Shipping Narrow Minds

"The past is always the present in the United States of America. From the modern-day Tea Party to the protesters taking aim at the Confederacy's most celebrated general Robert E Lee; from the argument over whether Washington DC's American football team should call itself the Redskins to the dispute over whether we should still honour the Founding Fathers who owned slaves, no country in the world lives and contests its history with quite such passion and ferocity. The culture wars of contemporary partisan politics, the battles that make this country seem like shared land occupied by belligerent tribes, are so often truly history wars.

Only this week Clueless-in-Chief announced the creation of the 1776 Commission to promote "patriotic education" and "the miracle of American history". Yet another cultural salvo, it was intended as a counterblast to the 1619 Project conducted by the New York Times, an online educational series named after the year that the first slaves were brought to Virginia.

So where does the landing of the Mayflower fit within the American story? What significance should we attach to the arrival of these [stiff-necked, unpopular] English dissenters? How does it inform the present?

On this 400th anniversary, do the Pilgrim Fathers even merit all the fuss?"

[The puritanical religionists only merit celebration to those who do NOT decry intolerant, moralistic, bullying in the name of an invention and a long-dead Jew (if Yeshua ever lived at all).]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54199565 .