Culture wars heating up

No one can understand why the Augustus St. Gaudens funerary monument in Cornish, New Hampshire,  was defaced with anti-Semitic slogans.  St. Gaudens was not Jewish.  He is best known, however, for the 54th Massachusetts memorial on Boston Common, honoring Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the most celebrated Black regiment in the Civil War.  Which was itself vandalized last year.

Of course racists and anti-Semites have more than a passing acquaintance.  Down in Southlake, Texas, a new chapter was written in the struggle against critical race theory.  Teachers have been told that if they have a book about the Holocaust in the classroom they must also offer one with an "opposing perspective."  I don't know if that means a David Irving-type text claiming that it never happened or a book suggesting that the Jews had it coming.  I imagine we will hear more.

The Georgia Board of Education -- why are you laughing? -- decreed in June that there won't be any teaching about critical race theory or otherwise implying that racism is a real thing.  So when some white students at Coosa High School in Rome -- if you don't stop laughing I will turn this blog around -- decided to celebrate by waving a Confederate flag to mark "farm day," Black students planned a protest and were suspended before they could carry it out.  I guess that will show them.  It will also suggest that no matter what Mr. Beauregard is permitted to teach in American History, America's young people are painfully aware that racism has never gone away.  (Farm day?)

I don't read comic books because I am an adult, but I had to investigate the smell of burning hair.  I soon traced it to other adults whose heads are on fire because the newest version of Superman, apparently the son of the original and Lois Lane, is bisexual.  He kissed a boy and he liked it.  There is nothing that energizes the conservatives like the sex lives of imaginary characters, except possibly the racial identities of imaginary characters.  The very thought of a Black Santa Claus or a female James Bond gives them the yips.  Although he recently quit the role of Bond, Daniel Craig can expect plenty of grief for saying he frequents gay bars (fewer fistfights) and has kissed all his leading men.  If the UK breaks up I expect blame to fall on Jodie Whittaker, the first female Doctor on Doctor Who.  

You finally did it, you damn dirty Democrats!  You destroyed Christmas!  "Experts say Biden won't be able to save Christmas" screams The Hill, which is practically the same thing.  Joe the Grinch has longshoremen and truckers working around the clock -- it doesn't hurt to have a president who's on speaking terms with labor unions -- but the port congestion has been building for a long time mostly because of pandemic lockdowns and people too sick to work.  Christmas will still kick off in December but the stores may be out of the stuff Americans spend billions of dollars on because it's made somewhere else.  All right, China.  The people who blast their religiosity like bad breath will nevertheless insist that it's just not Christmas without plastic wreaths, shiny wrapping paper and glass balls the cat can knock off the tree.   And you can forget about Halloween -- there's not a slutty nurse costume to be had.   By December it will be Biden's fault that Louis DeJoy has made the postal service even worse.

All right, how many got this barely veiled threat from the National Republican Congressional Committee?

 

As far as I can tell it's authentic.  Stefanik?  Greene?  Sammy "The Bull" Gravano?  Is anybody missing tonight?