I live in Austin, Texas. That is to say, I am physically present in Austin most of the time, but spiritually distant from it. One of the reasons for my spiritual distance is evident in the recent suggestion by the city’s ethics office to rename Austin because its namesake, Stephen F. Austin, was “conflicted” about slavery. (Abraham Lincoln was un-conflicted in his disdain for blacks, but that somehow isn’t held against him.)
“Austin” is just a name, like “dung” and “rattlesnake”. The full name of its namesake rarely passes through the mind of an Austiner. (“Austinite” is preferred, but it seems pretentious to me, like “Manhattanite”. “Sodomite” has a certain ring, however.) Still less frequently will an Austiner give a thought to S.F. Austin’s “conflicted” views about slavery. Only in the fevered imagination of a left-wing Austiner (which is most of them), will the views of a man who died three years before Austin acquired its name be taken as a besmirchment of the upstanding city’s pure, virtue-signaling character. (It is hard to find a city away from the Left Coast whose denizens — that’s the word — are more puffed about their city and its mythical virtues. See this post and the list at the bottom of it.)
Anyway, back to the renaming mania.
With all of the disappeared statutes, street names, names of buildings and institutions — things formerly known as Davis, Jefferson, Jackson (Andy and Stonewall), Lee, etc. etc., etc. — why have Washington and Lincoln survived? Washington was a slave-owner; Lincoln, as I have intimated, held blacks in low esteem despite his (belated) anti-slavery views.
Mine is not to reason why, or why not. Mine is to suggest that all of this unpleasantness might be avoided if all persons, places, and things were assigned unique, randomly generated alphanumeric codes.
Or perhaps new unpleasantness would simply erupt because of objections if an alphanumeric code includes certain number sequences (666, for example) or letter sequences like RWR, GWB, or DJT.
You can please some of the people none of the time (i.e., leftists). They are just born to bitch.
Politics and Prosperity 