The SCV's Gonna Build a Museum, and Kevin Levin is Pissed

Levin has a post about the SCV's project of building a museum near its headquarters in Tennessee. He sez the SCV's "decision to call it a museum, however, needs serious qualification."

No, it doesn't. A museum is "a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed" (Random House via Dictionary.com) ... and ... "a place or building where objects of historical, artistic, or scientific interest are exhibited, preserved, or studied" (Collins English Dictionary via Dictionary.com).  

Levin further sez, "Let’s be clear that the epistemological foundation of this endeavor has much more in common with the Creation Museum, Noah’s Ark Encounter or even the Museum of the Confederacy in its earliest incarnation than anything that we normally designate as a history museum."

Than WHO "normally designate as a history museum?" YOU, Levin?

For the folks in Rio Linda, "epistemology" is a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge (Dictionary.com). If Levin is concerned about that with regard to civil war museums, he needs to understand that a great many of them existing today are not about knowledge of the civil war at all. They are about indoctrinating visitors into the progressive view of the South (evil), Southerners past and present (bad), the Confederacy (really, really evil), slavery (the greatest sin of mankind) and Abe Lincoln  (saint) and the union (sinless).

This is also the purpose of adding "interpretative plaques" to Confederate monuments that have been standing, quite well understood without them, for decades -- to indoctrinate visitors in the progressive mindset of the items named in the above paragraph. If you thought it was about "knowledge" and "truth," boy, are you wrong.

Levin concludes, "Ultimately, what we are seeing here is the further acknowledgment that the Lost Cause continues to lose credibility as a legitimate interpretation of the past and as something worthy of honoring or celebrating. ...It is another acknowledgment (at a cost of $5 million) that the Lost Cause has surely lost."

Well, Levin, obviously, the "Lost Cause" is not lost enough for you. You're obsessed with it.

But here's what's most instructive about your blog entry. I note that your post and many comments following it advocate the suppression of ideas and beliefs you disagree with. (That is standard fare on your blog, btw.) It's not enough for you to disagree with it -- it has to be figuratively strong-armed to force compliance, or else the public has to be verbally strong-armed to avoid it. Since the SCV isn't likely to knuckle under to progressive haranguing, you folks will have to go to Plan B.

The post and comments are a stark, clear example of the leftist mentality and the leftist approach. Progressives bill themselves as "tolerant" and welcoming of the free exchange of ideas. In fact, if they cannot suppress that which they disagree with, they will lie about it and strive to influence others against it (Plan B).

I don't think it will work, as it has in the past. Many recent events demonstrate that Americans are are sick and tired of the decades-long progressive strong-arming (i.e., political correctness) and they are pushing back. That's why Target is losing money hand-over-fist (and why it changed its "bathroom policy" yet again, and is spending $20 million to accommodate its customers and undo its earlier arrogance toward their beliefs). That's why the Washington Post speculates that the "NFL ratings plunge could spell doom for traditional TV" (although the article doesn't even touch on the reason for the ratings plunge; many commenters get it, though). That's why "Birth of a Nation" and "Free State of Jones" bombed at the box office.  That's why a brash New York billionaire who knows nothing of the verbal diplomacy needed in political exchanges is running neck and neck with his lying, dirty-trickster progressive opponent in the presidential race.  That is why, according to a Gallup poll and other indicators, Americans' trust of the media is at an all-time low.

But y'all sharpen your pencils, or get comfortable at your keyboard, and start churning out them efforts at the suppression of ideas. Write those blog posts. Comments.  Letters to the editor.... Show the world what you really are.

And to the SCV -- can't wait to visit your museum!

(Stay tuned -- I'll be addressing some of the more bizarre "progressive" ideas found in the comments in my next post).