As
long as we’re toppling offensive icons, what
about the Democratic Party?
Al Sharpton just
may be right about the need to remove offensive statues from the American
public way.
I'd been somewhat torn on the idea
of erasing history by tearing down statues, even Civil War Confederate statues,
since destroying public imagery and iconography isn't the kind of thing
Americans do.
Actually, it's the kind of thing
that ISIS does.
But Sharpton, the noted race hustler, helped me see things in a
different way.
Usually, I don't listen to him. But
he was interviewed on the Charlie Rose program and talked compellingly about
the need to remove statues of white men of the South who fought in the Civil
War for a South that wanted to keep slavery.
He said, rightly, that such statues
are offensive to many African Americans.
But he also said that such images should be removed, perhaps
taken to private museums.
Sharpton also added that public funding of other offensive
reminders of America's racist past, including the Jefferson Memorial, should
stop.
"When you look at the fact that
public monuments are supported by public funds, you are asking me to subsidize
the insult of my family," Sharpton said. "And I would repeat that the
public should not be paying to uphold somebody who had that kind of background.
… We're talking about, here, an open display of bigotry announced, and over and
over again."
Thomas Jefferson, founding father,
is the author of the Declaration of Independence, widely considered to be the
most eloquent appeal for human liberty that has ever been written.
But Jefferson was also a slave owner who repeatedly raped
one of them. That's history.
As a black American, Sharpton
believes using federal tax dollars to subsidize the Jefferson Memorial is
wrong. And even though the flames of cultural revolution are burning hot, you
can understand this.
History is important, but history
can also be quite offensive.
But there's one thing wrong with Sharpton. It's not that he
goes too far. It's that he doesn't go far enough.
Because if he and others of the cultural revolution were
being intellectually honest, they'd demand that along with racist statues,
something else would be toppled.
And this, too, represents much of America's racist history:
The Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party historically is the party of
slavery. The Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow laws.
The Democratic Party fought civil rights for a century.
And so by rights — or at least by the standards established
by the cultural revolutionaries of today's American left — we should ban
the Democratic Party.
Not only get rid of it in the
present, but strike its very name from the history books, and topple all
Democratic statues of leaders who benefited, prospered and became wealthy by
cleaving to the party. And shame Democrats until they confess the
truth of it.
The Democratic
Party's military arm in the South was the Ku Klux Klan. The Democratic
Party opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,
making the former slaves citizens of the land and giving them the
vote.
If the new cultural revolution was
serious, wouldn't it also demand that the Democratic Party be put in
a museum somewhere, away from decent people, along with those Confederate
statues?
We could put Democrats in
exhibits, behind glass, watching white political bosses chomp cigars and pass
out goodies for votes, as minorities were relegated, as they are today, to
failing schools and lost educational opportunity and neighborhoods that have
become killing fields for the young and old.
And in great museums,
the Democrats could be studied, safely, without endangering the
sensibilities of the children.
We might even peer down on an
animatronic Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, once a leader of the KKK.
And with him, prominent animatronic Democrats who, just a few short
years ago, said wonderful, moving things about Byrd after his funeral.
That's how it is with history. You
can't say the Democratic Party wasn't the slavery party. It's historical
fact.
Just as it is also historical fact
that the Republican Party was the party of abolitionists.
I mentioned this to a Democrat who
was all for the removal of Confederate statues in the South, and I told him I
wasn't all that opposed, either.
He thought I was being sarcastic.
But when I reminded him that his party was the slavery party,
the KKK party, the anti-civil rights party from the 1860s to the
1960s, and should be put into a museum, he made a sour face.
"You're really taking this
satire too far," he said. "The Democratic Party isn't a
statue. It's an institution."
If the cultural revolutionaries want
to topple statues, they can be my guest. They're so inflamed lately — and if
you don't believe it, just read the papers — that if you dare disagree with
them, you run the risk of being denounced by their high priests as a bigot or
as someone without moral character.
My guess is that most Americans are
afraid of social punishment. So, the offensive statues will go, and then
perhaps offensive iconography, offensive images, offensive books.
One book comes to mind. Let me quote a passage from it.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every
book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and
street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that
process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always
right."
George Orwell. "1984."
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Twitter,
@john_kass
