Knee-jerk hysteria

Now that the knee-jerk hysteria is for removing Stonewall Jackson’s statue in Charlottesville, I am wondering how long the 1956 Broadway musical, L’l Abner will last in its CD and DVD formats before being removed from shelves and deemed racist. Ban, ban, ban. After all, the song, Jubilation T Cornpone that helped put the play on the map might be instrumental in expunging it forever. If the Broadway Actors Guild permits this to happen, then they too should disappear forever.

How nice it was to grow up when a movie was only a movie, a statue was only a statue, and a song was only a song. I could see a future American history textbook, a few printed pages at the front followed by a hundred blank pages with the word “Censored” stamped in red, followed by a continuation of rewritten history. Sad, sad world indeed, but sadder, sad, sad United States.

DAVID JAMES WONG