Conservative demagogue John Leo writes in today's column about the now-scrapped plans for a monument to New York City's firefighters.
It's the standard racist complaint piece (barely cloaked in the once-fashionable anti-political correctness rant) that many of his fellow mouth-breathing demagogues have put together, but I have a visceral dislike for Leo, so I'll address his specifically.
He writes:
But the equality of imagery in the proposed bronze statue (one white, one black, one Hispanic) distorted the reality of what was essentially a display of heroism by multiculturalism's villain class, white males.
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This, to me, is fascinating. Raising the flag was a useful symbolic act, but was it heroic? It happened late in the afternoon of September 11th, long after the collapse of the towers.
But leaving that aside, Leo admits that he recognizes two messages in the photo: the obvious evocation of American resilience and the heroism of white males. In other words, Leo's doing exactly what he claims we shouldn't: emphasizing race. He's upset because the ideologically-sound image of white men raising a flag might be hijacked by a sensibility which suggests that their race is unimportant.
But of course he thinks race is important. He lets us know:
Out of concern for the self-esteem of minority students, history texts routinely do the same false balancing act, mugging the truth so all cultures end up with at least as much achievement as the West, preferably more.
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He's concluded that any rational evaluation of history would concede that the West (read: whitey) is a paragon of achievement, and any representation to the contrary must be motivated by liberal guilt.
Leo doesn't mention that the fire department in the culturally diverse city of New York is only 2.7% black and 3.2% Hispanic. I wonder if it has occurred to him that the combination of (disproportionately) low minority representation and a slavish devotion to chronicling white heroism will ensure that he has few opportunities to observe the achievements of others.
10:02:46 PM 
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