Generation Gap

Rightwing geezers don't like "woke" museums. Gee, that's too bad.

I wrote recently about a conservative press campaign against Jefferson’s Monticello, characterized as having gone “woke” (a cardinal sin in rightwing world) for talking about the fact that the Great Man kept and abused slaves. (The weirdo Jeffrey A. Tucker, cited in that story, turns out also to be a volume dealer in hardcore rightwing gush.) Later the usual suspects tried the same shtick with James Madison’s Montpelier.

Now, at The Hill, we have an attack on the allegedly woke exhibition on Latino history at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in DC, which is a preview for the upcoming National Museum of the American Latino:

A new Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful. Its only redeeming quality is that it makes clear why the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino must not be funded.

One of the three authors required to construct this screed is Josh Treviño, formerly a rightblogger known as Tacitus, now employed as Chief of Intelligence and Research (and “director for Texas Identity”) at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; the others have similarly typical wingnut welfare sinecures. The troika employs “Marxism” or “Marxist” four times, so you know they’re serious, at least about appealing to the sort of reader who thinks everything not explicitly MAGA is Marxist.  Among their more specific complaints:

[The exhibition] elevates only leftist ideologues, celebrates transexual activists, denigrates Christianity, denounces capitalism, condemns the West, portrays the United States as iniquitous and oppressive and badly distorts history.

And that’s just a small gallery show — when they get a whole museum think what mischief they’ll make!

Among the tendentious or downright false assertions in the Latino exhibit at NMAH are that:

·       The United States stole one-third of Mexico in 1848.

·       Cubans came here seeking economic opportunity, not escaping communist barbarism.

·       The Texas Revolution was a defense of slavery against an abolitionist Mexico.

LOL. Two out of three ain’t bad; advantage Museum! (And a lot of Cuban refugees came here because they lost their property to the Communists, so there’s a case for #2 as well.)

Leftist guerrilla and terroristic movements, including the Shining Path, the FMLN, the FARC and beyond, are absent — but the Nicaraguan Contras, who fought against a communist regime to liberalize their country, are called out for “terror.”

The Contras were abso-fucking-lutely vicious terrorists backed by the U.S. and this is not seriously in dispute. The tres amigos’ characterization of them, along with the general hysteria of their accusations, should give honest men and women an idea of their trustworthiness.

But I’ll give them this: As it happens I visited this show when it opened in June, and I understand their visceral negative response to it. The “Presente!” show does talk about oppression, struggle, human rights, and historic injustices — which is probably what they mean by Marxist.

The show’s website will give you some idea: There’s a video about “Identity and Activism,” starring a 19-year-old “climate justice activist [and] hiphop artist” whose “ancestors are the Mexica Peoples” and who believes that in his environmentalism work he is “a carrier of the voice of my people.” Part of this work, the young activist says, is pointing out “the injustice at the core of what this country was built off of, of the oppression of the indigenous peoples, of the oppression of immigrants, of migrant workers, of families.”

How that must enrage the troika, who would much prefer a rant against Hugo Chavez! And when elsewhere in the show we meet Jonthan Jayes-Green, “undocumented activist and co-creator of UndocuBlack Network, a support network for undocumented Black people,” and Nefertiti Matos, “Access Technology and Disability Rights Advocate,” you can imagine how their gorges must have risen, at the names alone. (I mean, “undocumented” is sputter-sputter enough, but disability rights? Curb cuts cost money that could be going to police departments!)

I don’t recall explicit discussions in the exhibition of Castro’s repression — one of the troika’s beefs — but there is a panel about the Mariel Boatlift. There’s also mention of the United Fruit Company and Arbenz, and indeed side-eye on most of the U.S.A.’s Southern adventures. Visitors are encouraged to “reflect on the effects of colonization and slavery in the Americas and throughout the world” and “make new connections between U.S. expansionism and the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars.” One panel explicitly asks, “Did colonization promote racism?” (Short answer: Yes.)

It’s not wholly a grudge-fest, though; far from it. Video witnesses talk about their immigration experiences and the lives of their Latino communities; there are examples of the art, industry, and music immigrants carried into and created fresh in the new land. As the docent said when I was there:

We close our exhibit with a number of examples of boundary-breakers — those who are reaching new levels of excellence in sports and the arts — like Mark Gonzalez, who revolutionized speed skating in Southern California in the 1980s; Judy Baca, the public artist, the New York Times just did a great review of her, she’s painted the largest mural in the United States and basically what she’s doing is taking art involving people to re-tell the California story; and then we have people like José Julio Sarria, person of Columbian descent, San Francisco native [and] legendary drag queen and the first out gay man to run for public office, a whole generation before Harvey Milk. All of these stories are dialoguing together as I said. Would all these folks want to hang out with each other? Maybe not. But they are all part of what we consider the national Latino story.

This all sounds reasonable and interesting to me but I can imagine what the Hill authors would think and it has nothing to do with Karl Marx.

Look. Things change. I doubt visitors would be content with Marco Rubio and Desi Arnaz. (Though I imagine, from the threats the authors make, that when Republicans take power again they’ll pause in their general destruction of the country to squeeze them in here.) I assume these guys would like other people to believe this is a matter of principle for them, but like most other culture war bitchery its root is rage that the kids, their own and other people’s, have different interests and, especially, moral judgments than they have, and it just gets more obvious with each passing year.

Elsewhere at the museum there’s a show about the life of girls in the United States. It has videos and pop music and an “online exhibition section on Subcultural Stylin’” etc. Among the videos are ancient educational films about young sexuality that are clearly meant to be taken as relics — not because of any “Marxist” curatorial prompting, but because that’s how they look to anyone living in 2022. You can get an idea of the tone of the show from this bit of signage:

In school, girls are taught to fit in. In classrooms, on the playground, at lunch, and even in the bathroom, girls learn how to behave, what to wear, what to say, and what to study. They learn the rules, and they learn how to break the rules.

In this mix, girls confront what society expects from them.

Like anyone being “schooled,” girls talk back.

You may find it silly and insubstantial. But it’s not a plot against conservative morality; it’s just what the museum market will bear. Both the makers and the consumers of this content have changed over the years. The exhibit is different from what such an exhibit might have been like in years past for the simple reason that it is not years past.  If moldy figs get pleasure from bitching about it to one another in rightwing magazines may God go with them. I hardly even mind them threatening to rescind funding, because what they’re really trying to reverse is beyond their Zhdanovite capabilities. They can make a big stink, but they can’t make history.