A land with no past

Last week the usual suspects, otherwise known as any governing entity in San Francisco (in this case it’s a school board), voted 6-1 to remove the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, and 41 others (Dianne Feinstein??!!) from the city’s schools for various violations of wokery and having “significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

That any of the members of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education know enough history to know that that phrase appeared in a rather important document written 245 years ago by another of their memory-hole targets is less than certain.

Such uncertainty also appeared in their decision to take the name Roosevelt off one of the schools since they couldn’t figure out whether it was named after Teddy or cousin Franklin, although the hunch is that even the latter might meet the disqualification criteria since his leadership during wartime undoubtedly reduced the “opportunities” for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for certain Germanic goose-steppers whose conception of happiness included invading neighboring countries and incinerating Jews.

Those quibbles aside, we should thank San Francisco’s not especially well-educated education commissars for having given us a roadmap to where all this must eventually lead in a world of persisting human imperfection and spreading moral idiocy—given the nature of wokeness and the need to be more woke than the next woke, other woke city councils and school boards will have to get in on the act sooner rather than later and to the point where it will eventually be accepted by the non-woke as far as Omaha, Muncie and Wheeling, lest they be accused of complicity in the “white supremacy” project otherwise known as the United States of America.

There is, as with so much else in post-modern leftism, no inherent or even conceivable “stopping point” with any of this—once you begin erasing historical figures for failing to have lived up to today’s (evolving) moral standards, there is no way to create a decision rule allowing you to draw a line and say, “here, but no further.” To the contrary, a certain inexorable logic dictates that if Washington then Jefferson, and if Jefferson then Lincoln, and so on, until we draw right up to the present with virtually nobody left and all public buildings and streets named after Cesar Chavez, Barack Obama, or Harriet Tubman (although even Obama might not make the cut if some skunk at the picnic brings up that pre-2012 re-election campaign opposition to gay marriage).

Any sane person knows that this is insane, but we have no way of stopping ourselves, except perhaps throwing up a cordon around the state of California.

That just about everyone who lived even in the not-so-distant past was racist, sexist, and homophobic (by today’s standards) and probably cheered for the cowboys whenever they went up against the Indians is beside the point. Because the point of such expungements isn’t to provide a balanced historical assessment but to send the message that we, the enlightened if obscure members of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education, are sufficiently virtuous as to sit in judgment of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the man who led us to victory in our war for independence, and the man who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and find them wanting.

At the least, the inability to distinguish between history’s heroes (however inevitably flawed) and its genuine monsters has the effect of giving the latter a free pass; after all, if the fellow who freed the slaves gets the same treatment as the fellows who fought to preserve slavery, what good is it to oppose evils like slavery?

When a leveling occurs that obscures the distinction between good and evil, only the evil benefit.

Those of us who were skeptical of the frenzied movement to knock down Confederate statues held that skepticism not out of any worship of the Confederacy or for which it stood, or even any substantial disagreement with the claim that such monuments are in sufficiently bad taste as to recommend removal from public spaces, but because we knew this wouldn’t be the end but merely the beginning. That it always had less to do with getting the bad guys out of the public square than with erasing the good guys too, as part of an effort to rewrite American history not with warts and all but just the warts.

Because with all that we held to be good now redefined as bad, even heinous, we would become increasingly reluctant to defend the nation’s founding or the principles it reflected.

All of which brings to mind one of the funniest scenes from the Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night,” wherein a grumpy old man on the train tells them, “I fought the war for your sort” and Ringo responds with, “Bet you’re sorry you won.”

Which is another way of asking whether great figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, to whom we owe so much, would have been inspired to such greatness if they had known that a consequence of their actions would be that school board in San Francisco.