Garrison Keillor: Al Franken should resign? Thats absurd.
By Garrison Keillor November 28 at 8:08 PM
My friend Pastor B.D. Christensen said something so good Sunday morning that I woke up and wrote it down: “[something something] .?.?. about making peace with the mistakes of the past [blah blah blah] and learning from them. It’s slippery ground, in general, to judge past actions by present standards and with a benefit of hindsight that is, morally, highly questionable.”
And immediately I thought about the Minneapolis Park Board voting to rename Lake Calhoun as Lake Bde Maka Ska because the man for whom it was named back in the early 1820s was a slavery enthusiast from South Carolina and an author of the Indian Removal Act and also, judging from his pictures, ugly as a mud fence.
Renaming is a slippery business. I knew a Cheryl back in 1969 who became Saffron and it didn’t work out and a few years later she resumed her Cherylness. The Triborough Bridge in New York City was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, but if you were to ask directions to that bridge, you might wind up in Pennsylvania, a state named for the common pencil. This will happen with Lake Bde Maka Ska. The name will appear on signage, but when people look at that body of water, they will think “Calhoun.” The effect of this on the slave trade in Minneapolis will be slight.
On the other hand, Jean-Louis Kerouac did well to rename himself Jack. A Jean-Louis would be unlikely to write “On the Road” but a Jack Kerouac — the road was right up his alley. In 1963, Idlewild Airport on Long Island was renamed JFK, which stuck, thanks to the clumsiness of “Idlewild” — no large airport is idle, and airline passengers do not care to think of aviation in terms of wildness — and besides that, “JFK” rhymes. Fine and good. And back in the 18th century, Francois-Marie Arouet did a smart thing by taking the pen name Voltaire.
more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/al-franken-should-resign-thats-absurd/2017/11/28/d33e2d8a-d482-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html?utm_term=.5285680b414c
= new reply since forum marked as read
