Just drop an “r”

"…The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it's hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett's Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it..." GK

This reminded me of our brief discussion in CoPhi yesterday of the problem of Forrest Hall. I have a fix, which I've shared with GK's readers:

The ROTC building on my campus in middle Tennessee, and any number of residential streets hereabouts, still bear the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Old misplaced sentiment dies hard, administrative wheels grind glacially. But this could be a relatively easy fix: just drop an r, and commemorate the trees instead of the racist.

I  once taught a class in Forrest Hall, and had some Opening Day fun with my classroom's militant decor.

 

Several students captured the moment when I raised my flimsy Phillip Toy Mart sword and contradicted the writing on the wall with Brian Cohen's balcony pronouncement: "You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody. You've got to think for yourselves..."