Running Against Ghosts

THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, seemingly in disregard of native sons Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the advice they might give, has elected, albeit just barely, a Rpublican governor who has all the appearances of a wealthy businessman turned demagogue, reminding those of us with memories longer that that of an average goldfish (eleven seconds), a rarity in these United States of Amnesia, of a certain seditionist pathological liar who rather recently established a new record for the most prevarications (more than thirty thousand) of any president in U.S. history while in office. The victorious candidate ran on a single planked platform of keeping something called "critical race theory" out of public schools, with just a smidge of the usual yawningly familiar planks tacked on for good measure: lowering taxes, resisting creeping socialism, blah blah. Either unmentioned or unnoticed by himself or his Trump deluded supporters is the teensy tiny little fact that not only is there no such thing as "critical race theory" in any public school in Virginia, there is no such thing in any public school in the entire United States either. A Republican, winning an election by campaigning against somethinig which exists only in the fertile imaginations of paranoid conservative voters, voting against a threat which does not exist, like a neighboring country "sending" rapists and murderers across the southern border of the U.S. of former Mexico, or the alleged theft of a presidential election. Go figure, like we like to say. With all due respect, which is very little, one might wish to remind Republican supporters of dishonest damagogues that critical race theory is part of the curriculum only in some law schools, as an examination of the legal ramifications of lingering, enduring systemic racism deeply embedded in American institutions, such as government. If and when it ever begins to sneak into the nation's first grade classrooms incrementally, like Mexican rapists, murderers, or socialists, then surely the mobs of violent conservative Christians currently bullying their way into school board meetings all across the fruited plain, hoping to keep all mention of American racism out of the minds of school children, will take immediate notice, and damned well do something about it. What they wish to do is to flood the country with right wing Christian ideologue school board members, for the purpose of keeping all mention of racism out of the impressionable minds of American youth, and to instead instill the "shining city on a hill" hagiographic Ronald Reagan version, so pupular among the super patriotic super mentally warped Christian conservative plurality. Next thing you know, the kids'll be pledging allegiance to the flag of the united States of Christian America, kneeling and praying before recess, and absorbing the fantasy version of American history, the one in which God established the nation in the name of American exceptionalism, unfettered free enterprise, according to the gospel of wealth, and the teachings of Jesus, excluging inconvenient scripture such as "give unto the poor" (socialism), and "render unto Caesar" (big government).