Procrustes Stretched
"intuition and imagination and intelligence"
I love this article. I love the headline. It's also a title to one of my favorite popular books of all time. A Confederacy of Dunces
The South Lost The War.
Op-Ed Columnist
A Confederacy of Dunces
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: April 7, 2010
April is the cruelest month. Or, if you live in Virginia, Confederate History Month.
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Maybe we had better be grateful for small favors. It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.
History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson,,,
... if McCain wants to re-imagine the 2008 presidential campaign, he is free to give it a try. Although if you are planning to deny that you ever thought of yourself as a maverick, it would be better not to have subtitled one of your memoirs “The Education of an American Maverick.”
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The love affair with all things Confederate is way more worrisome. Once again, it’s in to talk secession. The Republican attorneys general are lining up to try to nullify the health care bill.
“Many issues of the Civil War are still being debated today,” said Brag Bowling of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which led the push to get that proclamation in Virginia. That seems extremely depressing, as if we were Serbs stewing about what the Turks did at the Plain of Blackbirds in 1389.
Actually, a national discussion of Civil War history sounds fine — as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea....
Virginia has been making big leaps lately in the category of general craziness. We all remember the Legislature’s heroic work in passing a bill to protect Virginia citizens from having microchips planted in their bodies against their will. And that the sponsor said he was concerned the chips could be a “mark of the beast” that would be used by the Antichrist at the end of days.
Confederate History Month was promoted by former Gov. George Allen, who was fond of Confederate flag-décor and suffered from a sense of history so imperfect that he did not discover his mother was half-Jewish until he was 54....
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Op-Ed Columnist - A Confederacy of Dunces - NYTimes.com
The South Lost The War.