Moses and the Texas Board of Education

The recent social upheaval over the battle flag of the Armies of Northern Virginia (erroneously called the Confederate Flag) has once again revealed the politicizing of history in Texas and the criminal bowdlerizing of textbooks intended to educate the youth of the country. If you want to isolate a failure with public education, look no further than Texas.

The Washington Post published an editorial that emphasizes the danger inherent in Texas:

How Texas is whitewashing Civil War history

This Fall, Texas schools will teach students that Moses played a bigger role in inspiring the Constitution than slavery did in starting the Civil War. The Lone Star State’s new social studies textbooks, deliberately written to play down slavery’s role in Southern history, do not threaten only Texans — they pose a danger to schoolchildren all over the country.

Continue reading “Moses and the Texas Board of Education” →

Gone With the Wind

My father told me about his watching the movie Gone With the Wind projected on a white sheet while the viewers leaned or sat on the railings around the commissary on a warm summer night. I think he was in the Army Air Corps at the time but this may well be a memory jumble and he might have just returned from a successful day of catfish wrangling when growing up in Oklahoma. I saw Gone With the Wind one Saturday morning at a restored mega-cinema houses on Hollywood Boulevard—the Egyptian, perhaps—when the restored (recolored) edition was first-run in the mid-60s.

Continue reading →

Benjamin Button

I suspect that everyone knows the story of Benjamin Button. I certainly did and I had not seen the movie before I took a little breather and read Scott Fitzgerald’s story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The first thing that struck me was that Mr. Button ran around buying clothes and thinking about how embarrassing it would be introducing a septuagenarian as his newborn son but there was nary a thought or remark or question concerning the condition of his wife. Is this because the fiction focuses on the newborn or does it reflect a time when women were just doing their duty having babies and taking care of the man of the house (this was just before the War of Northern Aggression, remember)? Then, when Benjamin and his father appeared to be about the same age (50 or so), the two gentlemen gussied up for a night on the town … where was Mrs.. Button?

Continue reading “Benjamin Button” →