Rod Love does have a point, something I thought I would never grant to an associate of the obnoxious Ralph Klein - but it is a relatively small point, and there are other greater points he misses entirely.
Mr. Love is talking about history with a very narrow definition. Genuine history is actually the entire body of our nation's shared experience.
And, yes, that does contain warts and blotches and even horrors: it is raw, but we can learn more remembering those things than deliberately suppressing them.
Lots of ordinary folks like spectacles such as re-enactments, and I would bet there would be more enthusiasm for the spectacle than feelings against what the real event did a quarter of a millennium ago. These things do engender enthusiasm over history, and they are damned good tourist draws.
After all, when Americans re-enact Civil War battles - as they do endlessly - they do not include the actual meaning of that bloodbath, which was quite dark.
The American Civil War was not over slavery, not at all. It was over the right of a state to leave a federation only created about 70 years before. Lincoln crushed an old society trying to assert that right.
He removed the right and welded the Union into the thing it before long became, an international imperial power. It is often forgotten that Lincoln was a successful corporate lawyer, a self-made, ambitious man who made his fortune working for corporations like the Illinois Central Railroad, often against the interests of small people.
I do understand why Mr. Love would not want every historical event re-enacted, as, for example, Ralph Klein’s drunken rage at a men’s shelter when he threw coins at unfortunates. Now, that kind of thing is perhaps best left alone.
HERE IS ONE HISTORICAL SUBJECT SUITABLE TO RE-ENACT ONLY IN A CIRCUS
