The past is never dead

 "To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.  For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"  (Cicero)

History can be weaponized like anything else, and it's always easier when your opponents are unarmed.  We begin today in the sad state of North Carolina, where forklift operator-turned-lieutenant governor Mark Robinson has been revealed as a Pearl Harbor Truther.  In a 2018 interview uncovered by the UK's Daily Mail he combined the hoary FDR-knew-about-Pearl-Harbor story with the Patton conspiracy theory to explain how Roosevelt rigged the whole war to help Stalin.  General Patton wanted to keep going east straight to the gates of Moscow, of course, so he had to be stopped by the reds in Washington.  That Roosevelt died months before Patton is just one of those inconvenient details.  Should Robinson become governor, history teaching in the state would follow the path blazed by polities like Florida (slavery provided the enslaved with valuable job skills) and Russia (Ukraine has always been a province of Mother Russia).  History hobbyists like Robinson start with a fact (Japan attacked Hawaii but a decision was made to fight Germany first) and garnish it with some isn't-it-odd (isn't it odd that Patton came through the war unscathed only to die in a silly car accident?) before serving up the result (Roosevelt was a Communist!).  It works with children who know nothing about history.

This is another piece of history, Tanz im Variete by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1911).  It portrays a Black man and a white woman dancing the cakewalk and was long believed destroyed by the Nazis along with hundreds of other Kirchner paintings.  The owner concealed it on a farm and then gave it to his children; last week it sold at auction for seven million Euros in Munich.  If it goes on display in a public place, see it before it's vandalized in the name of some good cause rather than an attack on entartete Kunst.

Usually it's climate activism, which has seen soup hurled at Mona Lisa, mashed potatoes flung over Monet's Haystacks and paint smeared on a Degas sculpture in the National Gallery.  A new group called Animal Rising entered the chat by pasting improvements on the new portrait of King Charles.  (The king also received a "Happy birthday, Motherfucker" greeting from Melbourne, a video of the beheaded statue of his great-grandfather George V.)  Strangely, none of these efforts has made any dent in global warming, ended the maltreatment of animals, or whatever it is the Australians want -- Charles is already not king of Australia.  Even when they have pictures of some liquid dripping off a Van Gogh, the media have lost interest.  The art restorers are kept busy and nobody is hurt, but the main effect of all this is to link climate activism with juvenile misbehavior, even when it's two octogenarians trying to break the glass covering Magna Carta.  It cheapens their cause to the level of Laura Loomer handcuffing herself to things, and Laura Loomer is a MAGA moron.

What with Byron Donalds endorsing Jim Crow and Tim Scott quoting Fannie Lou Hamer, it's possible to forget there was a civil rights movement.  Certainly it's less painful.  One of its last living witnesses, Rev. James Lawson, has died at 95.  He was the great theorist of non-violent protest, mentor to John Lewis, the Freedom Riders, Diane Nash and of course Martin Luther King, Jr.  He led the boycotts and sit-ins that desegregated Nashville; later he organized the sanitation workers of Memphis, on whose behalf King died.  "The task is unfinished," Lawson said in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of King's death.  It seems to grow more unfinished every year.  At least he won't have to witness the Sleazy Six overturning Brown.

Sometimes history is made while everyone looks the other way.  According to the economic outlook of the World Bank, America's "impressive" economy is driving world growth from 2.4 to 2.6 percent.  (But eggs are so expensive!  I can't afford gas for my EV!  Biden is old!)  Is anyone out there?