The Past Isn’t Over

 

So I’m reading (on Xitter, so I can’t link it) general chatter (i.e., opinion the opinionattie agree with) that revising American history is a GOP thing now.

And it is.

But everything old is new again.

I’ve mentioned this statue before. It’s on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, prominently placed at the Congress Avenue entrance to the grounds (the Capitol building faces down Congress). It’s not a 19th century homage to the Civil War; it was erected in 1903. And it is huge. The figures are life-sized, or near enough for dammit. The central figure there is Jefferson Davis.

There are 11 monuments on the Capitol grounds honoring the Confederacy. The last time I was there, this giant monument to failure and racism was being ignored by visitors, in favor of one nearby that reflected the slave history and struggles for freedom and equality of African Americans. That statue was immensely popular.

The Lost Cause didn’t explain away the explicit racism of the Confederacy until a new generation came after the war. The daughters of confederate soldiers built the monstrosity, not the veterans. 

I was taught in public school that the war was due to the meanness of the North, not the evil of owning human beings. I didn’t learn about the Tulsa massacre, the Tuskegee experiment, or Emmit Till, to name three, until long, long after. But even then I could read books like Dick Gregory’s Nigger, or Black Like Me, and know I wasn’t getting the whole story.

But whitewashing American history isn’t finding the purchase it once did. It’s a rear guard action, old people desperately fighting to preserve a past younger people have already abandoned. I don’t even think you can blame it on boomers, the youngest of whom are 59 this year. This is moms with kids, not grandparents who worry about their grandkids getting shot at school. It’s a reactionary force energized (I’d argue) by the mortgage securities crisis 16 years ago (it took Hitler about that long to bubble Weimar Germany into Nazi Germany, and I don’t mean he didn’t take advantage of circumstances), with Covid tossing kerosene on those coals.

But I don’t mean Nazi Germany is coming to America. Already I’m seeing random tweets from formerly rabid Trump supporters sticking their rhetorical heads up to say “We gotta do better than this!” Hell, even Trump realizes his ass is grass and the justice system is the lawnmower. There’s a long way to go between now and November ‘24, and a lot is gonna happen.

The people driving Trump are Millennials more than Boomers, and not enough of those for him to win in ‘24. Not enough to keep spreading the whitewash, either. All the money in Texas that was trying to defund public schools is now being spent frantically to save Ken Paxton; but I don’t think the Texas Senate is listening, and I’m still convinced the FBI is waiting for him in the wings.

I think that speeding car of ideological mania is about to run into an immovable brick wall. The same one Goldwater ran into in ‘64.

I mean, does anybody really want to be like DeSantis’ Florida?