Nonsense on Stilts, Steroids, and PCP
Okay, it isn’t often that I give a thumb’s up to anything coming out of the Trump Mansion—you know, that big white pile on Pennsylvania Ave. with all the construction going on everywhere—but, well, sometimes man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Over at the National Review, Kaitlyn Kiepert, interning at the right-leaning National Journalism Center,1 has the story:
The White House called out the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) for “problematizing”2 America’s 250th Anniversary and abandoning history for political activism in a report released on Saturday.
The 162 page report [officially, Saving America’s Story How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage] was produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council after a year-long investigation which found that Smithsonian leaders used the NMAH as their “prime tool” to reshape America’s core narratives in the service of a left-wing, revisionist agenda.
The museum’s mission has gone “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country,” the report’s authors claim.
Well, “interesting if true”, but is there any real evidence to justify the Trumpeteers’ sweeping conclusions? Well, yes, yes there is, if you bother to even sample the report, as I did. The examples are almost endless, horrifying testimony to the extent to which the social sciences in academia have been all but swallowed up by a set of ever-proliferating post-modern, anti-colonialist, self-validating clichés. Furthermore, the report’s anonymous authors engage in surprisingly little posturing and invective, just the opposite of what one expects from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. these days.
As a sample of the “thinking” behind what’s going on at the NAMH these days, listen to the pronouncements of Dr. Orlando R. Serrano, Jr., Head of both PreK-12 Learning and the “Center for Restorative History” at NAMH, which seeks to restore all the joyous innocence that prevailed in North America prior to the arrival of you know who and not so incidentally to correct all the evil that the Smithsonian itself has done—because, like any other creation of Western Civilization, “it is an institution that has perpetuated harm through its collecting and display”3— a mere tool, one might say, of the oppressive rule of the white capitalist patriarchy. To give you some background, I’ll quote from a 2023 article by Dr. Serrano appearing in the Journal of Museum Education titled There are Different Suns: Learning, Restorative History, and Finding Ground, explaining how the Anglo-American Common Law went off the rails so many centuries ago: they wanted to “punish” people! For breaking the law! So now we’ve got to change all that! Through “Restorative Justice”! Says Orlando
Restorative justice (RJ) is a framework for addressing harm and/or conflict between and among people that has roots in Native American peacemaking practices. It is also a way to structure relationships between people. RJ seeks justice, resolution, repair, and/or redress without perpetuating harm by foregrounding horizontal organization, problem solving, solidarity, and contingency. It must be stated at the outset that the thinking, writing, and practice in RJ is rich and deep. The four themes outlined below are not the totality of thinking on RJ, but a beginning. [AV note: I’m only quoting the first two]
Horizontal organization
[Navaho] Chief Justice Robert Yazzie explains horizontal organization by contrasting Anglo-European “vertical” justice and Navajo “horizontal” justice.In a vertical structure, rank and position matter: some people are situated above others, while other people are situated below. Namely, judges are able to make more power based on their structural position over lawyers who are able to make more power over plaintiffs and defendants.
In a vertical model, harm and/or conflict is adjudicated through lawyers and judges, not person to person. Sujatha Baliga, a former public defender and RJ practitioner, states that the U.S. system of law obscures and fetishizes the profoundly relational nature of harm and conflict by routing it through intermediaries. In other words, when someone is harmed, they do not confront and/or meet with the person who harmed them, but with lawyers and judges who make decisions for the parties. In a horizontal organizational structure, no person is above another. According to Yazzie, a circle best exemplifies how to imagine this structure and its impact on relationships. “In a circle, there is no right or left … it conveys the image of people gathering for discussion.” The circle can be as small as three people or as large as needed for support. This relational and interpersonal aspect of seeking justice transforms its meaning and practice.
Problem-solving
Understanding why an act of harm occurred – problem-solving – is at the core of peacemaking. In the U.S. system of law, problem-solving is rarely foregrounded. A judge presides over a case and … makes one party the ‘bad guy’ and the other ‘the good guy;’ one of them is ‘wrong’ and the other is ‘right.’ The vertical justice system is so concerned with winning and losing that when the parties come to the end of the case, little or nothing is done to solve the underlying problems which caused the dispute in the first place. For centuries, the focus of English and American law has been punishment by the ‘state.’
See, we shouldn’t be “punishing” murderers! That’s the wrong approach entirely! We should be solving the underlying problems that caused the dispute—okay, have it your way, the “murder”—in the first place! The sheer fatuousness of modern wokitude is difficult—indeed, impossible—to summarize or describe. To convey it, one simply has to quote them at length, and let them wander in their endless circles of self-righteous self-pity as they moan about this and that, searching endlessly for new reasons for white people to feel ashamed of themselves.
There is “plenty” in the historical record of America that got left out in the supposed “good old days”—the way millions of Native Americans died thanks to the myriad of Old World diseases unwittingly imported into the Americas by the Europeans, the enslavement of first millions of Native Americans by the Spanish and then millions of Africans by all of the European nations engaged in the trans-Atlantic trade, the massive displacement and oppression of the American Indians in North America by the U.S. and Canada, but it simply isn’t the whole story.
The civilizations of the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs had brutalities and oppressions very similar in scale to what had occurred in Europe and Asia. The North American Indians, it’s true, did not have structured class societies, and life for them was much more consensual and “egalitarian”, but they did engage routinely in such less than admirable practices such as torture and war as almost a sport and pastime, allowing young men to distinguish themselves and attain status, skirmishes conducted largely for the capture of young women and children, who would be incorporated into the tribe. Furthermore, Indians endured all the hardships incidental to human life around the globe prior to the emergence of modern Western medicine around the year 1900: massive rates of infant mortality, massive physical suffering of mothers during childbirth (which was not mitigated by, you know, “herbs” and potions), often resulting ultimately in death, along with a constant susceptibility to infection and disease. I don’t think that “civilization” ever benefited the majority of human beings prior to about the end of World War II, but we reached it then and now, for the first time in human history, most of the world’s population is not condemned to a life of constant poverty and hardship, and this thanks to, yes, Western Civilization, including, yes, capitalism.
Afterwords
One must congratulate the White House Domestic Policy Council for a job well done for this report, which I did not expect. As I said earlier, the report, though it perhaps goes on a bit much on the NAMH’s partiality to illegal immigrants, lacks the sort of substance-free hysteria so common on “the Right.”
The Washington Post links to an email from Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III to Smithsonian staff responding to the DPC’s report on the National Museum of American History. I find it “interesting” both that Mr. Bunch avoids responding to any of the specific charges (no surprise there) and that he describes how Americans enjoyed the Smithsonian’s bounty on the July 4 weekend in the following manner:
This past weekend offered a vivid reminder of that purpose and our mission in motion. Visitors from around the world gathered to mark the 250th, moving through our museums —pausing before a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence in the Smithsonian Castle, encountering bison sculptures on the National Mall, and stepping into the future in our newest galleries at the National Air and Space Museum. Across the Smithsonian, history and possibility stood side by side, inviting reflection, curiosity, and inspiration.
“Funny” that none of these attractions were located in the, you know, National Museum of American History!
Special Post-Modernist Afterwords
I have descanted (a lot! Until I’m blue in the face, really!) on the manifold evils of modern wokery, most spectacularly here but also here, ranting at length about the wickedness—and occasional virtues—of the woke. You could also just search for “race” here on my blog and knock yourself out. You’ll be glad you did!
1. According to Wikipedia, at least, when the NJR kids aren’t uncovering a scandal, they’re blasting away with AR-15s and AK-47s (know your enemy!). Notable NJR grads include Ann Coulter and Malcolm Gladwell.
2. Kaitlyn’s use of quotation marks around the word, also used in the report itself, echoes without making explicit the current use of “problematize” and “problematization” by the metamodernist, post-postmodernist, and remodernist left to identify a currently fashionable analytic/propagandist tool. According to Wikipedia, “Problematization is a critical thinking and pedagogical dialogue or process and may be considered demythicisation. Rather than taking the common knowledge (myth) of a situation for granted, problematization poses that knowledge as a problem, allowing new viewpoints, consciousness, reflection, hope, and action to emerge.” And about fucking time!
3. This according to CRH founders Tsione Wolde-Micheal and Nancy Bercaw.
