Remembering history the way they wished it had been
Rally For Our View  
No doubt we can now look forward to the many conservative stalwarts revising and extending their complaints at Obama’s grandiose event staging.
History didn’t deter them at the time, but we Americans are an optimistic people.
Legends Of The Fall 
It’s come to this: after being around for 20 years, the Nixon Library’s best spokesman defending the Nixon “legacy” is creationist fraudster and imaginary civil rights veteran Ben Stein.
The celebration of 20 proud years is in the spirit of the man, with events featuring such 60s legends as Freddie “The Jew Counter” Malek.
The Library spent most of these years with no actual Nixon presidential documents. It’s been a place of song, myth, and wedding rentals, staffed by the fervent few who still believe Nixon’s vindication will come, someday.
CultureWares.com celebrates Nixon’s Twenty Years Of Lustration.
Quit Your Stalin   
Americans like to think of D-Day as a splendid battle which, while tough, prefigured our inevitable sweep to victory over Germany. How it came to be that most of the German army was elsewhere, or where the slave laborers who built the Germans’ “Atlantic Wall” came from are petty distractions.
So it comes as no surprise that Joseph Stalin is becoming unwelcome at a Virginia war memorial, reminding us that we didn’t beat Hitler all by our lonesome.
  Bedford Virginia’s National D-Day Memorial is a vast crop circle of memorials,
with hideous arches,
and landing beach recreations.
And statues. There is an Eisenhower statue in its own “Tuscon folly” , but somehow it’s not controversial that the father of Reyonlds Wrap gets to slap his name on the garden.
Among busts of famed war leaders Stalin makes the cut, and the planners have mumbled something about the Russians fighting over yonder contributing to the D-Day victory.
Skunk At The Picnic 
The creators are making an effort, possibly unique in American public recollection of the war, at remembering the Soviet people’s epic sacrifice in defeating fascism. No doubt Stalin was guilty of many crimes, but he’s hardly the only problem with the proposed memorial if we are going to get fussy.
Perhaps the trouble stems from the monument’s defference to “great man” history
 Why is Harry Truman there?  He wasn’t even Vice President at the time of the landing
 
 House Proud 
A belated salute to the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, who July 4th shared with readers his meditations on America and the world’s obsession with replicating homes of the great and the good, or at least George Washington.  
Mount Vernon, soon to host another superfluous “Presidential Library,” holds first place in the nation’s architectural imagination, or lack thereof. Kennicott spotlights the many sad recreations of the Big House, and Lydia Mattice Brandt’s research into America’s mysterious practice of making foreigners and school children troop through replicas at half a dozen World’s Fairs and exhibitions.
We Might Be Giants    
Current star practitioner of this architectural ghost walking is Alan Greenberg, whose accomplishments include a toy house Mount Vernon for future Chief Executives with excess family cash, and a “flagship” store for the always strenuously patriotic Tommy Hilfiger.
Ronald Reagan exhibited some of these morbid symptoms, enjoying work at a replica of George Washington’s desk before he was president even of the Screen Actors Guild.
It’s not only the Great House.
      Kentucky proudly hosts a fake Abraham Lincoln boyhood cabin, now replicated on coins.
And an Okinawa businessman’s strange fakery compulsions could only be satisfied with a recreation of Bill Clinton’s boyhood home.
What Would George Drive? 
National Resource Wonkette tries to probe the deeper meaning of the Washington Post‘s probe of the unfortunate Founding Fathers impersonators revival.
In a new ad, automobile welfare queen Chrysler has George Washington scattering his enemies with a sensible sedan, and the Post thinks they may be tipping their tricorn towards the Teabaggers.
Hats off to Chrysler’s new owners, the United Auto Workers.
Weak Tea
