Minor Riddle Answered

Following up on a minor item from yesterday's post on San Francisco taking down all the names :

The committee isn’t sure which president Roosevelt Middle School is named after, but both Theodore and Franklin are being flagged.

Theodore Roosevelt is cited for his opposition to civil rights and suffrage for Blacks. Franklin Roosevelt is on shaky ground for his refusal to support an anti-lynching bill proposed by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and for his support of limiting immigration based on race.

It's obvious to me, so why isn't it to everyone? Just say that Roosevelt Middle School is named after Eleanor, not Theodore or Franklin, both of whom were highly flawed in the Names Advisory Committee's opinion.

As to which President the school was actually named after, a few minutes on Google show the list of Roosevelt Junior High School graduates in June, 1934.

Back in the day, children, "middle" schools were known as "junior high" schools.

Also, it was a more modest era when there was no possibility that a school would have been named after someone who was still alive.

Answer: Theodore.

Sierra Club: They Thought They Were Protected

Some conservatives have decried leftism's "long march" through American institutions like universities, entertainment, mass media, churches, and big-city governments. With few worlds left to conquer, progressives are turning on liberal institutions that once gave them succor, such as the Sierra Club:

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier
Point in Yosemite National Park in 1903.
(Chronicle image)

The executive director of the Sierra Club apologized Wednesday for its “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy,” and said John Muir, the club’s founder and an icon of the environmentalist movement, was a racist.

In his early morning post on the organization’s website, Michael Brune said that just as Black Lives Matter activists are pulling down monuments to Confederate leaders, the club must re-examine its past and “take down some of our own monuments.”

That includes Muir, who Brune admitted was beloved of many of the club’s members and whose writings “taught generations of people to see the sacredness of nature.”

But Muir also was close friends with Henry Fairfield Osborn and others connected to the eugenics movement, which looked to sterilize those whom white supporters of the movement pegged as “deficient”: the poor, physically and mentally disabled people, and those of “unfit” races, including Black, Latino and Jewish people.

Though I've often disagreed with Sierra Club policies, I respected their single-minded dedication to the environment. One always knew where they stood.

I could not care less about what John Muir said about non-whites like myself; Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park would not exist without him, and I give thanks for a life whose accomplishments far outweighed its faults.

Straying from its original mission into wokeness not only will dilute its effectiveness, but the Sierra Club will likely experience a melting away of existing members and their donations. We have seen this phenomenon occur in churches and college alumni associations and newspaper/magazine subscriptions.

I suppose that I should be happy about the slow dismantling of an institution whose politics are different from mine, but I'm not.

Independence Day, 2020: I've Stopped Looking For a Pony

(Business Insider image)

The headlines about President Trump's speech on Independence Day eve were uniformly negative, so I decided to exercise my right to independent thought by reading his speech in its entirety (after the break at bottom) before checking out the reviews.

A generation ago you wouldn't have blinked at most of the speech: praise for American exceptionalism, the words and deeds of the Founders, the great inventions and triumphs ("electricity, split the atom, and gave the world the telephone and the Internet. We settled the Wild West, won two World Wars, landed American astronauts on the Moon"), and a recitation of the accomplishments of the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore.

The latter allowed the President to transition to a condemnation of those who tear down monuments (he was careful not to mention Confederate symbols). He then levied a much broader attack against

“Cancel Culture"— driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values...

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.

Throughout his term the President has been called every name in the book, including Nazi and dictator, so his opponents won't like it that he's calling them the Fascists and totalitarians.

Actually, I've decided not to read the reviews because I know they're going to say what they've been saying for the past 3½ years: the President is divisive, he's firing up his base, he's a racist and white supremacist.

From Russian collusion to the Ukraine-whatever-that-was to the emoluments clause to the Logan Act to the climate denialism to the #MeToo movement that toppled mostly Democrats to the Trumpian over- then under-reaction to the coronavirus the media has been shoveling a lot of [stuff] since 2016 and affecting outrage throughout.

I used to trust their profession of journalistic principles to believe that they had something, but frankly I've stopped looking for a pony.