Forget the Past? Forget That!

                            Forget the Past?  Forget That!

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/20/19

            Over two decades ago I watched and listened as columnist William F. Buckley sat and talked with his television show guest, Arthur Schlesinger.  The PBS show, “Firing Line,” was always a genuine exchange of ideas and beliefs about all things cultural.  There was no shouting, not even when differences of opinion were distinctly drawn and strongly held.  Those were the days before the children and grandchildren of the 60s took over and gave us the childish, non-productive yelling we have today.

            Buckley, who should always be heralded as the most effective megaphone of modern conservatism, had sealed his dynamic literary and rhetorical future with a book he wrote only two years after graduating from Yale .  In “God and Man at Yale,” the young Buckley faulted his alma mater for its hostility to Christianity and free enterprise.  In 1951 we were not using the expression “went viral,” but that’s exactly what the book did.

            In 1951 our universities, whether public or private, were considered national monuments.    No one spoke of them in the way Buckley described Yale.  University professors were untouchables.   But the highly educated Buckley would have none of the fawning praise poured on higher education.  He had witnessed too much of academia’s growing disdain for our Founders, our free enterprise system, and our foundational Judeo-Christian ethic.  A “Yankee” if there ever was one, Buckley’s libertarian/conservative views were more in line with those of Southerners than of his high-caste New England and London raising.

            Arthur Schlesinger, on the other hand, was a liberal professor, a Kennedy advisor and biographer.  Politically, he and Buckley could not have been further apart.  What they held in common was a love for history and a strong belief that it should be taught objectively.  They also spoke often of the need of intellectual history (the history of ideas and philosophies), not just political history (dates, wars, elections).

            As Buckley and Schlesinger discussed the value of historical studies on “Firing Line,” it wasn’t Buckley the wordsmith who uttered the chief quote of the day.  It was his political opposite Schlesinger, the history professor.   Schlesinger commented, “I believe history is to the nation what memory is to the individual.”

            And so it is.  We speak often of people we know who are perhaps losing either their short term or long term memory.  But ponder the ramifications of a nation that does the same thing.  How can freedom be understood, appreciated, or preserved if our knowledge of its path is shady or even nonexistent?  How, without history knowledge, can we know who we are as a nation?

            Much worse than losing one’s memory is never having one in the first place, yet this is the condition many Americans find themselves in now.  How many children today don’t remember their father because they never saw him?  How many teens know nothing of free enterprise because they dropped out of school just before reaching American history or economics?

            In recent conversation with Carol Paschal, founder and director of Cobb Street Ministries, she told the heart-breaking story of a 4-year-old boy who asked her, “Miss Carol, what’s a daddy?”  Readers who know Carol and know about her relentless efforts to help people will also know that the child was answered lovingly and forthrightly. This child had no memory loss.  He had no knowledge of a father to forget.

            Buckley asserted 68 years ago that academia was responsible for much of America’s forgetfulness.  His assertions were prophetic.  His death in 2008 prevented him from knowing of how students at Washington and Lee University are clamoring to have monuments of their school’s namesakes removed, of how the mayor of New Orleans has treated certain statues there, or what Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said about Stone Mountain.  Like Faulkner, Buckley believed the past isn’t even past and that “it’s useless to try burying it.”

            In “God and Man at Yale,” Buckley wrote, “I propose to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude which, under the protective label, ‘academic freedom,’ has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of their supporters to be atheistic socialists.”

            History we don’t like is still our history.  I hope that I never forget Stalin, Hitler, or the black children who walked past my house to a school shack while I rode into town on a new Bluebird school bus to a nice building.

            I also hope Buckley will be read and heeded for a long, long time.

Roger Hines

1/11/19