(In which the Blob again tunnels out of Sportsball World and is on the loose. Post your APB here if you don't want to be want to be subjected to, ugh, names and dates and demon hist'ry)
Today is Juneteenth National Independence Day in America -- Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, etc. -- and once again some folks will celebrate with picnics, barbecue, music and seminars, and other folks will make snide remarks and wonder why the hell we have to mention slavery again when President Trump says it's verboten.
This is our country now, sadly. It always has been, really -- Americans have forever been a squalling, contentious lot, a melting pot that never completely melts -- but now the divide is more stark and unhinged than ever, having been given the seal of approval by the Unhinged One himself and his various toadies and bootlicks.
On his watch, per his executive order in March of last year, it's now official policy to scrub the nation clean of any history Fearless Leader deems insufficiently worshipful of 'Merica. This of course means keeping quiet about slavery, America's original sin and one of its messiest and most defining legacies -- i.e., the very essence of what history is, and what it's supposed to teach us about ourselves.
People with a reverence for the past understand this. The people driving the bus in America now do not.
And so the National Park Service, on orders from the very top, has either removed or ticketed for removal signs and exhibits at dozens of sites. Not surprisingly, most of the removals involve slavery, the civil rights movement, America's erratic and often murderous policies toward indigenous peoples, and the trashing of the environment.
In other words, anything that suggests American history isn't all seashells and balloons, as Al McGuire used to say.
The latest erasing happened just a week or so ago, when the NPS removed several panels at Bunker Hill with quotes the Regime deemed inappropriate. These included a Vietnam War era quote suggesting the U.S. should "cease to build memorials to death and begin to glorify life", and a quote urging that immigrants should take "no second place" in America.
And another?
An editorial from the abolitionist paper "The Liberator" chastising freedom-loving Americans for also embracing slavery.
Now, none of those, obviously, is remotely controversial to any rational human. Of course we should choose glorifying life over romanticizing death. Of course the immigrant should not take a back seat in a country built by immigrants. And of course the contradiction between freedom-loving Americans and the institution of slavery is central to our national narrative.
But, again, rational humans aren't driving the bus anymore.
This includes the woman who claimed a Bunker Hill display about the women's suffrage movement in America was -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "woke" feminism. Yet her lone complaint set in motion the aforementioned erasures.
So one nutbar says something irredeemably stupid, and the Park Service commences scrubbing. This is our country now.
It's a country where our leaders pine for either the 1890s or 1950s, when history textbooks still advanced the false catechism of the Lost Cause, teaching a generation of young minds that most slaves were happy and, anyway, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. And it was a time when no one questioned how bizarre it was that United States military installations were named for Confederates who waged war against the United States military.
Juneteenth?
A national holiday, but one of which a disturbingly large part of the nation seems disinclined to make too much. It's OK to celebrate the end of slavery in America, but not to talk about slavery itself. Better to keep it locked in the national attic with your crazy Uncle Fred.
On the other hand ...
On the other hand, here's something I wrote on this occasion three years ago. Very little has changed, sadly. Which only means it's still a relevant way to wrap all this up:
Juneteenth ... is rightly celebrated, but you can't fully discuss it without acknowledging the backlash that followed. It led to freedom, and then the ballot, and then to representation in Congress -- and then, as night follows day, to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction in favor of the reconstruction of slavery in the form of Jim Crow.
And then to the black Holocaust of lynching and racist violence. And then to the civil rights movement, the backlash-to-the-backlash whose gains the usual suspects are now working overtime to undo.
You can't properly teach Juneteenth without mentioning that context. And yet it's everything those usual suspects are trying to suppress in the name of -- to use one of their arguments -- not stirring up resentments that divide us.
Know who else used that rationale?
Well, in Adam Hochschild's history of the years 1917-21 in America, "American Midnight," there's a passage describing domestic Military Intelligence chief Ralph Van Deman's strong-arming of the black press. His excuse was that they were running exposes about lynching, and that pieces like that might create "a feeling of disloyalty" among blacks.
Hmm. Sound familiar?
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