The night the censors drove old ‘Dixie’ down – Washington Examiner

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, operates on a more liberal compass heading than much of the South. But it carries the unfortunate distinction of having hosted the Dixie Classic Fair since 1956.

The word Dixie, NPR reported, offends enough locals (and one assumes outsiders) that the city is censoring it out of existence.

Some local skeptics questioned whether the name Dixie Classic Fair should be stripped from history, puzzled that next to go might be Dixie Cups. For good measure, lets throw in Dixieland, Dixie Mart, Winn-Dixie, and the Dixie Chicks. These all may somehow offend, and the absurdity of changing them won't be enough to pause hit the "pause" button on the non-stop movie of censorship.

Censorship has long been the first refuge of scoundrels, and history isnt always forgiving of their cause. Stalin erased Nikolai Yezhov from a now-famous official propaganda photo, which only served to keep the functionarys name alive well beyond his historical due. The salting of Carthage after the Third Punic War one of Romes more memorable mop-up operations might be the only thing keeping Carthages name alive two millennia later. And who can forget about Galileo? His name lives on, whereas that of Pope Urban VIII, who tried to silence him, is almost forgotten.

Taking offense to words and symbols is as natural as breathing. Censoring them out of existence is operating on a far grander scale. When I was growing up in California, a group of atheists decided that places with Christian saints names had to go, ostensibly for violating the separation of church and state. But this was really because, as atheists, they just hated Christianity.

Think of the audacity: the logistics of changing every offending name, from San Anselmo to San Francisco to Los Angeles, and every Zion in between (thats every persons drivers license, every official document, every newspaper masthead, etc.). It would have bankrupted many of these municipalities and all just for the fun of it. The coup failed, but not without extravagant legal fees, paid mostly by the citizenry. Every time I pass the highway sign at Grass Valley that reads, San Francisco, 143 Miles my heart sings, not simply because Im going back to the city of my birth, but because, despite a tiny few ill-intentioned and censorious atheists, it is still San Francisco.

Most recently, and coincidentally, was the San Francisco Board of Educations decision (these are educators mind you) to censor an anti-racist mural in a local high school. The Life of Washington, painted in 1936 by an avowed left-wing agitator to depict the evils of slavery and exploitation in the founding of the nation, is ironically the very thing todays leftists would trip over themselves to erect in public. Its depiction of slaves and Native Americans could not be more poignant.

But because the very liberal Board of Education has become hyper-sensitive to the supposed hyper-sensitivity of students, this piece of history had to go. This time, the censors won, but not without embarrassment since some in the media were actually watching and wondering, This is What Educators Do?

By the way, student attitudes towards the mural before, during, and since the controversy remained decidedly apathetic. So much for the little dears' sensitivity.

Meanwhile, as the grievance industry pursues its metaphorical March to the Sea with all of Sherman's subtlety, its worth revisiting someone whose legacy has a dog in this fight: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He may not have known he belongs in the censorship battles, but he does.

King, deeply a son of the South, was unequivocal about the pasts eventual reckoning. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, he said, and liberals like to quote him on that. But one may ask if, for King, that means all of history or just some selections from a drop-down menu that suits the tenor of the current era.

A basic reading of the man offers a simple answer. For King, the pastor and prophet, the linearity of Christianity promises redemption and salvation, but one must live within human history to get there. The problem of this history is both our fate and our calling. It is not a trifle.

How dare you invoke King, some will say, and not without good intention, though certainly fueled by emotion and mistrust. Those who defend censorship in the name of soothing bruised sensitivities would do well to recognize that King himself was as much a maker of history as he was its victim. The glory of King cannot exist without the shame of the past. Yin and yang are inseparable. Destroy one, you destroy the other.

Two quotes in a teachable moment are always better than one. George Santayanas all-purpose cheer for history Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it itself always bears repeating. Would King subscribe to an updating of his own words? "The arc of history is long, but it bends towardscensorship?"

Daniel Keefe is a writer in Montclair, N.J.

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The night the censors drove old 'Dixie' down - Washington Examiner