Erased

 Only the shoes remain.

Bolted to a concrete base, neatly sawed off at the ankles, they're all that's left of a life-size bronze statue in McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas. The rest is gone, leaving only two feet in baseball spikes -- some unintentional symbolism, perhaps, or likely just more evidence that America is over-served with idiots these days.

The statue, you see, was of Jackie Robinson.

It stood in McAdams Park because kids play baseball there, and also because ... well, when has anyone needed to explain the significance of Jackie Robinson to both baseball and civil rights in America?

According to this piece by my friend and former boss Justice B. Hill, the statue was one of eight of Robinson around the country.  There's even one of him carrying a football outside the Rose Bowl, a nod to Jackie's days as a two-sport star at UCLA.

And if you're asking now, as are officials in Wichita, what would possess someone to do something so jackass-y as stealing a statue of Jackie Robinson, my response would be I don't know what possesses half of America these days. I mean, I do, but you're not allowed to say it without being tagged as a "woke" Commie-fascist-socialist who hates the good old US of A.

Which brings me to my larger point, and perhaps where the symbolism of Missing Jackie comes in: That in America today the people who scream "cancel culture" every time someone tries to remove the whitewash from American history are the very ones doing most of the canceling.

It's why Nikki Haley's out there selling the absurdity that America has never been a racist country. It's why parents and politicians of a certain ideological bent are bullying school libraries to remove books they deem "inappropriate" -- including, gee, what a surprise, the works of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. 

It's why among their various bogeymen is Critical Race Theory, an advanced law-school study no secondary or primary school in America is teaching anyway.

Rewriting American history is the goal of all this, and it goes back to the immediate post-Civil War period, when Lost Cause revisionism became the accepted narrative in the South and eventually, as a byproduct of the reconciliation movement, in the North. One of the things reconciled, after all, was that we white folk gotta stick together, though it was never stated so explicitly.

And now it's 2024, and Lost Cause revisionism is experiencing a comeback in your redder states and communities. The Civil War had very little to do with slavery, the narrative goes there. Slavery, in fact, was beneficial because it taught slaves useful skills they could use later on (hat tip to Ron DeSantis for that one). And let's not bring up the less noble parts of American history, because that might reflect poorly on white people and therefore would be "divisive."

The height of absurdity in all this might have been when the state superintendent of schools in Oklahoma said teachers were permitted to talk about the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa by a white mob. But only as long as they didn't say it was about race.

Ay-yi-yi. As a student of history, stuff like that makes me want to beat my head against a wall.

"Gee, Mr. Blob, you sure have wandered a good ways away from a stolen statue of Jackie Robinson," you're saying now.

Yeah, well. I do tend to get carried away. But my point pertains.

Which is, Jackie ain't the only thing that's going missing these days.