Posted on 06/02/2017 8:08:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
Liberal hysteria over Donald Trump was hardly required to pose questions about the "patriotic myths" of the Founding Fathers, but his elevation to the Oval Office has accelerated the trashing of the heroic past, even the stories of the American Revolution that generations of school children cherished.
It's not just Parson Weems' imaginative tale of George Washington cutting down his father's cherished cherry tree, and his owning up with his assertion that "I cannot tell a lie." That story, from the first biography of the first president, has long been exposed as the fiction of a teaching moment meant to encourage childhood virtue. The current fashion of debunking authentic stories of the Founding Fathers provides different lessons, piercing the pride of country and the questioning of the morality of our origins.
The American Revolution is targeted as "the last bulwark of national myth," or, as Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker characterizes it with a snort of snark, something "still sacred in its self-directed propaganda." He speculates wistfully in the column headline that "We Could All Have Been Canadians" and says that such a result would have been a more sanguine alternative to idealizing what our Founding Fathers actually wrought. He is only half (or perhaps a quarter) in jest trying to be provocative.
He writes, "The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America -- what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them?"
Reading a range of new academic histories drew him into his absurd cause-and-effect analysis of the American Revolution. Instead of the democratic principles conceived by thoughtful and pragmatic idealists, these arguments find that the founders concocted their schemes and dreams through mixing the rhetoric of slaveholders with enlightenment argle-bargle, "producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy." The American Revolution is thus the last major myth standing.
Deconstructed and gone from textbooks is the portrait of the brave, if flawed, Christopher Columbus, who sought a shorter route to India and stumbled into a new world instead. In the new telling, he is a rapacious warrior who led to the genocide of American Indians, as he called them. And so, Columbus Day must be erased from the books.
Deconstructed and gone from memory are the rugged pioneers who set out to settle the new and untamed land, hoping to arrive in the West with their scalps intact. They're replaced by greedy and unscrupulous men who stole the land of the noble red men and deserved their savage haircut.
Deconstructed and gone with the wind are the heroes of the South, who sacrificed their blood and treasure in defense of kith and kin, as they saw it, trapped in the compromises made over the slavery that was the shame of all, Southern slaveholder and New England slave importer alike. Pulling down of the statue of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans, as graphic as the toppling of the evil Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad in 2003, was a cruel reminder that not even a noble man on the wrong side can be spared by the politically correct mob.
The academic deconstruction of American history has spared the Revolution until now because, in The New Yorker account, "fetishizing" a Founding Father can be worth a Pulitzer Prize, as in the success of "Hamilton," the hip-hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. But that's changing; historians are nibbling away at conventional interpretations of the American experience, fanning the fires of contemporary polemics and questioning the democratic roots of pride in country.
Gopnik, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, betrays an emotional sympathy for the Canadian sensibility, which encourages him to denigrate American heroics and sacrifice. As a child, he writes, he learned that Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats -- as if that betrayed cowardice. He denigrates American heroism on D-Day and the carnage on Omaha Beach, compared with the Canadians who fought well at the more lightly defended Juno Beach. It's a silly comparison, as men of both nations who fought there would have been the first to say.
Gopnik knows that his audience of millennials is hardly the "greatest generation," like the men and women who won World War II. He recalls parades in Philadelphia with flags and the singing of "The Marines' Hymn"; and that Canadian patriotic pageantry was celebrated in a hockey anthem sung when the Canadian hockey team beat the Russians in 1972. Could a young man resist that contrast? Apparently not. That's what comes from a bad rewrite of history.
There was a scene in “Dazed and Confused” where the high school teacher was telling her students that the Founding Fathers were “a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
So it started a long time ago.
‘”We Could All Have Been Canadians” and says that such a result would have been a more sanguine alternative to idealizing what our Founding Fathers actually wrought’
Oh yeah, that would’ve happened.
You jackass liberals (and Canadians and Australians and all the lily-white British enclaves): there would BE no “Canada” without the United States as is.
The damned British learned their lesson - never push too far or you lose it altogether. That is what happened with the “American” colonies to the south....they insisted on the GB way and ended up losing everything.
So they became nicer with the northern colonies, and then their other own-flesh colonies like Australia and New Zealand. They gave them what they asked. Because they didn’t want to lose everything as they had in the 1700s.
There would be no “Canada” per se without the US. Period. Unless they would actually fight for it, too.
RevWar era ping
Nice summary but long been happening, at least since hippies dominated news.
We became a nation of spoiled rotten BRATS.
They pretend things are so terrible here (or have been, which is also a false premise). They WANT things to be terrible. They want to whine and cry, so they pretend their lives are horrible here.
This is why I want to force some “exchange” students. To real 3rd-world crapholes so these assholes learn what REAL hell is like.
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Recessional of the Sons of the American Revolution:
“Until we meet again, let us remember our obligations to our
forefathers who gave us our Constitution, the Bill of Rights,
an independent Supreme Court and a nation of free men.”
Dr. Benjamin Franklin, when asked if we had a republic or a monarchy, replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
Until our Revolution slavery was the norm of the world. It still is in most of it.
Yep...until the American Revolution, it was the Divine Right of Kings that ruled almost everybody on the face of the earth. Self-Government, government by the consent of the governed, is the biggest political accomplishment of men since the beginning of time.
People that write and espouse this nonsense are really ignorant of history. They would rather have us living under Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela than have us in our present system. They prefer MiniTru, Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, memory hole, and “we’ve always been at war with East Asia” to liberty and freedom.
I have been saying for years that the Left HATES everything about America starting from the voyages of Columbus to the present. Leftists pretend to love America but ask them what they love about it and they have no answer.
The Left antagonizes Americans intentionally, just like the old time pro rasslin' heels.
So when are these same iconoclasts going to trash the French Revolution, which would probably never have happened without the American example (despite how different the two were)? I suppose it's only a matter of time that all previous leftisms are cast into the dustbin of history for being "too white."
These same Commie punks tell us how brave and genuine the guerrilla "freedom fighters" in Vietnam and Iraq are when they kill American troops by posing as civilians or even emergency aid workers.
Without a neighbor like the United States, Canada might have faced numerous threats from “imperialists” over the centuries.
When you learn history from a book written by Zinn, this is what the result is.
They cannot say they love America. If they do, they must qualify it with a “..but....”
These bastards hate America and whatever is closest to it. Watch how they handle movies. If it seems to be patriotic, it’s no go. If it’s British vs. Africans, they slam the Brits. If it’s Europeans vs. Asians, they slam it if it’s pro-European. Whatever side is closer to America, they hate, and they hate the movie if it glorifies the “American” side.
I’ve never seen so much “patriotism” from the leftisits here than since Trump was elected. Suddenly they care about America and its survival, and they care about the Russians and how “bad” they are! Would that they were so worried about the Russian commies 30 years ago!
Good point, and I don't know why it seems nobody has drawn the obvious conclusions from it.
Namely, Dems & Ruskies were sweethearts going all the way back to FDR & Stalin.
FDR loved them so much he let Russian spies run wild in our scientific works, stealing secrets to build their own A-bombs.
And ever since Dems & Ruskies were secret lovers, which explains their outrage at old Joe McCarthy for exposing them in public.
Dems supported Russian allies in Vietnam, again against Reagan and most conflicts since, i.e., Iran.
So what happened in 2016?
Once again Dems were heading for the alter with their Russian lover, but for some reason, this time he didn't show up.
Hillary was standing there holding her flowers, ready for the ceremony, but groom never arrived!
So naturally, Dems feel jilted, abandoned and p*ssed as h*ll!
So what do they do?
Well, being Democrats, they do what Dems always do -- they accuse Republicans of every crime Dems ever committed, and they say it with genuine outrage & anger, because it should have been them!
Is any of it actually true?
Who knows, but I suspect what's really genuine is anger Democrats now feel at missing out on their usual love from Russia.
And why would Putin do that to poor Hillary?
Again, who knows, but just maybe in a moment of unusual enlightenment old Vlad had the thought, "as KGB I'm paid to be evil, but not completely insane."
Just my $.02
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