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> Truth v politics?
> Politics will almost always win.
Right. Especially when those with the national moral stature to stand up
against the politics fail to stand up.
I still owe Jurretta Heckscher an explanation that she asked for, a summary
telling why I express disappointment in historians who joined, whether or
not consciously, with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in
staying silent on the question of respecting sense of place at Fort Monroe.
These include Adam Goodheart (an especially surprising case) and Douglas
Brinkley, as well as the historians who participated in the special January
2008 symposium about Fort Monroe--including Ed Ayers and other genuine
luminaries.
True, Big Money and its politicians might have ignored them--same as Big
Money and its politicians ignore
* the National Parks Conservation Association,
* nearly every attention-paying Tidewater citizen,
* the Virginian-Pilot on the left and and
* on the right even Tom Gear, the conservative Republican
retired legislator who was honored by Citizens for a Fort
Monroe National Park for his Fort Monroe leadership, and
who calls what's happening a "land grab" by Hampton,
giving us only a "phony" national monument.
But even if historians of stature would have been ignored, they still should
have spoken up.
Anyway, yes. Politics will _almost_ always win, true enough. But in the
matter of America's treasured landscapes, if politics won every time, Ken
Burns would have had no story to tell in his national parks series on PBS.
It's too late for Fort Monroe in Virginia, where the leaders were grimly set
from the start. But it's not too late for the country itself to intervene.
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