Rock-tober 31, 2017

Hatshepsut came to power in Egypt in 1473 B.C. after the death of her husband, Pharaoh Thutmose II, and at that point was only the 2nd woman in Egypt's history to lay claim to the title, pharaoh. While some military actions are attributed to her early reign, she is credited with presiding over a 22 year period of peace. To put that in perspective, the U.S. has yet to string together a single decade without armed conflict. As part of this peace dividend, she was able to re-establish trade routes disrupted by earlier conflicts and establish new ones. The resulting increase in trade greatly increased the wealth of the Egyptian kingdom. She also launched a massive wave of construction projects that have been deemed wonders of the ancient world and have given us insights on certain building methods of the ancients.

Shortly after her death, an attempt was made to expunge her from memory. Statuettes of her were destroyed, her name was chiseled off monuments and temples, and many of her construction projects were claimed by subsequent pharaohs as their own. Scholars still debate the reason for this obliteration. It may have been a patriarchal attempt to dissuade another woman from seeking the pharaonic title in the future, or it may have been a political move to collapse lines of dynastic succession. It may have been simple jealousy and rancor. Regardless of the reason, Hatshepsut disappeared from written history until the 19th century.

I oppose the destruction of Civil War era statues. This attempt to edit history is at best silly and at worst puts us on a very dangerous revisionist slope. My views on this are not uninformed. I'm obviously a lover of history. I recognize it as a record of humanity's soaring successes and abysmal failures. I also have first hand experience of growing up an Asian kid in the deep south at the tail end of a very unpopular war. I hadn't yet reached my 10th birthday and had already been subjected to epithets from "Fu Man Chu" to the hardcore slurs of Chink and Gook. Kids in my neighborhood came up to me and matter of factly announced, "My daddy hates Asians."

*sigh* Well, sucks to be him...and more General Tso's Chicken for me.

Folks, after nearly 50 years of observing the human race I've decided we can be pretty hard headed. If you really don't want to make the same mistakes over and over, you might want to leave yourself some hard core reminders of where you went astray.

Removing what you find offensive is fairly easy, depending on the level of civil disobedience you embrace. In 1912, a shipment of cherry trees given as gifts from Japan were first planted along the the tidal basin in Washington, D.C. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan became our preeminent foe, and there were calls to destroy these symbols of that era's evil empire. Four were actually cut down by vandals who likely saw themselves as patriots. However, the rest of the trees survived, and in 1952, Japan requested US assistance to restore a stand of trees in Tokyo that sustained heavy damage during the war. Despite the enmity from the hard fought battles and Japanese atrocities that came to light, cuttings from descendants of the original cherry trees were returned to Japan to restore Tokyo's trees. I hope cooler heads can prevail yet again regarding Civil War statuary and turn the issue into one of restoration rather than division.

You have my thanks for indulging me this past month and my apologies for this long rant. Despite some close-minded knuckleheads south of the Mason Dixon, I still love the South. Skynyrd said, "You can take a boy out of Dixieland, but you'll never take ol' Dixie from a boy." On this final day of Rock-tober, I'll take another line from Skynyrd - sometimes "all I can do is write about it."

Rock-tober out.