American Coast Falls Away

A news article (aka propaganda screed) from Associated Press reports (i.e., carefully frames so as to avoid the real heart of the story) that California’s public school superintendent, Tony Thurmond, has praised and endorsed a decision by the Berkeley Unified School District to rename schools named for “Confederate leaders or other racially charged figures” whose names on the schools “exacerbate feelings of racial inequality.” 

AP then goes on to quote Superintendent Thurmond in saying, “I applaud those schools that have taken these conversations up,” and worked “to rename schools in ways that are more thoughtful and more sensitive.”

Hmm, I see. And then the objective and unbiased AP report goes on to explain that the Berkeley school board “unanimously approved a plan last week to rename two schools named for founding fathers who were slaveholders.” How courageous and sensitive of them.

But, um, “founding fathers”? Wait a moment…oh, I am sure all this will come clear if I just continue reading the objective news report.

The AP item then goes on to yield the floor, without qualification or alternative voices, to Thurmond’s remarks that, “When we have institutions, not just schools, that are named after Confederate leaders, that are named after those who perpetuated racism, lynching and hate, that exacerbates feelings of race in our schools.” Institutions, not just schools, mind you.

Well, certainly America should not have schools — places of learning, don’t you know! — named after Confederate leaders of the sort who perpetuated racism, lynching and hate. (As for those who are currently perpetuating Marxist totalitarianism and the conversion of childhood education into a communist indoctrination program…well, I am sure that AP is planning to address that in a follow-up article, objective news source that they are.)

As Thurmond further explains in the unbiased news article from AP, “We need reconciliation that racism has shaped so many factors that we are still dealing with today. There are conversations ahead for sure. I think we should enter into those hard conversations, to move to that reconciliation, to move to healing.”

It was at about this moment in my reading of the AP article — roughly four-fifths of the way down — that I began to be more than idly curious which Confederate perpetuators of racism and lynching, not to mention hate, had schools named after them way out in California. I mean, I guess those must be some pretty obscure slaveholding founding fathers, right?

Finally, down in the article’s penultimate paragraph, after quoting all the objectively important statements they had to report from Superintendent Thurmond, I read this supremely understated point, mentioned almost in passing:

The Berkeley Unified School District board unanimously approved a “Resolution in Support of Black Lives Matter,” which started the process of renaming Jefferson and Washington elementary schools.

Jefferson and Washington. Oh. That would be the author of the Declaration of Independence and the first president, then. Yes, well, I can see how Californians of all races would sleep a lot better knowing that American children were no longer being forced to go to school in buildings named after men of that sort — perpetuators of lynching and hate, that is.

America is so far gone they’ll never find the body. I just hope Beelzebub’s acceptance speech at the Global Totalitarian Awards ceremony remembers to give due credit to all the Republicans out there who clung to their tribe to the bitter end, even as it sold its soul to an unholy mix of vulgarizing chaos and cowardly capitulation.

When the largest state in the United States of America begins sandblasting the names of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington from public buildings in the name of “reconciliation and healing,” all the talk radio rants and CPAC conferences in the world will amount to nothing but the tedious soundtrack of national suicide.


There will come a day when essays such as the one you have just read, after being identified from the Google algorithm stockpile, will be banned from American readership, on account of their “overt expression of sympathy with perpetuators of systemic racism, lynching, and hate.” Such bans and deletions are a necessary part of the process of reconciliation, of course.


You may also like...