Review of NBC’s Timeless second season finale. How well did they handle the Civil War? Did they break their own rules?

Timeless’s heroes meet Harriet Tubman

So, the season finale of Timeless was a doozy, receiving big critical praise and trending #1 last night on Twitter. It blew the minds of its fans, and made a pretty strong case to NBC for renewal of a show that currently sits on the proverbial bubble.

I loved it too, but have to admit I’m angry at the Civil War historical inaccuracies, and also that the show’s creators broke their own time travel rules, apparently just to shock and surprise us. (Which worked).

SPOILERS AHEAD.

The opening scene was set in June 1863 in coastal South Carolina, yet we see what looks to be the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia hanging in the tent of a Rebel officer.  I knew at that moment we were in for some pretty basic historical inaccuracies, and boy, we sure were.

Battle flag of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. NOT the Confederate flag.

Yet, I reminded myself, the flag is just a fairly minor detail.  Most people think the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag is the Confederate flag, so just let it go.

Later, however, Wyatt (one of our time traveling heroes) explains to Harriet Tubman that he and the others are spies sent by “General McClellan” to help her with her planned raid into the interior of the state.

Oh come on! This is just lazy research by the writers, as Little Mac was removed from command as general-in-chief of all Union armies over a year earlier, and was in fact not in command of anything (except his New Jersey household) in June 1863. Lincoln canned him in November 1862.

You say McClellan sent you? Hmm.

If Wyatt had told Tubman that McClellan sent them, instead of taking the group into her fold, she surely would have taken the assertion as proof that our heroes were particularly ill-informed Rebel spies, and then would have promptly unloaded her gun into them.

As if this historical error weren’t enough, the Rittenhouse “sleeper cell” agent working as a Rebel colonel reveals to other Confederate officers that Grant is converging on Vicksburg and that they must now maneuver to get him. “We leave at dawn,” the colonel declares, “face them on the road before they join forces. Should be easy pickin’s'” He knows this because he has a copy of a “military history of the Civil War” that tells him everything Union troops are going to do before they do it.

Too bad the show’s writers didn’t read the same book.

The book contains a military history of the Civil War. The writers apparently skipped almost everything about the Vicksburg Campaign.

First of all, Confederate troops in coastal South Carolina would have had little to do with maneuvering in Mississippi, and secondly, that Grant was moving on Vicksburg was hardly unknown in June 1863.  He had been converging on that city for over 7 months, had tried digging a canal across the river from it, had already fought several battles as he marched there, and in fact was already entrenched and besieging the city!

I’m sorry, colonel, but you’re too late. The Yankees had already “joined forces” outside of Vicksburg. So much for “easy pickin’s.”

I have to wonder how Confederate officers would have reacted had the Rittenhouse agent delivered the news that Grant was trying to get Vicksburg.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious!”

This is all just lazy research on behalf of the writers, but what was most maddening about the episode is that they would have us believe the Combahee River Raid was a pivotal moment in the war.

Yes, it was a unique campaign in that it was planned by an African American woman, Harriet Tubman, and was a spectacular success for the Union, achieving all its primary objectives. For the estimated 700 or more enslaved people that got their freedom as a result, it was a pretty huge deal.

But did it alter the course of the Civil War? Not even close. It was a minor raid that is rightfully famous today only because of Tubman’s involvement and because it was a Union operation mainly for the direct purpose of liberating slaves (and getting them into Union uniforms). It is a great story, and one of the war’s largest emancipation events, but hardly a crucial event in the course of the Civil War.

Had Rittenhouse wanted to change the outcome of the war by changing events, June 1863 in South Carolina would have been a strange place to start. (Unless they targeted the 54th Massachusetts before its assault on Fort Wagner).

And yet, when Tubman’s raid is thwarted on the show by Rebel troops tipped off by the Rittenshouse agent, one of our heroes declares, “so we’re too late? History has already been changed? The South’s going to win?”

The real Tubman was definitely hardcore.

Um, no.

FYI: the real raid involved Tubman directing two Union ships up the river (she was aboard ship, none of which we see in the episode), avoiding Rebel mines thanks to intel she gathered from local runaways, and her singing songs to attract and encourage some 700 enslaved African Americans to escape, many of which then enlisted in Union service. They also destroyed southern plantations and supplies in the process.

The irony is that Comedy Central’s Drunk History hilariously covered the raid, and did a much better job at getting the details correct. Check it out (language warning):

And yet,  if the biggest thing viewers take away from the episode is that Tubman was “hardcore,” (as one of our heroes rightfully observes) that’s pretty great. The show provides a quick and accurate biography of Tubman (including the rightful assertion that she claimed to see visions). Most people know of her Underground Railroad activities, but fewer know she was involved in Union military efforts during the Civil War.  Actress Christine Horn’s performance as Tubman was fiercely on-par with that of Aisha Hinds, who played her so memorably in WGN’s Underground.

(We could definitely use more Tubman on screen. What happened to the project HBO announced several years ago, as well as the separate theatrical film? What’s taking so long? My guess: the difficulty of securing funds for a movie featuring an African American female protagonist. Come on Hollywood, it’s time).

The best part: Timeless demonstrates that Tubman and the enslaved community probably wouldn’t have needed the help of our time traveling heroes anyway. Despite the setback, Tubman is determined to just change plans and try again, convincing our heroes to go along with it AND go after the Rebel spy (the Rittenhouse agent) as equally important missions. Yet when the decisive blows are struck, Tubman fires the shots, backed up by runaways and black Union soldiers.

Standing strong against the bad guys.

Further, as hoped, the whole episode was a hit on the Lost Cause. Timeless has the evil democracy-hating forces of Rittenhouse trying to engineer a Confederate victory.  It’s clear that a southern triumph would have sucked for African Americans and democracy, and that the Union cause became intertwined with the liberation of enslaved peoples. (I loved when Rufus referred to the Rittenhouse agent/Confederate officer as “David Duke.”)

I especially appreciated the depiction of African Americans heroically fighting against their oppressors—the Confederacy.  “Believe me, we are we NOT going to lose this friggin’ war,” African American time traveller Rufus stubbornly assures Tubman, indicating the importance of Union victory for the future of African Americans. Timeless’s 2.4 million viewers last night were shown that in the American Civil War, the Rebels were the bad guys and that African Americans played an aggressively active role in bringing them down.

In the end, that lesson is way more important than flags, General McClellan’s career status, and the whereabouts of Grant’s troops in June 1863.

On another note . . .

Let me bitch about something apart from the episode’s historical accuracy. Timeless got a lot of attention last night because of its surprise ending. I too was pretty wrapped up in the show (which took us far afield from the Civil War, and ultimately into 1888 San Francisco) and caught off guard. BUT, it’s because they broke their own time travel rules.

At the start of the first season, the creators told us that their rules would be simple, because they wanted to focus on the history, not the sci-fi. For example, our time travelers couldn’t revisit a place/time where they had already been. And, to quote co-creator Eric Kripke, “What we’re trying to avoid is the overly complicated time travel trope where you’re meeting slightly older and slightly younger versions of yourself.” For example,  “we didn’t want an older version of Lucy meeting a younger version of Lucy.”

And yet that is EXACTLY what they did in the shocking last seconds of the show. Making this worse in my mind, is that in an interview with Entertainment Tonight actress Abigail Spencer (Lucy) tells us that they had been planning this all along.

Future Lucy and Wyatt. Wait, what??

“What you see at the end of the finale,” Spencer claims,”was pitched to me in my meeting when [executive producers] Shawn [Ryan] and Eric [Kripke] asked me to play the part.”

So that means the creators established and publicly shared their time travel rules, just so that it would be a shock to audiences when they broke those rules at the end of the second season?

I call foul. That’s cheap audience manipulation.

Anyway, that aside,  I was still admittedly very entertained by the pulse-quickening episode that paid off all the more because of the strong character development we’ve gotten, especially this season. I also appreciated the overall message about Tubman and the Civil War (though the writers should have done their history homework better), and everything positive I wrote about the show last week still applies.

I sure hope NBC renews it.

 

PS: Also count me as one of the ones hoping Lucy ends up with Flynn and not Wyatt. Yes, ordinarily I would cheer for the “good guy” instead of the “bad boy,” but there is something about Wyatt that rubs me the wrong way. Flynn is way more of an interesting character. But maybe that’s just me.

(And one more thing, please get that modern make-up off Lucy’s face, especially when she is in the 19th century).

 

“Great man” theory, “contingency” and NBC’s Timeless.

Now that NBC’s Timeless is about to wrap up their season with another visit to the Civil War, I have had a few people ask my opinion of the show after it has had two seasons. (What’s with these short TV seasons these days? Remember when a full season of a show was 22+ shows?)

Initially, I viewed the show as pretty harmless fun, and I still feel that way, but it is actually a bit more than that.

In case you haven’t been watching, Timeless involves a team of time-traveling heroes that are at war with an evil Illuminati–like organization called Rittenhouse, which is desperately trying to destroy democracy so the world will be run by a select few superior peoples. Namely, themselves.

The nefarious organization tries to accomplish this task via time travel and the planting of “sleeper cell” agents in the past, who at the right moment, are ordered to complete a task that will alter humanity’s time-line which is marching toward greater democracy. This almost always involves an attempt at killing some key historical figure at a moment before they can accomplish their deed. The job of our heroes, of course, is to stop them, and/or to mitigate the damage.

It is up to this diverse group of heroes to keep the arc of the moral universe bent towards justice.

The show’s creators have wisely decided to keep their time-travel rules simple so that the show is less about the sci-fi and more about the history. I like that choice, of course.

But our heroes do have to make sure that the time-line gets altered as little as possible, and that does not always happen. The big events essentially remain the same, but some of the details get altered because of their efforts. Let’s call it a small price to pay in order to save the world from tyrannical rule.

So from the perspective of an historian, what is good about the show, and what is bad?

The Good:

If you have read many of my blog postings, you know I am sympathetic to the “arc of history bends towards justice” view of American history that President Obama has championed. No, that doesn’t mean that the arc always goes the way we want, instead, it means we are responsible for keeping it moving in that direction–and that despite the significant forces pulling the other way, mankind has slowly overcome them and successfully kept things on the right trajectory. It is a fight we must vigilantly continue.

Timeless seems to embrace that concept as well, as Rittenhouse goes into the past to essentially try to bend the arc in another direction, and our heroes are there to stop them.

Each week we are treated to a little history lesson that often demonstrates that the past was not a great place for minorities. That alone helps fight the “golden age” concept that gets peddled too much these days (that there was a time in the past that was so much better than our present, and that we need to get back to that again).

But we also get a history lesson about a historical figure with which most people are probably unfamiliar. Rittenhouse knows their history well, so their targets are usually more obscure figures that did big things.

This of course also makes it more difficult for our heroes to know exactly what they are up to. If you track the bad guys to landing on December 7, 1941, it’d be pretty obvious what they were trying to shape. But what if they have landed in San Antonio on November 23, 1936?

Yes, in the largely inferior first season we did get storylines and brief appearances by Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln, and the second season had an episode involving JFK (in his high school days. That was kinda cool). But more frequently this season, audiences have learned about more obscure figures who nevertheless did big things.

And there is great diversity among these figures. Timeless understands the world has been shaped by more than just white men. So far this season, viewers have been treated to little history-lessons-of-the-week involving less familiar people such as Marie and Irene Curie, Hedy Lamarr (1940s Hollywood! Fun!), Abiah Franklin, Grace Humiston, Alice Paul (who should not be less well known), as well as African Americans Wendell Scott and Robert Johnson.

That’s a pretty good lineup, and Timeless usually gets most of the details about these people and their contributions to the world mostly correct (the Alice Paul storyline being the biggest exception). The show is getting about 2.5 million viewers per episode (which is way down from the first season, but the critical response has been higher). This means they are educating a lot of people about the diversity of historical actors that have shaped and created the more democratic and inclusive world we currently inhabit, and they are doing it mostly well. Bravo, Timeless.

The Bad:

But here’s the ironic thing, in doing so, they are at the same time embracing the “great man” theory of history. That is, simply put, that the history of the world has been shaped by certain great men that were born as exceptional individuals, and that their actions alone have shaped most of history. The history of the world, the theory argues, can thus be told within the context of the biographies of these great and exceptional men.

Yes, the historical figures on Timeless are more obscure, and very often not men, so how can one say that the show embraces great man theory?

Because the creators are often attributing big events and movements to the actions of just one individual, and if that individual does not accomplish their task, the whole world would be different. Abiah Franklin can’t be killed in the Salem witch trials, we are told, because if so, Ben Franklin would never be born to advance democracy.

Two other examples from this past season make the point stronger. In one particularly excellent and fun episode, we learn about African American blues guitarist Robert Johnson. He makes a recording of his inventive and distinctive style of blues music in San Antonio in 1936. If that recording doesn’t get made, Timeless tells us, his influence on American music is destroyed, and with it, the emergence of rock-n-roll, and with no rock, we get no 1950s and 1960s protest/counter culture, which means no Civil Rights movement, no withdrawal from Vietnam, no fall of Nixon.

The Robert Johnson episode. Rock must be saved!

Huh? As a blues lover, I love Johnson, and I appreciate the effort to demonstrate the cultural and political influence of Rock, but the show asks us to disregard the myriad other musicians and influences that shaped American music, especially those that came before Johnson. As an amalgamation of African American jazz, gospel, and blues, with elements of country music stirred in, rock was coming, Johnson or no Johnson.

As for protest/counter culture, doesn’t the liberal consensus, the Cold War, and television insure its emergence, with or without rock? Didn’t those very same things provide momentum for Civil Rights, which provided momentum for the war protests, etc. ? How is rock music the most essential key ingredient? It was an important one, no doubt, but crucial?

The other example: another episode focused on suffrage hero Alice Paul. I was very excited about this episode, as I am a big fan of Paul and believe she should be much more well known than she is. Yet the episode argues that if she had not delivered one particular diatribe within earshot of, and directed at, Woodrow Wilson, the suffrage movement would have failed, and American women would have never gotten the right to vote.

Not only does the episode get the details wrong about Wilson’s stance on women’s suffrage at the moment in time depicted (he had already succumbed to the movement’s intense pressure), but it asks us to believe that a movement that had gained steam after close to one hundred years of work by untold thousands of suffrage workers would have been wiped out in a moment had one particular speech not been given.

The suffrage episode: somebody has to make that speech!

Most frustrating to me in the episode is that when Rittenhouse succeeds at killing Paul, our heroes implore the other women to make sure the speech gets delivered, yet none of them are willing to do so. Paul was exceptional, but come on, there were plenty of motivated and eloquent women in that movement that could have easily stepped up to the plate. Lucy Burns comes to mind, for just one example.

So Timeless is giving us moments in time in which just one person’s actions (or non-actions) can change all of history. Instead of the “great man of history” theory, it is peddling “a great person of history” theory.

The Judgement:

So does the good of the show outweigh the bad?

I am a big believer in what historians often refer to as “contingency” in history, and Timeless’s entire premise is based on it. Events in history have not been inevitable, and are the product of decisions, choices, and actions that mankind has made. Different decisions or choices would have resulted in different outcomes.

(And yet at the same time, Timeless also asks us to consider whether or not certain things are destined to happen, no matter what we do. Consider this season’s JFK episode, for instance).

It is important for people to understand historical contingency, because it encourages us to become actively involved in shaping what happens to our world. Keeping the arc bent toward justice requires our vigilance and action. Contingency teaches us that it is our responsibility to keep things moving in the direction we want. What happens is not inevitable, because what has happened in our past was also not inevitable.

Timeless brilliantly makes that point, and does so by demonstrating that our world has been shaped by more than just dead white guys, highlighting a diversity of history’s most important contributors. But the cast of heroes charged with ensuring that things stay on the right path is also a very diverse group. The point of the show could not be any more clear, and it is a needed one.

I’d just like to see more sophisticated stories than just “we’ve got to make sure this person doesn’t get killed!” Or “we’ve got to make sure this one person gets to do their thing!”

Anyway, in the end, the show is a bit of harmless fun, and at its best it is giving good history lessons to large audiences. And it is doing so in a way that diversifies our history and embraces contingency theory—showing how important our actions and decisions are in shaping the world in either positive or negative directions.

That, and debunking the “golden age” of the past, are pretty important message to be sending out right now.

The two-hour season finale (and possibly the series finale) is set for this Sunday. It appears that Rittenhouse is headed back in time to help the Confederacy win the Civil War. Uh oh!

And it looks like it will involve Harriet Tubman. Yeah boy!

A scene for the upcoming finale of Timeless.

That should prove to be an interesting episode, and perhaps a hit at the Lost Cause. Let’s see how well they pull it off.

Stay tuned.

(Oh, and if you subscribe to Hulu, you can quickly get caught up on both seasons one and two).

Some humble musings from a professional historian: Did Trump “radicalize” me?

“Trump made you a blogger.”

My friend and fellow professional historian, Christian McWhirter, said that to me a few months back, and I am reminded of it today because of a New Republic article that has been making the rounds on the internet. It claims that Trump’s ignorance of basic US history has “radicalized” historians. It is an interesting and short piece, so I encourage everyone to read it.

I am not sure exactly what they mean by “radicalized,” but the context suggests it means that historians have become more publicly vocal about their views on current politics. And more active in the resistance to Trump. Of course many of us spoke out before he was elected, and the fact that he won has many of us wondering if people even listen to historians, or perhaps even that our railing against him only actually made people love him more. (Probably so).

I have discussed this here before, but one of my biggest goals as a college educator was to never let my political leanings become clear to students. Most of us have had the experience of sitting in a college class, as a professor has used his captive audience as a chance to spew out political diatribes. I recall, for example, taking a course on Gilded Age America, but having to endure a professor that spent well over 50% of our class time holding forth on modern politics and all the problems he had with a current governor. I didn’t always disagree with him, but I got increasingly angry because I wanted to study the Gilded Age, not his political opinions about current events.

As a result of such experiences, when I began teaching college in the late 90s I dedicated myself to never letting my politics shape my lectures in an obvious way. Not only because it would be more fair to my students, but also because it would make my lectures more objective. I am a firm believer that one of the most important things that studying history does is create open-mindedness, forcing students to look at things from different perspectives than their own. I felt (and still feel) that having clear political leanings in my lectures only hinders that goal, as students will only become defensive (and thus close-minded) about their beliefs if they feel the professor is trying to indoctrinate them with a particular party’s political agenda.

Thus my goal has always been to remain as objective as possible, with the goal that students would actually have a hard time figuring out my personal political sympathies. When asked by students if I am a Republican or a Democrat, I’ve always refused to answer. If I can create a classroom environment in which a student’s preconceived political leanings are challenged, whether they are a Republican or Democrat, I feel I have done my job. I think I have a history of being successful in that regard.

Further, when I started this “blog,” I never intended it to include long musings like this. I did not have time for it and felt no one would be interested anyway. My sole purpose was to simply post links to history related stories and blogs that I found interesting, share a comment or two, and encourage other folks to check them out. And I most certainly did not want to fill it with political diatribes. I still prefer it to be that way, and try to stick to that format.

Thus both here and in classes, I never intended to comment extensively on current political events. But yes, Trump changed that.

During the election, I felt he presented such a grave danger to our country that I had to publicly speak out, using my position in the classroom to demonstrate the danger of his ideas and his utter lack of preparation and qualifications for the job. Trump began to make regular appearances in my lectures, whenever a particular historical topic seemed to shed light on his shortcomings (which turned out to be numerous). I was uncomfortable with this, and still am, but it increasingly feels like a duty.

I have gotten some small blow-back from students, and have heard one or two grumbling about my Trump attacks. To counter such sentiments, I have increasingly argued that much of his policies are not mainstream Republican ones (especially foreign and trade polices), pointing out this is one of the big reasons that the Republican leadership tried so hard to derail his candidacy. You don’t have to be a Democrat to be concerned about this buffoon (just ask John McCain or Lindsey Graham).

And this carried over to my blog. If you have spent anytime here, you know that my friend Christian is right. Trump did indeed turn me into a more traditional blogger, as I find it near impossible not to unleash diatribes like this one whenever sharing a story involving him.

Part of me despises Trump for causing these changes to my classroom and this blog, but on the other hand, is this not exactly the role that historians should play? Again, I think that our most important work is to help encourage and develop the open-mindedness that is so sorely lacking in our world. How can an historian do that if they stay quiet when they hear Trump making asinine, untruthful, and historically ignorant comments?

Trump wants “truth” to be as he defines it, and anything that challenges that is “fake.” Isn’t that pretty much the definition of close-minded?

Thus if I were to just keep quiet about Trump in my classrooms and here on this blog, would it not in the end work against my own personal dedication to encourage and promote open-mindedness? I think so.

Sadly, however, I have to wonder how much good my efforts actually do, considering that Trump’s true believers listen intently to Fox News every night. There they are told that anyone that disagrees with Trump is a leftist radical, a “snowflake,” or a pompous self-important liberal. No, actually, that is not the case, and I am proof of it.

Disgraced political hack Bill O’Reilly took to Twitter and his podcast last night to explain to his followers how wrong American historians are about Trump’s recent comments on Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. Despite the fact that we make the study of both those things our professional career, knowing the history and the sources far more than he likely ever will,  he labeled us “morons.”

I am more than certain that his and Trump’s folks believe that to be true, despite our academic pedigree, or most likely because of it.  So why listen to a well educated professor? Bill O’Reilly says the president is right, so they have to be wrong.

Thus when I open my mouth in class to criticize Trump, even from a historical perspective, I am sure that my most ardent Trump supporting students only dismiss it as the inaccurate rantings of a liberal professor. The enemy.

In the past I would never have been someone you or anyone else would ever see as a radical (or a liberal). And in fact I would have run from such a label.

So does that mean that Trump has turned me into a “radical?” Sadly, in the era of Trump and Fox News, adherence to basic facts, objectivity, and open-mindedness have come to be seen as just that.  In a world of closed minds, objectivity is now radical.

So be it.  I’m a radical.

And as radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed during the presidency of slaveholder Andrew Jackson, “I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard.”

I promise you, Confederate history is NOT being erased

Oh my gosh! Look at that man erasing history! NOT.

Quick thoughts on monuments in the news:

So, New Orleans has begun the process of taking down monuments, starting with one that is NOT a Confederate monument (no matter how it has been labeled as such by the media). They are set to remove three others that ARE Confederate monuments in the coming days. I really don’t have the desire to comment much on these types of removals, because I think I have made my position on this very clear in the past.  Simply put, I prefer contextualization and/or counter monuments (which is a powerful way of confronting and challenging the iconography of previous generations in a way that is in itself educational) instead of removal. Yep, you heard me right. I do not think removal is the best way to deal with this.

BUT removing them is NOT “erasing history,” it is an attempt to be honest about it. If I hear or read another person claiming this is an attempt to erase history, I am going to have a full on conniption fit. As I have seen other historians say, don’t worry folks, we are not going to be letting anyone suddenly forget what the Confederacy was and what it stood for, I promise you that. It is what me and a great number of other people are paid to do, and we do it passionately. Research and teaching about the history of the southern confederacy and the Civil War isn’t going anywhere, monuments or no monuments.

So don’t worry, hundreds of Civil War books are going to keep coming out every year, the Civil War is still going to get taught in class, more and more battlefield land is going to be preserved (which has only increased in recent years), and historians are going to keep increasingly getting involved in public history and on social media.

But you say, it is erasing older interpretations about the Confederacy and the Civil War, and replacing them with ones you don’t agree with. Nope. We may be correcting/challenging older interpretations, but we aren’t  erasing them. The fact that people once interpreted the Civil War in the ways reflected in the monuments is not going away either. It too is part of the story, and I can again promise you that historians are not going to let anyone forget how the Civil War used to be interpreted. This is called “historiography,” and every professional historian is trained in it. You can’t be a good historian without learning how events have been interpreted by others, and how that has evolved over time.

In fact, the removal of these monuments only adds to the story that historians tell about the Confederacy and the Civil War. In essence, it is Confederate history continuing to be made today. The removals are now part of a story that will never be erased. So please just stop saying that history is being erased. Just stop it, please.

But as to the removals, regardless of mine or anyone else’s opinions, these decisions are best left to local communities that have the right to commemorate or not commemorate whatever they want to.

Yet there are two things I find funny/hypocritical in the nationwide reaction to New Orleans’ decision. 1) We hear people say that Trump protestors need to “get over it” and move on. Yet the people that say that seem to be the most vocal against these removals, which is ironic given that the placement of the monuments themselves was done by people who couldn’t “get over” their loss in the war. It was their attempt to reframe what it was all about. (The “Lost Cause.”)

And 2) it seems that Republicans are the most vocal against these removals (like this clown pretending to be a southerner and running for governor of Virginia), which is ironic because they are supposedly the champions of letting state and local governments do most of our governing. So shouldn’t we let local governments/communities make their own choices about these monuments? I’m just calling for some consistency,  . . . again.

And while we are on the Lost Cause, yesterday was “Confederate Memorial Day” here in Alabama. Ugh. But I take it as a sign of progress that the ceremony marking the day at our state capitol building was attended by a whopping 150 or so people. Nice. It is a good thing we have these people around to remind us of the Confederacy, since its history would apparently just disappear if they weren’t here to remind us.

 

Lastly for today, and on a different subject: Another news story that is all over the place is that a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered in a British archive. Unfortunately, the story is getting blown out of proportion and/or misunderstood by people that are apparently inspired by that stupid Nicholas Cage movie. My local news got it all wrong last night, as has been the case all over social media. This is not an unknown second “original” copy of the Declaration. It is a handwritten copy that was made on parchment in the 1780s, which is rare indeed, but not exactly an original and/or something that should set off conspiracy theories. Researchers believe it was commissioned by James Wilson (who was the signer that was treated so poorly and portrayed so inaccurately in the otherwise awesome musical 1776). How did it wind up in Britain? That seems to be mostly a mystery.