Repainting the General Lee won’t erase what it symbolizes from history

It is fashionable in our age to seek unity in all things, but the “General Lee” is not a statehouse, responsive to and reflective of the popular will. It is a historical artifact and cultural totem that sums up a particular moment in time. By amending it to suit contemporary fashions Watson is seeking, in effect, to erase that moment from history. This in my view is extraordinarily dangerous. If, per Watson’s suggestion, our instincts continue leading us to bring our venerable “American” rarities into lockstep with au courant American thought, we will soon find our archives transmuted into glass menageries. Questions abound: Must the owners of Monticello take Wite-Out to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, lest the more egregious passages offend our modern sensibilities?; Must the custodians of vintage Aunt Jemima boxes throw them into the Mississippi to atone for their ugly anachronisms?; Must Congress contrive to paint over the uglier stereotypes on display at the World War II museum in New Orleans? I should certainly hope not, for societies tend to learn the most from their histories when they determine to preserve and to show them — and in their original form to boot. To take any other course is to risk becoming akin to the fictional Senator Finistirre in Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking, who, when asked if his plan to digitally remove cigarettes from old movies could be reasonably construed as “changing history,” replies with a stony face that he prefers to think he is “improving” it.

To remove the Confederate battle flag from the General Lee — or, for that matter, to rename the vehicle: perhaps Watson might go the whole hog and rechristen it the “General Sherman”? — would not in any meaningful sense be to improve upon it. Rather, it would be to deface it.