There is a monument to Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota capitol in St Paul? I had no idea. He was an evil old monster, I’m all for removing anything like that — and there is a petition to remove it and replace it with two statues, one of Prince and another of someone chosen by the Indian community. I like that idea.

But then, I think we should regularly change art anyway. The Columbus statue isn’t exactly equivalent to Michelangelo’s David. It was bought and paid for by an association of Italian-Americans about a century ago, and so what it really represents is a wave of self-promotion by an ethnic community that had been discriminated against (which is a fine thing to do; it’s just too bad they picked such a terrible hero), and isn’t necessarily high art. Of course, Michelangelo’s David was also commissioned as propaganda by Florentines to cock a snook at Rome, so motives don’t necessarily mar great art, but does anyone believe this particular statue will stand the test of time? Does anyone think the Confederate statues that dot the landscape are actually significant works of art? Many of them were mass-produced!

I have no problem with old, pedestrian art being taken down and replaced with new stuff — that’s the kind of change that also brings more money to artists, too. And then, a century from now, Minnesotans can look at the statue of Prince and think about whether to swap it out with something new, too.^*

We often revise and modify memorial art. That statue of Columbus originally described him as ‘discovering’ America; that did not go over well in a state with a substantial native population and an even larger Scandinavian population (and, I fear, the sensibilities of the Lake Wobegone set were more influential than the Indians) and it was replaced with a plaque that credited him with initiated the merging of the cultures between the old and new worlds (warning: autoplay video at link!), which is the niftiest euphemism for rape, looting, and genocide I’ve ever seen.

There’s also a Spanish-American War memorial there that had the most revealing change:

The original memorial honored Minnesota soldiers who “battled to free the oppressed peoples of the Philippine Islands, who suffered under the despotic rule of Spain.”

The corrected language reads: “The United States entered that war to defeat Spain, not to free the Filipinos. Most of the battles listed above were fought against Filipinos.”

Yeah, that’s a kinda different interpretation all right.

So sure, let’s not pretend old statues become sacred with the passage of time.

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^*I know, the music of Prince is timeless, and he didn’t go around maiming and murdering people, but still…we don’t get to dictate the will of our descendants.

I’ve heard of medieval-themed dinner theater before, but this is the first I’ve heard of Confederate-themed dinner theater, where they re-fight the Civil War, with the South usually winning. And it’s a Dolly Parton operation!

Because I had seen the promo video on the show’s webpage, I thought I knew what to expect. It all seems innocent enough until you begin to see relics of the War Between the States: waiters dressed in Union uniforms dropping food on the plates of happy patrons hungry for nostalgia and smiling men on horseback wearing Confederate uniforms. As one colleague pointed out with a mix of horror and delight, recalling the deliberately offensive fictional musical from The Producers, it’s Springtime for Hitler.

Except that this thing has been running for 30 years, and the audience doesn’t see it as parody.

Last time I was in Germany, I didn’t see any Nazi-themed restaurants, or Nazi musical revues. Did I not look hard enough?

It’s time to march on DC and just throw the rascals out.

Charles Pierce is having no more of these Trump supporters.

Before we get to the other stuff, and there was lots of other stuff, I’d like to address myself to those people represented by the parenthetical notation (Applause) in the above transcript, those people who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You’re all suckers. You’re dim and you’re ignorant and you can’t even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn’t have 15 seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that end, too.

A guy basically went mad, right there on the stage in front of you, and you cheered and booed right on cue because you’re sheep and because he directed his insanity at all the scapegoats that your favorite radio and TV personalities have been creating for you over the past three decades. Especially, I guess, people like me who practice the craft of journalism in a country that honors that craft in its most essential founding documents. The President of the United States came right up to the edge of inciting you to riot and you rode along with him. You’re on his team, by god.

Sasha Abramsky is wondering what he is: a bumbling dolt out of his depth, an opportunist riding the gravy train, or is he actually, deep down, a genuine Nazi, a white supremacist.

The third possible reason is that Donald Trump—the son of KKK-supporting Fred Trump, the pupil of Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn—actually is, to the very core of his being, a white supremacist, a man who always has and always will divide humanity into hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Trump’s almost pathological inability to do what ought to be the simplest thing in American politics—issue a clear, unambiguous, eyes-looking-straight-at-the-camera denunciation of swastika-waving, weapons-toting Nazis—certainly raises this as a strong possibility. He has certainly never needed Steve Bannon’s or any other adviser’s encouragement to spout his bigoted obscenities. So Bannon’s recent ouster, however welcome, will not address the key problem we’re facing.

I can answer that! We know, and it’s never been the slightest bit ambiguous.

Our moral imperative is crystal clear: we must oppose this man. He must be driven out of office, along with his corrupt cronies. He is wrong, he is incompetent, he is a terrible person with monstrous ideas. And if you are supporting him, you are also a terrible person.

Without even getting into the antic, hateful content of his demented speech, why is he even having this rally? He has accomplished nothing but chaos, and alternates between golfing and having ever-shrinking crowds cheer him.

Today is the first day of classes. I’m thinking I shouldn’t bother presenting a coherent lecture on the basic chemistry of organic molecules, but should just go around the classroom and demand the students tell me how much they love me. And then I’ll go play video games for the rest of the day.

That old Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is significant, although the age is arbitrarily specific. Shape them early and you can do all kinds of rotten things to the adult. Fundamentalist Christians also know this; we’ve seen the consequences here in the US, where they’ve invested a huge amount of time, money, and effort in school boards and corrupting the educational system. Creationists don’t just spontaneously appear, they are the product of years of indoctrination.

So what do we do about College Republicans? The school year has started, my university has over a hundred clubs (anyone can start one, for any cause or reason), and there are first year students signing up this week for the College Republicans, in a sincere belief in conservative values, and they’re going to stumble right into a toxic atmosphere.

Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?

Ha ha, no.

Our two-party system has us locked into this weirdly limiting binary dynamic, where power is driven entirely by the party qua party, both for the Democrats and the Republicans — we might as well rename the factions the Blues and the Greens. Unfortunately, it means party membership is driven more by gamesmanship and identity and hatred of the opposition than by policy and civil service and sensible leadership. The next generation is not looking any better, either.

Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause.

Alex Pareene makes a terrifying prophecy.

This is the state of the GOP leadership pipeline. In a decade, state legislatures will start filling up with Gamergaters, MRAs, /pol/ posters, Anime Nazis, and Proud Boys. These are, as of now, the only people in their age cohort becoming more active in Republican politics in the Trump era. Everyone else is fleeing. This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.

It’s sad. There are some optimistic young people entering the university, and one of the mistakes they’ll make is to join CR and breathe the mind-rotting poison, and next thing you know, they join the staff of the Morris North Star (or its equivalent; it seems to have gone belly-up, but we’ve had a succession of right-wing rags with different names and different editors, all the same) and start writing bigoted drivel to qualify themselves for the wingnut welfare program.

And I can do nothing. The people who ought to be cracking down on this malignancy are the mythical Responsible Republicans, who believe in cautious conservative values, but who, it seems, don’t actually exist. Conservative has become a code word for racism and misogyny.

Just today, there has been a mass resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities and the Department of Commerce’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors. The American Red Cross, the Cleveland Clinic, and the American Cancer Society will no longer hold fundraisers at Mar-A-Lago. The director of the Office of Public Liaison George Sifaki has been fired.

And of course Steve Bannon is out.

It was a good day.

It’s another mass resignation: the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities has just dumped Trump in an excellent “Dear Donald John” letter.

We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.

Exactly.

It made me laugh to see Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville hate march, get heckled so fiercely he had to run away.

Even better is watching the memorials to traitors come down.

It’s classic. Remember how everyone cheered when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled, or the gleeful destruction of Saddam’s monuments? Only difference is that these Confederates were the losers who should never have had statues put up in the first place.