“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Clinton, a Southern governor of a state whose flag still alludes to its history in the Confederacy, needed to solidify support from nearby states to have a chance at unseating George H.W. Bush.

Not only should the Confederate flag come down, but I believe it’s also time for Southern states to change place names in honor of traitors such as Jefferson Davis.

I know, I know: it’s a slippery slope that could eventually result in taking slaveholders such as George Washington off our currency or even renaming our national capital.

Southern partisans still rankle over Lincoln’s centralization of power and his assertion that the states are strictly subordinate to the federal government and have no real sovereignty of their own. Their position is one worthy of consideration; but do not consider it. We do not want students to support or oppose Lincoln’s policies based on some well-thought philosophy of government. We want them to snicker.

So, for instance, we assume that Lincoln was right to go to war against the South, because the southerners who prosecuted the war were all nasty slave owners. It isn’t true, but it absolves us of the need to take the southern position seriously. Then we say that Lincoln himself thought that blacks were an inferior race. We neglect to mention that just about everybody thought so, too, including the abolitionists; it was the foolish “scientific” consensus of the day. Then we say that Lincoln mismanaged the war, and that his generals were bloodthirsty brutes….If possible, we toss in a modern rumor that Lincoln was a homosexual. There’s no evidence for it, but the tactic works in a couple of ways at once. It diverts attention from the man’s heroism, and it reduces him to a counter in a modern political game. It also–though it is politically incorrect for the teacher or textbook writer to admit it–makes him appear a bit contemptuous.

If you feed children enough of what is politically motivated, regardless of the direction of the motive, you will insinuate into their minds that all the humanistic subjects they study, and some of the scientific ones too, are power games and nothing more.