Cleaning up history, erasing all racial insensitivity

Roll up your sleeves, time to get back to work. There’s still much to do.

We’ve had a good start, toppling those Confederate statues and ripping up those Dixie flags.

ESPN kept the ball rolling with its wise decision to cancel plans for an Asian broadcaster named Robert Lee to call a college football game in Virginia. A gross insensitivity was thus avoided. Good start. But just a start. And no, this doesn’t mean addressing the shamefully low levels of educational achievement in cities where African Americans live in large numbers. Or addressing the presence of high rates of crime there, including Kabul-level violence. Or addressing the socio-economic pathology of single-mother households with no father present. Or addressing the high rates of black unemployment — higher than the rates among Latinos, oddly, even though Latinos are a demographic at significant language disadvantage, judging by the extent of bilingual programs.

These are issues we can keep on the back burners. We must seize this opportunity to indulge ourselves in smug moral righteousness, in “virtue-signaling,” as it has come to be named.

Here’s the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put political foes on the spot. Embarrass ‘em. Shame ‘em. Gain partisan political advantage. Take back the White House, Congress, state houses.

What we’re talking about here is the challenge of eradicating all historical traces of history with a slavery connection. Eradicating all trace evidence of racial or ethnic insensitivity in our past.

Toppling statues of Robert E. Lee and even his horse Traveller are signal accomplishments in this challenge.

But this exuberant, iconoclastic Talibanism only points to the lengthy agenda ahead.

As noted, the Washington and Jefferson monuments in the nation’s capital may very well have to go. Or be rededicated to more acceptable historical figures. Lesser memorials can be destroyed. Or covered up, as some universities — bastions of enlightenment — are doing with certain pieces of their problematical sculpture.

Meanwhile, however, there’s more basic history to be revised, or erased — work that gets right to the root of the matter. And, alas, this will inconvenience more than just the NASCAR crowd and the Trump Deplorables.

First and foremost, a gigantic tarp must be acquired and draped over the entire Democratic Party.

Its history is such that from the presidency of Andrew Jackson all the way through the presidency of Abraham Lincoln the Democratic Party was the proslavery party.

And for a hundred years after Lincoln — all the way up to Lyndon Johnson — the Democratic Party was the party that obstructed civil rights legislation in Congress. (With the assistance of Johnson himself over many decades.) A powerful faction of the party blocked even the passage of anti-lynching legislation.

Meanwhile, it was largely the partisans of that political party who founded, organized and filled the ranks and sheets of the Ku Klux Klan.

Moreover, all of the memorable segregationist characters of the Civil Rights Era were of Democratic Party provenance. George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox, Bull Connor. Robert Byrd. You can look it up.

And it was a Democratic President — Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton U, former governor of New Jersey — who re-segregated the District of Columbia after Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, had taken significant steps toward desegregating it.

So fetch that tarp!

It may even be necessary to find a tarp big enough to cover up the whole history of slavery itself, actually.

For one thing, Islam has what you might call a somewhat chummy doctrinal and historical relationship with slavery. To avoid charges of “Islamophobia,” it might be more prudent simply to cover up the whole history of slavery rather than tip folks off to Islam’s accommodating role in it and attitude toward it.

Many are compromised by slavery’s taint. The tarp needs to be big enough to cover up, for example, African potentates’ role in slavery.

For a remunerative arrangement, they typically attended to the fulfillment of the human cargo manifests while the European slave ships lay at anchor offshore.

It may be necessary even to ban the black poet, Langston Hughes. One of his famous poems describes slavery as “the rock on which freedom stumps its toe.”

“Stumps its toe!” A pretty lame denunciation of slavery, wouldn’t you say? Doesn’t that remind you of Trump’s weak condemnation of alt-right extremists?

Indeed, it may be advisable just to skip over all of history in general. After all, from the earliest civilizations slavery was a characteristic feature of the human chronicle, in every corner of the planet.

There were — dare this even be mentioned? — Native Americans who held slaves. Held African slaves and Native American ones too.

There were even some blacks, a very few, who were slave owners themselves. Maybe some of them — who knows? — were the ancestors of Black Lives Matter activists or ancestors of Rep. Maxine Waters or of Rev. Al Sharpton.

Then there are the great-great grand daddies of New York’s financial community. The financiers of the North accrued fortunes underwriting the shipments of slave-plantation cotton to England.

These were contemporaries of and successors to Alexander Hamilton, current toast of Broadway. Therefore, that show has to be shut down! And that Hamilton statue on Wall Street must be toppled. Or at a minimum defaced.

Erasing even trace evidence of racial insensitivity also requires some hard-nosed decisions regarding the Goody Two-Shoes. For example, the Quaker abolitionists.

Many of the prosperous Quakers of Colonial Philadelphia owned slaves. And they persisted in doing so despite the efforts of a few of their hectoring peers, who tried to embarrass them into manumission by publicly highlighting their pious hypocrisy.

As for the abolitionist groups themselves, most of them — get this — did not permit freed blacks to be members. So this leaves a lot of abolitionist statuary to be melted down and portraits to be removed to warehouses or destroyed.

Which brings us to Abraham Lincoln. The Great Emancipator had a patronizing view of blacks by today’s standards. He toyed with the idea of boating ‘em back to Africa. So the Lincoln Memorial must be dismantled. And Lincoln, Neb., must find a new name for itself.

Let’s not overlook the historical scourge of Christopher Columbus, either. All traces of him must, of course, be effaced.

It turns out there was no human resources office on the Santa Maria. And Columbus neglected to institute affirmative action programs for the indigenous populations of Hispaniola. This leaves us with countless Columbus parks, Columbus boulevards, Columbus plazas, Columbus squares, etc., all of which must be renamed. Not to mention another state capital, Columbus, Ohio.

Columbus pops open a whole new can of worms: namely, Hispanics, whose victim status is now in need of serious revision. Just look at how Spanish-speaking Europeans treated the native dwellers of South America, Central America and Mexico. This means many more thousands of statues to rope and pull down.

Speaking of native populations, here’s yet more historical cleanup work to do. To the south, some of the indigenous practiced human sacrifice. Very insensitive, to say the least. And to the north, the misnamed “Indians” raided each other’s turf and made off with each other’s womenfolk and horses. Undeniably true, Native Americans were abused, bamboozled, displaced, the luckier of them were, the ones who weren’t exterminated.

Yet the historical reality remains that Native Americans weren’t always punctilious about smoking the peace pipe themselves or practicing conservation, contrary to the stereotype. Their intra-tribal warfare was as savagely ferocious as it was common. Plus, they stampeded vast herds of buffalo over cliffs, for example. And descended like locust swarms on wilderness tracts which they scoured clean of game and then moved on to the next tract. What’s more, tribes were notoriously patriarchal. They’d never have passed muster with Rachel Maddow or the ladies of The View.

This history surely leaves hundreds of thousands of Native American place names — cities, towns, counties, states — to be erased and replaced with names less offensive to pacifistic, ecological and gender-equality sensitivities.

So, back to work. Much, much to do. As George Orwell observed: “Who controls the past controls the future...”

Let’s get on with it. We’ll get to the schools, jobs, crime and other nonsense later. If we can find the time.