Screeds
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Caught In The Act
Perhaps it’s my advancing age or my fusty old Catholic belief that bearing false witness is a sin. Perhaps it’s only that, for history to matter, you have to know what history is. Or perhaps we really, truly are locked in a death struggle with a nest of vipers who’ll commit any deceit, however petty or despicable, to cement their hegemony over us.
You decide.
In the immediate aftermath of the Black Tuesday assault on New York’s Twin Towers, three firemen performed a sort of Iwo Jima reenactment by erecting a flagpole bearing an American flag at the scene. All who saw it were immediately struck by the historical reference. The many contrasts between the two events notwithstanding, both acts were peculiarly American deeds, assertions of defiance and unstoppability that no other country in the world could make unblushingly.
The names of the firemen who participated are McWilliams, Johnson and Eisengrein. All are male. All are non-Hispanic Caucasians. All are still alive and available to affirm that they were the flag-raisers. Indeed, the act was caught on many cameras, and the pictures are available around the world.
A memorial statue of this stirring event has been ordered, but it seems that whoever at FDNY commissioned the statue ordered some adjustments to the facts. The commissioned statue will depict one Caucasian, one black, and one Hispanic fireman raising the American standard.
The forces of darkness are rewriting history while the participants and witnesses are still alive. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth could have done no worse.
The racial-diversity forces have never been subtle, and have seldom tried to fly under the national radar. However, with regard to this most current outrage, the specifications for the memorial statue only became known quite recently. Possibly they at FDNY headquarters who composed the specs didn’t expect them to become known until the statue was a finished and delivered fait accompli.
The Left has whined extensively about how "unfair" it is to women to celebrate the manly deeds of New York’s policemen and firemen on Black Tuesday. Funny, though, that with all the effort they’ve put into it, leftist pundits can’t come up with any important omissions of women from the news reports from that terrible day. In the main, they’ve ceased to carp about the absence of female heroes from the Black Tuesday disasters. The most vivid female representative of courage who’s been identified from the events of that day is the late Barbara Olson, conservative commentator and author of two damning books on the Clintons. The Left would rather self-immolate than honor her.
They appear to think that the racial angle will prove more fruitful.
Granted that there are many blacks and Hispanics in FDNY. None were involved in the flag-raising, as thousands of witnesses can attest. Why, then does the memorial change the races of two of the participants?
If you’re inclined to dismiss this as a trivial gesture of feel-good inclusion, please ponder the words of commentator Jennifer King: "One white, one black and one Hispanic? Is that inclusive enough? What about women? How about gays and ‘transgendered’ people?...Obviously, if the Firefighters involved HAD been black, Hispanic or women, there would have been no question of changing their actual countenances in order to fit into an ‘approved’ ratio of races." (Miss King’s complete column on this subject can be found at http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/2002/king/qtr1/0111.htm)
Great deeds are not done by racial groups, but by particular persons. The recording of history, if it’s to be meaningful, must be scrupulous about such things. Memorial statues are as much history as anything written in a textbook. McWilliams, Johnson and Eisengrein are being deprived of an honor and a remembrance that is rightfully theirs.
The racialists’ affiliates at FDNY must feel pretty secure in their power to attempt something like this. The power of the epithet racist! must be far greater than I had imagined. For, should this controversy become a matter for serious debate, in what direction is that epithet more likely to be hurled? Toward the racialists, who demonstrably are racists to whom nothing matters but racial quotas and the ascendancy of their chosen victimology? Or toward those who protest that the well known facts of a terrible tragedy are being perverted to serve the racialists’ agenda?
Historian and philosopher Clarence Carson has spoken of "the deactivation of history," by which he means the process of severing the lessons of history as it is known to have occurred from the experiences of those living in the present day. The principal victims, of course, are the young. We who have absorbed history’s narrative and have gleaned its lessons are aging out of the national picture. The direction of the future will be chosen by millions even now being taught, both implicitly and explicitly, that there is no significance for the present in the events of the past—that facts themselves can and should be effaced if it’s necessary to support some downtrodden group’s "racial pride."
But it is not so. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were not as vital to the shaping of the Republic as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. We know this full well. It is our particular task to convey this to the generation after ours, whose minds are being twisted in the government-run schools by ideologists masquerading as "global studies" teachers.
Viewed from that perspective, the firemen’s statue represents a valuable opportunity, for the racialists have been quite palpably caught in the act—and however powerful the racist! epithet might be, they can hurl it only in contradiction to the witnessed, well disseminated facts, whereas we can use it in accord with those facts.
It’s time to gird for war.
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