Eternal Flame   
The pop-necrophiliac juggernaut that is Michael Jackson has opened a London exhibit of career castoffs and oddities, somehow coinciding with the release of what we can only hope is his last final concert film.
Along with the usual costumes and chotskies is a treasured Ronald Reagan letter to Jackson, wishing him speedy recovery from burns sustained in an
  ill-starred Pepsi commercial.
Reagan’s infectious optimism failed to take hold in this instance. 
 Jackson’s fire injuries are blamed by some for his subsequent pain killer abuse.
Much as we might dream of these oddities on permanent display in a real museum someday, the cruel fact is this is only a tease for the inevitable memorabilia auction. 
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Turning The Page, Civil War Edition 
                  “The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.”   Â
The organizer of an historians’ petition asking President Obama to stop coddling racist traitors and their defenders offers an after-action report: it’s sort of a step forward, two steps back.
James W. Loewen’s petition challenged Obama to kill off a beloved tradition dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s crypto-confederate administration: the annual dispatch of a wreath to Arlington Cemetery’s Confederate War Memorial.
Obama fudged, continuing to honor a straightforward defense of the Southern Cause which denies it had anything to do with slavery, but now yoking it with Washington’s African American Civil War Memorial. The President seems to have lifted the idea from a Washington Post op/ed by University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage.
The classic role of the Washington Post op/ed pages is identified by Loewen: thoughtfully dismissing and refuting arguments that have never appeared in the paper.
“The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage’s op-ed opposing it. “
Loewen explains why two wreathes are not better than none:
“Why.. should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?…Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage’s idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument. Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice. However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it. They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery. Surely both sides are not of equal moral value. “
Good Times Not Forgotten! 
The Dallas Morning News reports that President Obama will answer the prayers of cracker hearts, and continue the tradition of presidents honoring an Arlington Cemetery Confederate War Memorial.
An historians’ petition had pointed to the unreconstructed racism and white nationalism of the bitter-enders who built the memorial, as well as the historical falsehoods it perpetuates.
Before Obama’s decision was known, the Washington Post op/ed page displayed a stirring example of thoughtfully splitting the difference.
University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage is author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.” He explained that Obama could have it all:
“To single out the ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy as beyond the moral pale does not help us come to grips with slavery’s more profound role in American history… President Obama, why not send two wreaths? One to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery and another to the African American Civil War Memorial in the District, which commemorates the 200,000 black soldiers who fought for liberation from slavery in the Union armed forces…Send two wreaths with one common message: that the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slaveholders should recognize each other’s humanity, and do the hard work of reckoning with the racial divide that is slavery’s cruelest and most enduring legacy. “
But the Confederate apologists don’t seem interested in any fuss about slavery.
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“Jane Durden, president general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy — the group that erected and maintains the monument — said the controversy over the wreath reflects a misunderstanding that the Civil War was a defense of slavery rather than a patriotic call to arms.“I am not totally shocked, and it’s not just with Obama, but with a lot of the American public,” Durden said. “This is a very controversial subject — we realize that. But all we ask is: I respect your views on things and I expect the same in return.“
The Daughters will pocket Obama’s Memorial Day wreath and then move on to their real priority, the annual Jefferson Davis fest in June:
Cause For Alarm 
A group of academics have petitioned President Obama to end a beloved presidential tradition dating back to Liberal Idol Woodrow Wilson: sending a wreath each year to a Confederate war memorial in Arlington.
 
The legacy of the man who segregated Washington DC lives on in this sacred annual remembrance, only shifted from Jefferson Davis’s birthday to Memorial Day by the first President Bush.
And not just any cracker monument.
“The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers.“
The monument is a relic of lost cause-ism, reading in part:
“The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth.”
Straw for Last Gaspers to grab hold of:Â the distinguished professors whose names are enrolled on the petition to the President include old pal Bill Ayers!
Now With Dignified Forms! 
The New York Times identifies a looming menace in presidential monumental-ism:Â a renowned architectural crackpot’s involvement in Washington’s prospective Adams family memorial.
Rodney Mims Cook Jr is a man with a mission: hurling architecture back in time to an era of stately forms, and a whole lot of pillars. Cook gave Atlanta a taste of Washington’s magic to come when he erected an enormous faux Arc de Triomphe plotzed amidst big box stores.
    The Adams monument got a boost when America’s Tom Hanks brought David McCullough’s stirring vision of our first one term president to tony HBO. Not since Ken Burns invented the letter-scan-with-voice-over shot has the written word exploded from the screen with such pith and power.
With Cook on board we can look forward to a monumental granite remembrance of flinty New Englanders Adams, the Mrs., and offspring/president Quincy Adams.
Washington’s embrace of the tried, true and trite has a long pedigree. Cook is at the nexus, tying in Bush Library architect Robert A.M. Stern, McCullough again, artful wordsmith of reaction Tom Wolfe, and voice for all those a little concerned about this Obama fellow, Cokie Roberts.
We could of course do worse, and probably will when Lynn Cheney’s next bio surfaces. Watch for much of this same crowd engage in still more founder-swoon when this friend of liberty turns her loving gaze on our next to slavingist president, James Madison.
Hot TopicÂ
 Jackson’s fire injuries are blamed by some for his subsequent pain killer abuse.