Small victories

 Comes now the news that the United States Air Force, having faced an epic raft of doo-doo for expunging basic training lessons on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) during World War II, has decided to reinstate those lessons.

("What does this have to do with sports, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.)

(Nothing. It has to do with history and the attempted eradication of same, another of the Blob's passions. Those who checked in expecting to see Super Bowl takes may now leave the room. Don't forget your hall pass.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. The Tuskegee Airmen. Women fliers. The eradication, or at least diminishment, of sizeable chunks of our history.

The Air Force, see, initially pulled videos on the aforementioned in response to the Felon-in-Chief's across-the-board ban on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.  Apparently diversity, equity and inclusion are un-American concepts, despite the fact America is and always has been a polyglot nation. Who knew?

Anyway, the Felon (and his faithful MAGA suck-ups) decided diversity, equity and inclusion had to go in their America. This tracks with their general attitude about "DEI hires", the sneering assumption they seem always to make when a woman or a person of color winds up in a position for which the Faithful Suck-Ups deem them unqualified.

Well, phooey on that. There's a new sheriff/gangster/jailbird in town, by god. And that's why the Felon and his suck-ups have replaced the former Secretary of Defense -- a black four-star general and Silver Star recipient named Lloyd Austin -- with Pete Hegseth, a white man with an apparent drinking and horndog problem who's never held a rank above major.

I suppose it would be unseemly here to refer to ol' Pete, in the same sneering tone of condescension favored by the suck-ups, as a "White Guy hire". But what the hell, I've never been accused of being seemly, so I will.

But back to history, and the backdoor way the new regime's DEI ban makes it permissible (advertently or not) to erase and/or whitewash it.

State and public officials of a similar mindset have been using "DEI" and "CRT" (Critical Race Theory) as cusswords for awhile now, despite the fact the latter isn't being taught in any of their children's classrooms. As the Air Force's actions reveal, the new zeitgeist will only encourage these folks. And while I may be guilty of the same fear-mongering the Felon and his suck-ups so artfully deploy, I do wonder how warped will be the history the next generation will be taught as a result.

Already, out in Oklahoma, the state superintendent of schools decreed students can only be taught about the 1923 burning of Tulsa's prosperous black district so long as no one mentions race -- which of course was the only thing it was about. But that would be "divisive", so, nyet.

Meanwhile, here in Indiana ("The Part Of Mississippi That Isn't Actually In Mississippi") I wonder how much the Felon's regime will affect, for instance, the teaching of Indiana history. In my day we learned only that William Henry Harrison was the father of our state, but not how he became the father of our state -- i.e., by playing divide-and-conquer with the indigenous peoples there to swindle them out of huge tracts of land, against the explicit wishes of President James Madison.

That's part of his story, too, for better or worse, and therefore part of ours. History, as has been noted by people far wiser than the guy driving this sentence, is messy and non-linear. This is especially true of American history, which is not a single story but many stories, each as much a part of the national (or state) mosaic as the others. It is, well, diverse.

Which in the Felon's America is an obscenity, of course. And that makes the small victory over the attempted erasure of the Tuskegee Airmen and WASPs a significant one nonetheless.

It tells us that in America, no matter how unrecognizable it becomes, overreaching will get your hand smacked. May it always be so.