If you’re a classic Broadway fan like I am, making me one of five straight men in North America who still are, you may remember the bicentennial-themed show 1776. On this Fourth of July it may do us all a bit of good to ponder it and ancillary issues.
In the musical there is a great scene where the Edward Rutledge character, representing South Carolina in the Continental Congress during the independence debate, gives an intense lesson in song to Northern delegates who want to insert an anti-slavery provision in the Declaration of Independence.
“Molasses to Rum” calls out the Northern men on their hypocrisy, as Boston ships are delivering the slaves from Africa. That hypocrisy aside for the moment, of course we side with the North and rightly wish this nation would have been conceived without the original sin of slavery.
However, we do so sitting comfortably in our 21st century rhetorical Barcaloungers, making it rather easy and stress-free to apply our modern sensibilities to questions of the past. And so it will be on the 4th that certain media outlets will use the date as a platform to trash this country and its people from before and after its inception.
Let’s see: Columbus was a genocidal racist, the Founders were sexist white men, the Indians were noble and placid indigenes until we massacred and forcibly moved them, the Civil War was only about states’ rights, more Indian massacres, nasty Gilded Age robber barons, racism, sexism, racism, sexism, we started the Cold War, we were the bad guys in Vietnam, the Great Society cured so much, homophobia, the Soviets were always innocent, radical Islam is a creed of peace, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, ageism, white privilege, ismism, and Trump is an insane orange intergalactic baby-eating baboon villain who will destroy the constitution to build gauche condos on the former site of the Supreme Court after Putin takes over and bans abortions.
Did I miss anything? Probably.
But the above list forgets a small thing. Mainly, nobody has a crystal ball to see that the seemingly controversial policy today will be looked upon as pathological psychosis tomorrow by the latest Bolshie academic, race hustler or poverty pimp.
Do we really believe that Columbus was after murder, not gold and fame? Were the Founders, men of The Enlightenment imbued with the spirit of Locke and Montesquieu, completely obsessed with race and not independence? Ever heard of counting coup? Did the liberation of slaves and 300,000 Union dead to do so play no part in the Civil War?
Did a growing country need men with capital willing to risk their fortunes to bring jobs and lands that could settle millions? Did the Soviets ally with the Nazis in carving up Europe, stand idly-by supplying the Luftwaffe with fuel during the Battle of Britain, only to move in on Eastern Europe after WWII?
As compromised as the South Vietnamese government was, wasn’t it better than reeducation camps, boat people, and the Killing Fields brought on by our withdrawal from Southeast Asia? What major part of the Great Society did not just make things worse? What happened, due to his policies, to the Cold War less than a year after Reagan left the presidency?
What about certain passages in the Koran is hard to understand?
And President Trump is indeed from another galaxy. Well, sorta. He’s from Queens.
(Credit: Pixabay/StudioLabs)
I managed to avoid much of this stuff because I went to college in Europe, not America. The Brits, French, and Germans who taught me marveled at the American tendency towards national masochism. Not that they were conservatives, mostly far from it. But they had read enough history to understand that ex post facto historical analysis is silly and meaningless. Not to mention since their histories were fifteen hundred years older than ours they were a tad cynical when it came to the various machinations of kingdoms, empires, and states. When pressed by some sanctimonious undergrad over alleged geopolitical guilt, they’d shrug their shoulders as if to say, “It’s all been done before by everybody.”
But to make good their Long March Through the Institutions the Left has to rewrite history by modern Marxist standards. If one was white and male then historical malice must be inserted into your soul to make the Marxist narrative work. Actually, they even want to control and rewrite who is considered Caucasian enough.
My whole life I have been told that those of Spanish heritage like me were part of an aggrieved minority race wholly innocent of the depredations of the evil white devils. Hence the name of groups like La Raza, Spanish for “the race.”
When I point out to these red rewriters that Spain is next door to and west of France, and everybody considers the French “white” and quite Western European, I get blank stares. When I inform them that Spaniards are actually Ibero-Celts, Irishmen with a better tan, I get that confused sideways head tilt that must be the look you get when you are trying to teach a dog calculus. When I remind them that Spaniards are the original opponents and victors over Islamic attempts at European hegemony, they generally just go back to nursing their Chardonnays.
Yup, the hard political Left and their fellow travelers in Hollywood and higher education try mightily to convince my ancestral cousins to get on the victimtrain, just like this and every Fourth of July they will make titanic efforts by word and screen to convince Americans that our historical experiment in a constitutional government is a lame rationalization for class, gender, and racial oppression. Our place in the world? Only an excuse for pillage and exploitation.
(Credit: Pixabay)
So while you’re flipping that burger or quaffing that cold one, consider those original sins, so beloved by some, utilized to make Americans ashamed of themselves on the Fourth. But then you’ll realize that by our actions here and all over the world over the last two hundred-plus years, the real sins that were committed have been more than atoned for by blood and treasure.
Not that we’re perfect. We just aspire to be our best. Then have another beer, American. You and your ancestors earned it.
