- At the close of the War Between the States, President
Abraham Lincoln visited the abandoned Confederate capital of Richmond,
Va. He asked an Army band to play "Dixie," remarking that it
had always been one of his favorite tunes.
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- Question: If Abraham Lincoln could enjoy "Dixie"
played by a Yankee Army band in the immediate aftermath of a bloody war,
why can't high-school or college bands play the tune in the year 2002?
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- "Dixie," after all, was just a show tune, and
the lyrics have nothing to do with the war or with any of the issues that
caused the war. When I was growing up, bands played "Dixie" all
the time, usually followed by "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
That was kind of a musical way of saying the war is over and let's get
on with it.
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- The current spasm of political correctness began sometime
in the 1980s. "Dixie" is banned, children are suspended or expelled
for wearing Confederate symbols, there are fights about Confederate monuments,
buildings are being renamed, and the National Park Service is trying to
rewrite all its scripts so visitors to battle sites will get a dose of
propaganda that the war was all and only about slavery.
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- Sorry, but it wasn't, though that was certainly an issue
for some people on both sides. The rewriting of history to convert it into
propaganda in the service of a current political cause is the issue that
should concern us. We should take our history straight and factual, not
filtered by ideology or some scheme to get reparations for slavery - which,
by the way, is one of the silliest con games ever heard of. They want people
who never owned a slave and whose ancestors freed the slaves to pay reparations
to people who never were slaves. But that's what happens when you have
too many lawyers and too many academics cluttering up a country.
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- We Southerners don't wish to fight the war again, but
we also don't want another Reconstruction. The first one was bad enough.
We don't want our children brainwashed into believing their Southern ancestors
were slobbering retards, which is the current Hollywood stereotype of most
Southerners. We don't want them given a false picture of the war and the
issues that led up to it.
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- Part of the political-correctness problem is just the
dumbing down of Americans. Most of them are so ignorant of history that
you can tell them anything and they will believe it - but even worse, they
really don't care.
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- Another part of the problem of political correctness
is that Congress, through the years, has created 1,001 grounds for minorities
to sue. The only people who can't claim discrimination as a basis for a
lawsuit are straight white males.
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- True discrimination should, of course, be dealt with,
but wearing a Confederate lapel pin or holding a gathering in an old cemetery
for a memorial service has nothing to do with discrimination - or with
racism, for that matter. If Confederate symbols offend some people, so
what. There are lots of things in our society today that I find offensive,
but one's subjective feelings are not proper grounds for government intervention.
Whatever happened to the good old American values of live and let live
and mind your own business?
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- The final part of the political-correctness problem is
plain old cowardice. Nobody is more cowardly than academics and educators,
except perhaps the media and politicians. They are the very ones who should
be leading the fight for free discussion of all ideas, but in fact they
are leading the charge to stifle free speech.
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- They are terrified someone will shout "racist"
or "anti-Semite" or "homophobe," and so, logically,
special pleaders use these tactics to intimidate them. Reading some solid
history books and developing some backbone would do wonders for this country
and spell the end of political correctness.
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- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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