August 22, 2011, - 5:30 pm
Dumbed Down “History”: They Gave “Historical Monument” Status to WHAT?!
This is absurd. Of all the buildings and sites in Virginia that deserve “historical marker” status, the last one I can think of is a parking garage. Sadly, they’ve dumbed down history in Virginia . . . and everywhere else in America. How else can you explain an Arlington historic preservation agency’s designation of a parking structure as a historical monument, merely because it was where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met his Watergate source, Deep Throat a/k/a W. Mark Felt, Sr.?
It’s truly a sign of America’s ever increasing mediocrity that we pick mediocre things and places, including the Rosslyn, Virginia parking lot, upon which to bestow honors. And this takes the cake. It’s the equivalent of posting a historical marker on the square of the sidewalk where young Barry Obama dropped the vial of coke and decided not to do drugs again. It’s just not important, nor is it history, even in the most elastic use of the word.
Historical locations are Mount Vernon or the site of the First Continental Congress. They are the Battlefield at Antietam, the site of the bombing at Pearl Harbor, the location where our soldiers stormed the Beach at Normandy, or raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima (though, obviously, the latter two are not in the U.S.
History is not a parking location where a cowardly, disgruntled FBI agent illegally leaked information to two selfish, uber-liberal “reporters” in order to take down a President whose centrist agenda they didn’t like. That’s not historical. Nor is history the gym equipment used by Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Hussein Obama Idi Amin Dada. It’s not even the bubble gum wrapper from the Bubble Yum bubblegum Britney Spears chewed after making out with Madonna and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Music Awards. Nor the hospital bed where RuMohammed, the first Muslim transsexual completed his castration on the way to his career as the first Islamic terrorist leader with male DNA and female make-up and breasts. Okay, so I made him up . . . but trust me, he’s coming into being in this crazy world in which we live.
Those things are not history. In the course of real history, the people and places and things I named above–like the parking garage–have no historical significance. They contributed nothing to America and the survival of the West. And they will be forgotten. If we’re going to assert that sites of tips to reporters are “historical,” then, perhaps a number of strip clubs and porno theaters should get the status. A lot of reporters meet sources in these places.
In the space age, when we are finally flying around in Jetson-like and Blade-Runner-esque ships and pods, will they be able to tear down that parking lot where Bob Woodward met with Deep Throat, now that it has a historical marker?
By that time, they won’t just mistake the name of the traitorous, loathsome FBI agent for the name of a porno flick. Both Deep Throats will be long forgotten. As will Woodward and Bernstein.
If that parking structure is “historical,” so is the hut where Barack Obama’s brother lives in Africa.
And maybe we are even more dumbed down than I originally diagnosed.
It also marks the degradation of History as well. For some time, history has been dumbed down in the schools, Americans who played a significant role in building this country have been de-emphasized, at the expense of women, Blacks, Native Americans, etc., and meaningless, insignificant, PC events have replaced discussions of those who contributed to our country.
This is why surveys show an astonishingly low number of high school graduates who even know what century the Civil War was in, or who was president then.
This latest outrage builds (or maybe the right word is “pushes down”) this outrage even further.
Little Al on August 22, 2011 at 6:13 pm