Thirty years ago I read that an early Chinese leader ordered the destruction of as many ancient Chinese history texts as he could lay his hands on. God praise the Internet but I just discovered that the Emperor was no less than Qin Shi Huang the Emperor who first unified China and is probably best known today for having interred the vast terracotta army with his own burial. He also reportedly buried alive 400 scholars who had hidden the proscribed histories from the book burners.
Today China may be poised to overtake Trump’s No Nothing America to become the Earth’s preeminent nation has done something similar. It has done its level best to scrub the Internet of unpalatable evaluations and especially the memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. By mentioning this I suspect Lincolndemocrat will be scrubbed from Chinese servers. That probably won’t stop me from passing out my lincolndemocrat.com business cards when I get to China this summer. (In my view China can never hope to overtake America until it gives its historians free rein.)
I mention this because the scrubbing of Tiananmen Square from History is mentioned in a second book on China that I began reading to Claudia today. Age of Ambition won a National Book Award and picks up about where Peter Hessler’s Country Driving left off ten years ago.
I happily added the Hessler book and the Book about Bleeding Kansas to my reading list which I began back in 1979 and later uploaded to my old website.
I’ve added to the list every year although the three years I fought hardest to get a vote on the Red plan my additions to the list were threadbare. What I’ve wanted to do for a long time is write a book myself and there are several topics I wish to pursue as my long suffering loyal eight readers know. I also resumed reading another history book this morning. Its 1920, The Year of the Six Presidents. This book will give me some insights on my Grandfather Robb’s early Republican years. This was the year that his biggest mistake left the Oval Office. 1920 is also the year of Duluth’s infamous lynching, another subject I’ve wanted to write about.
Until the second paragraph I swear its been a week since I mentioned President Trump’s name in the blog. He’s proving to be as hypnotic as Duluth’s Red Plan manic School Board. He’s been styling himself as Andrew Jackson reborn. On that point, I enjoyed watching author, Jon Meacham, taking Trump apart on CNN last night because Meach wrote a Pulitzer winning history of Jackson. I got half way through it just before traveling to Israel last year and am still meaning to finish it so that I can add it to my reading list. (I don’t add partially completed books to the list!)
Other than this darned blog I’m not sure when I’ll finally finish my first history. I just printed out most of the posts I wrote reviewing our school board attorney, Kevin Rupp. He might be a good chapter. But before I do that I’ll have to clean up some embarassingly awful passages like this godawful paragraph I discovered with Rupp’s name in it.
What I don’t know is whether, as an old Board member well acquainted with a villainous act on the part of Art’s accuser, I can safely tell a current school board member or even a Superintendent such confidential information. My retirement gurus, mentioned in the first half of this post, might be in a panic even now. Maybe I’ll get sued and my wife’s earnings will be wiped off the map. They would lose a nice account. Wouldn’t that be charming. Claudia would probably leave my bed all together not just for a couple hours early one morning. On the other hand maybe she could launch in the ministry with an even deeper conviction in her new found penury.
I’ll rewrite it Someday. Fortunately, most of what I’ve been rereading is pretty clear. And to cut myself some slack let me point out that this was stuffed in a 1300 word post that was cranked out over a long night I spent cranking four companion posts of similar size. That’s a lot of editing.
As I move closer to filing for the school board in June the history I may be concentrating on could be a lot more local. Explaining how we got our jam packed school classrooms may be the only way that the Duluth Public can be persuaded to pony up more money to fix the problem. I just have to hope that the authorities don’t square my Tiananmen first.
