Ignoring history and ignoring the law
06-29-2019Erasing History in School
Bari Weiss sees dark lessons about our “progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism)” in the decision of a San Francisco school board to spend $600,000 of taxpayer money to destroy a mural painted in the school by the radical socialist painter Victor Arnautoff. The mural, “Life of [George] Washington," does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.” The historically meaningful mural is now said to endanger the mental health of the children at the school, so it must be destroyed.
Breaking America
David Bromwich has published a new book, American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. Bromwich, a frequent speaker at Arendt Center events, argues that the roots of the crisis of which Donald Trump is a symptom began 50 years ago with the lies and coverups around the Vietnam War. Last year Bromwich published an essay with the same title, a succinct precursor to his book.
The invention of the liberal state originally derived from the need for balance in the parts of government; the presence, as Locke put it, of an ‘umpire’ and the absence of any power capable of acting as the judge in its own cause. Yet for half a century now, there have been signs of a growing non-attachment to the rule of law at the heights of American politics. The Nixon pardon was only the clearest example. Think of the Iran-Contra pardons; Bill Clinton’s pardon of the most exorbitant tax defrauder in American history, Marc Rich (also a donor to the Clinton Presidential Library); or Obama’s refusal to prosecute anyone implicated in the financial collapse of 2007-8 or the torture regime of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Nixon befouled the 1968 election in a manner Putin could only have dreamed of – the facts are now established – by having Anna Chennault tell the leaders of South Vietnam not to negotiate. The Reagan campaign team appears to have done much the same in 1980 by bargaining to have the return of American hostages from Iran delayed until after the election: their release added a pleasant grace note to his inauguration day. Trump, it must be said, worked faster than his predecessors when he issued early pardons to I. Lewis Libby (convicted of lying to the FBI to conceal his outing of a CIA agent) and Dinesh D’Souza (convicted of illegal campaign contributions and false statements to the Federal Election Commission).