The inconvenience of history

 Today is the official federal holiday commemorating Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when ex-slaves in Texas became the last to learn they were free. And so, as something of a history nerd, the Blob is calling timeout from Sportsball. 

It would rather acknowledge what a stubborn thing history is, and how you can't escape it no matter how much you try to deny or muzzle it.

For instance, I'm guessing there are more than a few history teachers who are thanking their deities Juneteenth falls in the summer, so the parents of their white students don't start caterwauling about Critical Race Theory again.

See, if school was in, their children would be compelled to talk (and their teachers to teach) about Juneteenth. Which would bring up America's original sin of slavery. Which might lead to discussions that would make their children feel bad.

(They probably wouldn't, kids being kids. But reality intruding on a cherished narrative spoils all the fun.)

In any event, little Johnny or Susie might learn it was white folk who did the enslaving, and how the legacy of that has stained and informed the American experiment to this very day. And that would be history at its most inconvenient.

This means it's history certain people don't want to think about, or want their kids thinking about. So woe betide any teacher who tries to get them to think about it,

That would compel those certain people to grab their torches and pitchforks and run said teacher right out of town on a rail, no matter how accomplished an educator said teacher was. This might seem exaggeration for effect, but the torch-and-pitchfork crowd has already done it, having become that unhinged. Shoot, look at what happened just yesterday in Tennessee, where a bunch of loons with Stop White Replacement (huh?) signs gathered to protest a Juneteenth celebration.

(They were all masked up, in the photos. The Blob figures that was because it's June in Tennessee, and the usual sheets and hoods would have been too hot.)

But I digress.

Point is, we are deep in the days of CRT hysteria, which is why the very inconvenience of history is what makes it most valuable. Santyana brushed up against the truth when he said those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but that was only a glancing blow. What's more true, in the Blob's humble opinion, is that those who distort history (or who excise certain parts of it because it might make certain people uncomfortable) are not just condemned to repeat it, but to deny its very existence.

This is going on right now in America, where a mountain of evidence is indicting a former president of trying to foment a bloodless coup. That it failed doesn't diminish its threat to  who we are and what we stand for as a nation.

And yet ...

And yet the former president, a gifted liar, has convinced a startling number of Americans that it's all a Democratic witch hunt. This of course ignores that all the Jan. 6 testimony against him is coming from Republicans. But then facts can be such pesky things. 

As is history, which is exceedingly messy as well. Interpreting the past and how it impacts the present is an art, not a science. If it were the latter, historians everywhere would be out of work, and the unemployment rate would be considerably higher. But interpreting and re-interpreting the past is a never-ending job, and so H.W. Brands and S.C. Gwynne and all the rest can breathe a sigh of relief.

Which gets us back to Juneteenth, in the Blob's usual meandering way.

I'm wondering, given all of the above, how teachers fearful of the torches-and-pitchforks crowd would prepare a lesson plan on Juneteenth. Would they dare risk the wrath of the hysterics by actually talking about slavery? Or would they toe the perceived party line, which sounds to the Blob like a passage from "Forrest Gump"?

And then, on June 19, 1865, freedom was proclaimed for all enslaved peoples in Texas. And that's all I have to say about that.

I'd like to think that wouldn't be the case. I'd like to think there would be a discussion of, you know, history, and how we've gotten to where we are as a nation because of it, and how every nation, no matter how great, got there by doing some pretty un-great things.

I'd like to think -- oh, how I'd like to think -- we would never go back to the days when schoolkids were taught that  Washington never told a lie (especially about that cherry tree), and that Davy Crockett died at the Alamo swinging old Betsy at a passel of freedom-hating Mexicans, and that the Civil War wasn't about slavery at all.

The first and third of those aren't true.

The second almost certainly isn't true, or is at best a gross distortion of the truth.

Here's hoping it will always be safe to say that.