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It’s hard not to connect this bureaucratic muscle flexing to the general move toward expunging the inconvenient facts about American history.

A while back, the shebeen discussed the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a group of activists fighting a huge plastic plant proposed for a poverty-stricken, environmentally lethal slice of that state called St. James Parish. From the Washington Post:

The LBB is fighting against Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese corporation that wants to drop a $9.4 billion mega-plant into this same small place. Anyway, the Brigade tipped us to a ProPublica story about another small place in Louisiana and how a large corporation is trying to bully the town out of its own history.

So Ms. Edwards did her job and reported that the project indeed would be disruptive to a historically significant site, one that included an old plantation and a burying ground for the enslaved people who’d worked it. Imagine her surprise when her company submitted a version of her report that was free of all that pesky historical data and recommending that the project be allowed to go forward.

It’s hard not to connect this bureaucratic muscle flexing to the general move toward expunging the inconvenient facts about American history from our classrooms and libraries. The problem is that there are citizens you are expunging, too, some of them with life histories that tell us more about American history than any textbook ever would.

If the country loses this simple truth, it loses a great deal of its rationale for existing at all.