McKinley Statue Targeted

            And now it’s McKinley.

Activists in Arcata, California, want the town’s statue of former President William McKinley taken down because they say the 25^th Commander-in-Chief was a proponent of “settler colonialism,” that “savaged, raped and killed,” the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous People told the Los Angeles Times. The activists say they were inspired by the wave of protests over Confederate monuments that swept across the United States last year. This is just the latest in a string of moves to tear down monuments deemed offensive to Native Americans.

In February, Arcata’s City Council voted 4 to 1 to get rid of the statue.

Of course, by today’s standards, McKinley had a few questionable views and policy prescriptions. But the same could be said about any human being in any era. It is irrational and counterproductive to measure, in absolute terms, the thoughts and behavior of any person from a different era by the current era’s “standards,” those standards themselves likely to be judged as inexplicable—or worse—at a future date.

McKinley joined the Union Army at 18 years of age and fought at the Battle of Antietam. He was sympathetic to the abolitionists and the African-Americans they were trying to emancipate. After the war, he married Ida Sexton, whose mother passed away shortly before their two young daughters died, as well. Ida’s health left her, and she spent the rest of her life as an invalid. McKinley patiently catered to her, doting on her throughout his growing political career, as difficult as that made his life, publicly and privately. He also tried to keep the U.S. out of war with Spain, asking only for a few concessions after Spanish forces started suppressing a revolution in Cuba, enraging the American public and press. The Treaty of Paris officially ended the Spanish-American War, ceding Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S., while granting independence to Cuba. Opponents of the treaty branded McKinley an imperialist, though the public was solidly behind him.

McKinley was also the victim of gun violence, as an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot him on September 6^th, while he was greeting citizens in Buffalo, New York, at the Pan-American Exposition’s Temple of Music. He died eight days later. The big man who risked everything fighting for the Union, emancipation, and his wife…ceased to be. Until he was memorialized in a few statues around the nation he served. But, he is now being stripped of even that modest recognition by the Tolerant Ones who’ve never erred, warred or entertained a bigoted, sexist, racist or impure thought.

Ergo, the fundamental transformation of the West continues apace, bureaucratic intransigence too big a barrier for any one man to overcome. The Deep State will defeat deep thinking every time, if the former owns all means of communication. Leftists, abetted by impotent establishment Republicans, have put paid to the concept of limited government. In its place, the majority seems to prefer a government that can deliver a guaranteed basic income, free contraception, and a deliverance from stress, effort, and scary things. And, could it please read us a bedtime story and tuck us in, too?

Progressivism is progressing so quickly now that in a few years it will be unimpeachable orthodoxy that the right to polyamorous inter-species marriage is clearly enshrined in the Constitution, the father author of which, James Madison, was actually a transvestite who liked to wear his wife Dolly’s clothes down to the local tavern. It will soon be held as similarly conventional wisdom that the verse in the Bible (Matthew 22: 37-39) reading “Love your neighbor as yourself” means we should sleep, shower and masturbate with them.