Farcical Tragedies

From Whatever It Is I'm Against, we learn that Americans in 1911 weren't any better at prognostication:

It is Lincoln’s birthday and, hey, it’s also (nearly) the 50th anniversary of the election of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy. The NYT thinks that after all this time “we ought to be willing to leave the civil war to history.” It says that the South is no longer hostile to the North and the “occasional demonstrations of the sectional spirit” are only ginned up in order to pressure the states to keep paying pensions to Confederate veterans. “The new South, full of commercial and industrial energy, will not long pretend to mourn the failure of the Confederacy.” Not long, huh?

At a Lincoln Day speech, Teddy Roosevelt comes out in favor of the direct election of US senators and the president. He also says that “the Republican Party must be not only progressive but sane.” (So how’s that going?)

Speaking of the South's lack of pretense, did you know that they want to give one of the treasonous founders of the KKK and other horrors an honored place among the license plates of our time?

The arc of history doesn't bend; it gets bent, if you see what I mean.

Have a nice weekend.