On presentism:
One of the characteristic mental disorders of our period is an easy contempt for the past. It’s not just that we are taught to hate the past, for one can respect and still detest an enemy. It’s that we despise it. We observe it with an easy, swaggering and thoroughly unquestioned contempt. We are presentists with all the arrogance of the cartoon plantation racist.
Which leads us into many faults of the intellect, some of them comic. But our worst fault is the belief that history, somehow, is easy. Of course it’s easy to know what happened in the Civil War! Every fifth-grader knows the story. Heck, my four-year-old daughter knows the story. She read about it in her Magic Treehouse books (which, by the way, are racist). “Oh, I know about the Civil War,” she said. Indeed she does – she knows about it the way everyone in 2013 does. If a little less.
Imagine the poor bastards who actually had to live in the past, being understood by a four-year-old. Of course, it is no more possible for Sibyl to understand the Civil War than to fly to the moon. She’s a bright girl, but still.
And Mark Twain:
If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.
5 Comments
You think there is somethiung wrong with racism.
All the up and coming countries are very concious of their race.
Ask the Chinese. They dont feel they should blend.
Only the decadent west has gone all soft and self deprecating.
When I was 17 there was a fair chance I would be handed a rifle to kill assorted races.
In a way bthat is not really racist. but realistic.
There is political profit in “race”. Ninety plus percent of black votes go to Democrats. If that begins to drop post Obama, the Left will resurrect even more ugly history, even if it has to be made up, to stem the loss. If that fails, blacks will be dropped like a bad habit and Mexicans will move ahead in the grievance pecking order. Black lives won’t matter a bit anymore.
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/07/west-point-revokes-confederate-diplomas/
My, what an adventurous life.
Beside being needlessly provocative and entirely unoriginal, your comment is completely off-topic.
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?search=1&entryID=628
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo
Mister Malpas?