For All in Tents and Porpoises

A funny story – it was funny then, to me, anyway – that I keep recalling it every now and then, went like this:

There was a camp ground for boy scouts by the beach close to the sea where dolphins also come by each morning.  The camp director actually fed the dolphins at about the same time the boy scouts have their breakfast.  Each morning the camp director would announce breakfast to the boys and calling out to the dolphins with, “For All in Tents and porpoises…“, to come and get it.  Corny now, perhaps, but it was a clever pun I can’t shake off.  I understand it later became a title of a funny book. 

The origin of the pun is of course, the phrase, “For all intents and purposes”. I will for a minute try to make light of something that has become part of a national conversation that is taken so seriously, despite the fact that it borders on hilarity if not outrageously ridiculous.

What is the intent and purpose of ESPN pulling out a sports commentator from covering a football game because his name is Robert Lee, so as not to offend some segments of the listening audience or fans?  If there is a height to stupidity, this is the Mount Everest of the absurd and empty headedness that is usually associated with political correctness run amok.  If we go by the Malay word origin of “amok or amuk”, we just witnessed an uncontrolled social homicidal rage by these institutions, such as sports organizations like ESPN, that have no business getting involved in political discourses.  Unfortunately, sports these days are also a media vehicle and, as such, they are pulling the same band wagon filled with anything and everything that has to do with political correctness.  Robert Lee, the unfortunate sportscaster of Asian descent, is about as far from Robert E. Lee’s family tree as tamarind is from blueberry.

What is the intent and purpose of removing confederate statues from public parks and sites today?

There are voices now clamoring for removing the Mt. Rushmore Monuments of four presidents because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners.  I can hear Abraham Lincoln speaking to the other three granite faces that are on that mountain.  Abraham Lincoln once had one of the best comebacks to critics who called him “two faced”.  He said, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” I am imagining him telling the other three, “Well, if they succeed in blasting us out of this mountain, then I wish they’d make another one somewhere and then perhaps I will have my other face on it”.

When we visited the Gettysburg National Military Park a couple of years ago everyone who was there felt nothing but respect and solemn admiration for those who died there.  It was a war that by Providential Grace led to the unification of a country that was about to be divided. The price for unity was paid for by blood from both sides.

Let’s imagine now if all the Confederate statues were removed from that national park.  Many of the statues were far apart from each other to signify where soldiers and officers may have fallen.  I can hear it now as one Union statue yells to another, “Is it just me imagining this? Where are the other dead whom we fought with?  Did we win this war without anyone to oppose us?  What was the intent and purpose of the war?”  Yes, Gettysburg will be meaningless if the story is not told in full.  It loses much of its significance when half of its history is erased. But, what would be the intent and purpose of doing so? If we are still arguing about the civil war and slavery a century and a half later when much of the healing had gone on, wounds almost all covered with dry scabs, numb to the touch for much of the nation, what intent and purpose is served by statue removals, other than coercing collective amnesia.  The statues had been there a while, silent, vigil, unmoving and un-intrusive to the daily activities of people, generations of them walking by and often oblivious to the presence of these inanimate objects which, like all open air statues, suffer from the ignominy  brought upon them by discourteous pigeons.  Is it not enough that they suffer through that every day? It is not enough for these folks, mostly young, whose moral compass is likely guided by social media than a deep sense of history or respect for what this country had gone through.

What is tragic about all of these is that the obsession and the compulsion to act on statue removal and attempts at revision of history are from a narrow slice of the population that seems to suffer from self-induced insanity. It is as if they woke up one morning and they started hearing voices.  It has to be that because so much of what this country had gone through is well accounted for and many generations were fine with it.  What ill, what injury, what consternation did just occur to bring about this sudden tinge of self-righteousness?  Is it perhaps a failure of higher education, where professors, some of them, more so from the so called liberal colleges, are indoctrinating rather than teaching?

How tragic it is that Columbus is also on the historical chopping block. First of all, if old Christopher didn’t show up someone else would have.  If they prefer the New World was never opened to European explorers, are they prepared to criticize the progress achieved here today?  Their ability to express their rights to protest is guaranteed by a new nation that took all pains to make sure it is in its Constitution. That nation was born from that discovery by somebody who now, sadly, is likely to be associated with mattress sales or extra discounts at department stores. Yet, his name needs to be expunged, his statues, yes, countless inanimate objects scattered all over the country, removed. For what intent and purpose?

At some point, we are heading towards a downward spiral weighted down by political correctness. Political correctness has become a battering ram against an imaginary or imagined harm caused by the creation of events in the course of developing a civilization. We are not looking forward if our attention is towards what is already behind us.  Are we going to let these modern day Don Quixotes fight these windmills of their imagination, believing that a magic eraser will actually clear history in order to create a better Utopian narrative, free of sad, bad memories?

What would be the intent and purpose of that?