WWW.PRESIDENTS"R"US.COM

Communism Point & Click

So little is left of the Berlin Wall that Reuters reports authorities have resorted to handing tourists a GPS powered device if they want to recreate that closed in feeling.

We know where the Wall went: vast chunks carried off to America for victory displays. Prime offenders are Presidential Libraries, which are cluttered with the stuff.

Let’s review:

George H.W. Bush has a cheesy salute to Berlin and all things Texan outside his museum, and indoors Wall as well. And Bush Secretary of State James Baker got a chunk for his Rice University Institute.

Ford has a piece, although the Wall rested undisturbed throughout his presidency.

Nixon too.

Kennedy saw it built on his watch.

The Hoover Library has a Wall piece, although he barely lived long enough to see it built, three decades after his presidency.

Truman hosted Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminister College in Fulton Missouri, and the campus now hosts both a plain chunk and a Wall “sculpture” – a piece with holes punched in it by Churchill’s granddaughter. She also sold one of these horrors to the Roosevelt library.

The greater glory of Ronald Reagan requires the most concrete, with Wall samples at his Dixon Illinois birthplace, alma mater Eureka College, at the federal Reagan office building in Washington, aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, at the Reagan Ranch Center, and at the Reagan Library indoors & out.

And they used to sell bags of chips.

Executive Assurance

The Methodist Church will not try to block the Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University, according to the Dallas Morning News. Unless a full regional meeting Thursday rejects it, the South Central Jurisdictional Conference resolutions committee is putting it’s faith in fair treatment from Bush.

“The group voted to reject a potentially divisive proposal calling for the conference to reverse a decision by the church’s Mission Council granting SMU the ability to lease land to the Bush library foundation for up to 250 years…Instead, it approved a resolution saying it expects the institute to protect SMU’s “integrity,” signaling that committee members don’t want the institute’s work to affect SMU’s academic independence.”

That should do it!

The Donor Party

Beyond giving work to Congressional and Homeland Security investigators, the Bush Library pay to play scandal has generated renewed attention to just who pays for these hulking mausoleum/fun-zones. Past and future Librarians rush to assure us that none of that foreign cash shall corrupt our American values, at least not while we have a job.

The Bush policy is clear-ish:

“Faced Monday with a report that a rogue lobbyist urged an exiled Central Asian leader to support the Bush library to curry favor in Washington, library officials promised that no foreign money will be accepted until President Bush leaves office. On Tuesday, it became clear the public will have to take them at their word…The foundation isn’t promising to identify all donors, or the dates and sums of their gifts.”

While the Clinton camp took a bold stance on the past, before retreating into mist:

“President Bill Clinton didn’t accept donations from foreign governments for his presidential library while he was in office, Skip Rutherford, who was president of the Clinton Foundation in 2000, told us. Rutherford couldn’t remember if the policy meant donations from foreign citizens also were prohibited.”

And we were reminded yet again why we have no Presidential Library disclosure law on the books:

It’s Tubular!

Invisible Men

Thanks to civilwarmemory for pointing to a recent post by John David Hoptak, a writer and Park Ranger at the Antietam National Battlefield.

Hoptak’s Antietam presentations on the battle and the contemporaneous drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation have stirred a vicious reaction from many Park visitors, unwilling to hear a discussion of Lincoln, slavery, or any of the real stakes in the Civil War.

“If we should not celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, if Lincoln should be criticized for not freeing all the slaves with this revolutionary document, then why should we celebrate and laud the Declaration of Independence? the Constitution? the Founders?…There was a sizable portion of the population that wasn’t declared free to pursue their lives, their liberty, and happiness. Such criticism is almost always met with outrage. . . some of those most outraged by such criticism of the Founders are among those that declare Lincoln to be “the greatest murderer” in U.S. history and that the Emancipation Proclamation should not be celebrated.”

Civilwarmemory comments:

“What I find so disturbing is the apparent number of Civil War enthusiasts who are unable to view emancipation from the perspective of the thousands of slaves who helped force the issue on the Union high command and eventually Lincoln himself by running away from their owners and aiding the efforts of the U.S. army in myriad ways. It’s as if emancipation began and ended with Lincoln…I’ve interviewed a number of Park Service personnel on this issue. For some it is simply enough to assume a perspective that has soldiers on both sides falling from the sky to butcher one another with little or no attention as to why. All that is left to do is explain how they did it. Even a cursory glance at our national memory of the war reveals a continued concentration on values that white Americans initially latched onto at the turn of the twentieth century as part of a movement towards reunion and reconciliation.”

A New Republic blog post on efforts to glide past the South’s stakes in the war sums up:

“The way of life they fought to preserve was not a set of morally neutral hillbilly customs, like playing the banjo and making apple butter; it was a way of life that specifically did include black slavery.“

And The Thoughts & Prayers Of The Nation

All eyes turn to Dallas, where a regional United Methodist Church body may vote to kill the proposed George W. Bush Library at Southern Methodist University. The South Central Jurisdictional Conference meeting starts Wednesday.

This comes after a national Church body in May voted overwhelmingly to refer the question to the region. A felicitously timed scandal over Bush Library fundraising may get investigated, helping opponents, although they looked weak in May.

The history and adventures of Bush Fallen Among the Methodists are detailed here. The weaknesses of the Library opponents as of May are discussed here. On the Conference’ site authors unknown attempt to summarize the sides here, and lay out the likely schedule with the Petitions and Resolutions Committee meeting Wednesday afternoon, and general Conference action if any likely to occur Thursday.

Petitioners opposing the Bush Institute cluster here, opponents here highlight this article by SMU Professor Valerie Karras laying out her case for the South Central Conference taking up the issue. SMU’s agreement with Bush is here.

For the truly obsessed, sign up for the Conference proceedings RSS feed!