The Whitewash

Hello.

I was emailing the other day with a friend whose personal act of conscience has lately become public. He ended one email thus: “I feel almost guilty being so self-absorbed at a time when the lunatic in the White House is destroying the government, defying the judiciary, sending masked stormtroopers to kidnap legal residents and send them to a Salvadoran hellhole, ending scientific research, forcing the world economy into recession, practicing corruption on a massive scale…”

I hadn’t thought about it quite so apocalyptically, but I saw he was right. And then I realized an additional insidious truth, one that he had understandably missed in his litany of horrors. (As in all wars, there is a blinding fog in this war against fascism at home.)

As he golfs with Saudis while the world economy craters because of him, Donald Trump also is going after our marrow. Our souls. This has been manifest for weeks, subsumed by the enormity of personal economic peril we all face. But became more apparent, and more focused, in the last two days:

Acting at the behest of the ignorant bigot with septic views, a man to whom they answer without question, the lieutenants in the Trump regime have been dutifully rewriting American history into a whitewashed alternative reality — a world that never was.

On a National Park Service webpage, The Underground Railroad is no longer described as an embodiment of enslaved Black people’s courageous civil disobedience and unshakable pursuit of emancipation; instead it is presented, in a shamefully Pollyannish interpretation, as a symbol of the triumph of “black-white cooperation.” For the benefit of analogists, this is tantamount to the sentiments in Stephen Foster’s 1852 song, “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” which presents slavery as a benign system in which primitive peoples — “darkies” — love their kindly ol’ massa, who has their best interests at heart.

Oh, and the huge photo of Harriet Tubman on the Park Service opening page? Gone. It has has been replaced by photos of U.S. stamps that celebrate the Underground Railroad by praising Whites and Blacks equally. The faces of both are there. Elsewhere, the phrase “enslaved African-Americans” was replaced by “enslaved workers” and “freedom seekers.”

The whitewashed site now cites “everyone’s shared commitment to liberty.”

It’s all about trying to explain Black history while somehow exempting White people from criticism. It’s not a misinterpretation, it’s a lie.

(This was all disclosed by The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine and Jeremy B. Merrill.)

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And the whitewashing goes on:

The U.S. Naval Academy has released a list of 381 books and literary works removed from its library by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as part of a purging of things supposedly representing diversity, equity and inclusion. These include Maya Angelou’s generation-defining “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and “How to Be Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Also, “The Making of Black Lives Matter,” by Christopher J. Lebron; “How Racism Takes Place,” by George Lipsitz; "Why Didn't We Riot? — A Black man in Trumpland" by Issac J. Bailey. Also, books on the history of lynching in America. Also, “Everything but the Burden : What White people are Taking from Black culture", edited by Black cultural critic Greg Tate. Tate won a Pulitzer prize posthumously last year.

Books by four former Washington Post writers were on the list — Wil Haygood, Juan Williams, Wesley Lowery and Leon Wynter. They are all Black.

Oh, just to show that he is not somehow prejudiced against Black people, Hegseth also killed a book about women in the Holocaust.

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I hope you all saw Rachel Maddow’s spectacular segment on the roots of Trump’s catastrophic tariff war. In case you didn’t, I will summarize. It is so insane it is almost funny … except, you know.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he apparently still had enough self-awareness to understand he knew nothing about economics, so he asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to find him an economics guru who would be as tough and uncompromising as he is. Kushner immediately went straight to Amazon.com, as you do, and looked up books written by economists. He settled on one whose title excited him (he never read the books, was just browsing titles). The book was “Death by China,” co-authored by a guy named Peter Navarro. Navarro was a prolific book writer, and a pro-tariff hawk. He backed up his beliefs, in almost all of his books, by quoting a man even more knowledgeable than himself, an economist named Ron Vara.

Still with me?

So, after Trump won the presidency, Ron Vara himself began circulating memos in D.C. advocating that Trump apply tariffs willy-nilly. Trump embraced this idiot idea from his new economics adviser, Peter Navarro, backed up by the wisdom of Ron Vara.

Ron Vara does not exist. He is an anagram of “Navarro.” Navarro invented him to give his crackpot books gravitas, and an illusion of wisdom and due diligence.

That’s how we got to where we are today.

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Today’s mercifully off-topic Gene Pool Gene Poll is based on a disagreement between me and The Empress:

Okay, and finally:

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