from Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford:
In the debate between Alamo revisionists and traditionalists, only the latter camp tends to vent its spleen in public. By that evening, the angry comments had begun to pile atop Sanchez’s story like a game of Tetris. Many sounded like this one by an especially splenetic commenter calling himself FiftycalTX: “The battle of the ALAMO has been taught for close to 200 years and no ISIS REVISIONISM is going to get it ‘untaught.’ Any ‘teachers’ that have a problem with calling the patriots that FOUGHT AND DIED at the Alamo ‘heroic’ need to return to New Germany or where ever they came from.”
That’s the kind of over-the-top comment writers tend to cite to make you think all traditionalists are ungrammatical lunatics. In fact, some were more lucid, as in this comment from someone calling himself Keith Smith: “The good people of Texas need to see this for what it really is: an insidious attempt by leftist radicals and hand-wringing American apologists to rewrite our proud Texas history and twist our struggles for freedom into unspectacular yarns of Yankee colonialism and thinly veiled white supremacy. They want to make us the oppressors and bad guys in the eyes of our children.”
The real fireworks came the same afternoon the article went live when Texas governor Greg Abbott tweeted, “Stop political correctness in our schools. Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’! I fully expect the State Board of Education to agree.”
It's entirely possible that the conservative politicians who leapt onto the governor’s Friday afternoon bandwagon were genuinely offended by the proposed changes and did not consider the political advantage in expressing this grievance two months before an election. It’s also possible that a diet solely consisting of refined sugar, tobacco, and whiskey is good for you. The first in, George P. Bush, chimed in just sixteen minutes later.
No comments:
Post a Comment