Thank God for Jack Cashill, huh?
Or so he'd have us think.
As he keeps telling us, we need him to help us all by explaining things like the Holocaust and the real racial history of Kansas City--and the US and world, I'm sure--as he's done in this month's Ingram's Magazine.
This time, he's telling the developers of this reputedly upcoming "Museum of Suburbia" that's to go out in Johnson County. I love how he even starts the column, just to straighten everyone out:
"Johnson County’s planned National Museum of Suburbia (NMOS, pronounced “no mas”) is not necessarily the horrible idea that most pundits think it is."
As I said, I love that. This museum idea is so bad, he has to make sure we know up front that it's not so bad after all.
Anyway, it's his contention that, while this proposal could devolve, as history would have it, as an explanation of and/or for "white flight" and racial division, that someone just needs to make it "fun" and it will, of course, work and be successful.
Golly.
What a great idea.
Forget that Kansas City is, to this day, deeply, deeply divided, racially, with the outgrowth of that white flight mentioned above, that we so clearly experienced here from the middle of the last century up to this day.
Forget, of course, that there were formal clauses in residential real estate contracts specifically calling out that blacks couldn't buy in the new developments.
Sure, Jack, forget all that.
Just paint a rosey picture of how that all developed and gee, it'll be just like it never happened.
Mr. Cashill insists that this proposed museum shouldn't make any excuses for itself and absolutely should't apologize for the fact that the 'burbs were created, at least in large part, so people could run away from people who weren't otherwise like them.
Way to rewrite history, there, Jack.
He tells, too, in the article that he does the same thing with our own national history, too, when he went back East to the Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It seems Jack was there, helping out a guide, in this example, who needed to be straightened out that the good old US of A wasn't that racist in the past, after all.
It seems a guide there mistakenly, according to Jack, told his group--God help her--that our own Constitution only applied to "White men with property."
Jack straightened her right out, of course. It's what God put him here for, clearly--to educate the rest of us.
Or, at least, God put him here to enlighten the rest of us here in reality land--those who don't agree with him and his views.
In this article, he mentions what happens to be, coincidentally, my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, as proof that the suburbs were'nt developed out of racism, in part or whole, at all. He states that, "despite a population that is less than one-half of 1 percent black... 'Who,'" he asked, “'are these people fleeing from?'”
Well, being from St. Joe, I can tell him. I lived there, after all.
The people in St. Joe ran from that East and downtown side of town to, yes, in fact, get away from black Americans and Hispanics and--no surprise--the lower class. The fact is, St. Joseph, Missouri makes a really poor example as a standout against the idea of "white flight" that created the suburbs because the same thing happened there that happened all across this country.
Forget the racism of the US.
Forget the racism of the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Forget the ugliness and sameness of too much of suburbia.
Totally ignore how sprawled and disconnected our metropolitan area is.
Forget how racially divided we are.
Forget all that.
If you just open a museum and have Jack run it, golly, he'll make it "fun" and you can ignore all that stuff.
Forget truth. Forget reality.
I can see it now--Jack Cashill needs to be whisked away as an international consultant to any and every Holocaust Museum in the world--from Germany to Washington, D.C. and any- and everywhere else.
Jack will make the Holocaust fun.
That'll pack 'em in.
Way to go, Jack. Thank God you're here.
Link: http://www.ingramsonline.com/Aug_2012/btl.html
Posts
