment of US citizens of Japanese heritage? Or the statues, museums, inventions, and books commemorating the works of the more than 300 famous American communists over the years? Just sayin’ that once the precedent is established, a future grievance mob can take it further – maybe a lot further.
Even if limited to the slavery issue, why contain it to only Civil War actors? Why not go backward in time and take out Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison and Jackson? Why not come forward in time and take out some very real Twentieth Century segregationists like Woodrow Wilson, Harry Blackmun, Robert Byrd, Al Gore Sr, and any southern politician who was a “Dixiecrat” opposed to LBJ’s Civil Rights legislation in 1964 and 1965?
But then a subversive thought entered my brain. Liberals (mostly Dems) have felt until recently that most of the South was in their camp. But this issue may really be a “lose/lose for them. What if the Republicans feigned opposition just enough to throw the fight, so the Democratic opinion prevailed. How many additional, or “new”, voters would the Democrats pick up? I say none because all those interested people are already with the Dems. But in winning the statue war, Dems have once again ticked off a lot of other people that might have considered voting their way next time. So we may have yet another instance where the Dem Party panders to one more aggrieved group (sometimes a phantom one ginned up by the always overheated media) and when all is said and done, they wonder why the people that they just offended don’t vote for them. Can you spell tiger trap?
Sigh