Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Dr. Seuss

In June this year, Aunt Jemima will die. So will Uncle Ben.

The companies that own those trademarks — Pepsi Cola and Quaker Oats for Aunt Jemima, Mars for Uncle Ben — have decided those brand images “do not fit our core values.”

They reek of southern slavery.

So they have to come down. Like those statues of Robert E. Lee and Lord Cornwallis. And renaming of sports teams, schools, and streets to banish references to an unsavory past.

Who’s next for the chopping block? Dr. Seuss?

Actually, yes. Six of his books will stop being published, AP reported this week, “because of racist and insensitive imagery, said the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy.”

The name given to this practice is “revisionism.”

I’m a bit surprised that no one has attempted to edit the story the biblical King David, for committing rape, murder and treason.

Traditionally, we learned about David as a righteous man, a just king, an example of how to obey God. But if you take off the faith-tinted lenses and read his story in the light of modern morality, you find that he raped a woman who dared not refuse him, and conspired to kill her husband.

He was a bigamist, with at least three official wives, and heaven knows how many concubines. (His son Solomon claimed 300 wives and 700 concubines.)

His family life was anything but exemplary. One of his sons raped his own sister; another led a rebellion against his father.

David himself committed what we would call atrocities — he slaughtered 100 Palestinian men and delivered their genitals in a basket to his prospective father-in-law as a bride price.

Today, he would also be called a terrorist, waging guerilla war against the legitimately elected king. And probably a traitor too, for having been treated like a member of the family by King Saul, before turning against his father-in-law.

But that’s all based on today’s morality. I use David as an example, because most people would consider it unrealistic to expect David to live by today’s moral standards. Then surely it is equally unrealistic to expect, say, John A. Macdonald to establish and operate residential schools with the wisdom of a later century.

The point is not whether these former heroes did something wrong. Of course they did — even if they thought it was right, by the standards of their time. The question should be, did they do something right?

Do we today benefit from their actions yesterday?

Yes. Again, Dr. Seuss comes to mind.

If so, we should celebrate that positive part of their lives, and avoid replicating the negative.

Revisionism unintentionally embodies Shakespeare’s famous line: “The evil that men do lives on after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

During the Cold War, the western nations heaped scorn on the Soviet Union for rewriting history from a Marxist viewpoint. But isn’t that exactly what revisionism tries to do?

When revisionism first emerged, I saw knocking tyrants and dictators off their pedestals as a symbol of moral progress.

But I’m having second thoughts, as the principle of retroactive correction seems to spread.

I know that I made racist comments and told sexist jokes, in my youth, before I knew any better. Didn’t we all? Are those indiscretions now usable against me?

Because once we establish that standard, we must equally expect to be judged by future generations. For our treatment of the environment. And of each other. And as we increasingly litter the universe with everything from abandoned satellites to electronic ripples of “Baywatch,” “Bewitched” and “The Brady Bunch.”

What we ought to be doing is learning from our mistakes. Taking seriously that standards keep changing. Evaluating our present conduct not by what we were traditionally taught, but by how we see — through a glass, darkly, as St. Paul once wrote — how social standards are evolving.

We cannot imagine what social standards will be ten years from now, let alone a century or a millennium ahead. We can only do the best we can with our present awareness, and hope that future generations will be more understanding than we have been.

As a descendant of one of the original Aunt Jemima models said, “I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything. Because good or bad, it is our history.”

I emptied my last bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup. “Goodbye, Auntie J,” I said, and dropped her in the recycling bin.