The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Something for Everyone to Hate’

Posted on | December 28, 2020 | 1 Comment

It would be interesting to know how many high-school students in Loudon County, Virginia, would be able to identify Col. Edward D. Baker. If you are a student of the Civil War, you know that Baker’s death in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the chief inspiration for the creation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, chaired by the radical abolitionist Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio. This tale is told artfully by Bruce Catton in a dozen pages (pp. 68-80) of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, a book I doubt any recent student at Heritage High School in Leesburg has actually bothered to read, despite the fact that the historic events related by Catton happened about five miles down the road from the high school.

Military history is almost completely absent from the 21st-century curriculum, which is big on “social justice” themes and short of any genuinely useful knowledge. What students are expected to learn in school now is not facts, but rather a politically-correct attitude. The way history is now taught, the chief goal of the curriculum is to inspire teenagers with the kind of fanatical passion for “progressive” values that one might find in an Antifa riot in Portland, Oregon — fire-bombing police cars as your senior project. But I digress . . .

Heritage High School was the scene of a teenage melodrama this summer, when a vindictive punk decided to make a big deal out of a Snapchat video, thus destroying the reputation of the captain of the school’s varsity cheerleading squad. “There’s something for everyone to hate in this story,” Ed Driscoll remarks, and indeed I found something:

How long must the South be chastised for its history? For the editors of the New York Times, apparently, the answer is, “Forever.” Nothing could be more obvious in its intended purpose than the non-accidental choice of Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest iteration of the tiresomely familiar “Legacy of Slavery” theme in the New York Times.
If you are not a Southerner, or if you pay no attention to the New York Times, you may be unfamiliar with that newspaper’s long tradition of invoking slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow as a means of insinuating the South’s permanent status of moral inferiority. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator, History, New York Times, Virginia

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One Response to “‘Something for Everyone to Hate’”

  1. Wednesday Linkage « Bacon Time !!!!!!
    December 30th, 2020 @ 3:06 am

    […] ‘Something for Everyone to Hate’ […]