Free The Whites of their Eyes by Matt Braun

Then we ate hamburgers and talked about the men who had died on that spot, all those years ago, and what they died for. By then, we had all gotten a little weary of Longfellow—“Listen, my children, and you shall hear”—but once you commit a thing to memory, it gets stuck there:
    For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
    Through all our history, to the last,
    In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
    The people will waken and listen to hear
    The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
    And the midnight message of Paul Revere. 5
    We had another musket fight. It got pretty fierce. We ate some ice cream. We biked home, thinking about the night-wind of the past.
    What was the Revolution about? What is history for? Who are we? I tried to stop watching, but every story in the news seemed to ask the same questions. On April 23, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill making the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and authorizing police to question anyone who might possibly be an illegal immigrant. 6 Five days later, Jeff Perry, a Republican from Cape Cod, introduced an amendment in the Massachusetts legislature to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants. With Palin gone, the Boston Tea Party turned its attention to planning a “Pass the Perry Amendment” rally. 7 (Perry had also introduced, in 2009, the Massachusetts Tenth Amendment Resolution. Tenth Amendment resolutions, asserting state sovereignty and opposing the expansion of the federal government, had been introduced in forty states and had passed in four.) 8
    On April 30, Glenn Beck launched a series called “Founders’ Fridays.” He began with Samuel Adams. He lamented the founders’ fall from greatness: “Our Founding Fathers were once revered in this country as divinely inspired, courageous visionaries. But now, after the past one hundred years of ‘enlightenment,’ we’ve come to realize that they were nothing but old, white, racist, heathens.” He explained his purpose: “In order to restore the country, we have to restore the men who founded it on certain principles to the rightful place in our national psyche.” 9 On the next Founders’ Friday, May 7, Beckreported that the ratings were so good during that first show that he was thinking about extending the series. “It seems like America, for some reason or another, is interested now in our Founding Fathers and meeting who they really, truly are.” He introduced his guests, Earl Taylor, president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and Andrew Allison, coauthor of
The Real George Washington
. He urged viewers to read Washington’s own words. “When you read these guys,” Beck said, “it’s alive. It’s like, you know, reading the scriptures. It’s like reading the Bible. It is alive today. And it only comes alive when you need it.” 10 Just like Jesus in the Gospels.
    That same day, and also on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sarah Palin. “Why do you think America is a Christian nation?” O’Reilly asked. “Nobody has to believe me,” Palin said. “You can just go to our Founding Fathers’ early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.” O’Reilly, playing devil’s advocate, suggested that some people might say that the United States had changed, “and now we’re a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776.” Palin called that kind of thinking “an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.” She wanted to “go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.” 11 Take back Washington. Take back America. Take back the past.
    I thought about Langston Hughes:
    O, let America be America again—
    The land that never has been yet. 12
    On May 11, the executive board of the nine-thousand-member