Columnist and former GOP speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes as though Charlottesville never happened, or that reams of US history haven’t been written, or that she listens to anyone with whom she appears on television.
OTOH it is the kind of ruling class understanding of US history more common to Republicans, one whose privilege allows for and even cultivates an ideological ignorance for its revisionist narratives … “they reconciled”.
This country has yet to have that closure that a truth and reconciliation commission might bring, which is why we have had the eruptions of what the Reverend Barber calls multiple reconstructions.
In reacting to the Washington National Cathedral’s decision to remove stained glass windows of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Noonan portrayed the generals as honorable men who just happened to be on the losing side of the American Civil War.
“They were figures in the greatest, most killing moral struggle in US history,” she wrote. “They didn’t tweet, they took to the field and died. Then one side won, they reconciled, the American experiment continued and we learned through this history. Keep ’em. Let it be. They are us.”
A thousand points of error...
Noonan’s argument, a common viewpoint, is still incredibly flawed and illustrates a world in which people walk by statues and ponder philosophical thoughts, or are otherwise given deep historical knowledge. Noonan and the like argue that if the statues are taken down, their historical significance is stowed away or erased — as if there are no other places that knowledge of these men, and what they fought for, exist.
Finally, a professor at Georgetown just lost it with her ...