The American Conservative
In its chortling about the melting down of a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, the Washington Post noted that as “dozens of Confederate monuments have been toppled around the country, most others have been left to sit in storage or put on Civil War battlefields that venerate the Lost Cause” (emphasis added). If you haven’t yet visited the Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg or Manassas or Chickamauga, you might want to go now. It sure sounds like they’re slated to be paved over and turned into skate parks reserved for minority youth.
Today, of course, just about any patriotic version of American history is a lost cause. It’s worth remembering that Lee and Stonewall Jackson once merited stained glass panels in our alleged National Cathedral. Those are gone, as is so much that once honored our nation’s history: films and television programs quietly locked away in storage or slapped with warning labels, history books rewritten, streets and schools and military bases renamed, flags furled, monuments removed…
