Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Not to pick nits, but it's not really an island, either, is it?



I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I didn't know a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30rename.html?hp"Rhode Island's full name/a, so while I would support efforts by states to make their names longer and goofier, I guess don't especially care if the Ocean State decides to change it based on flimsy historical interpretations of the term "plantation." The broad argument made by the bill's sponsors and a href="http://wearenotaplantation.blogspot.com/"advocates/a are reasonable enough; apparently, it's possible to get an education in Rhode Island and not learn much about the significant a href="http://www.slavenorth.com/rhodeisland.htm"role/a it played in the colonial slave trade. I doubt that altering the state's official letterhead will do much to correct the problem, but Rhode Islanders -- unlike the supporters of the Honduran coup -- don't seem to be especially threatened by the notion of a public referendum, so more power to them. br /br /It would certainly be nice if the debate in Rhode Island were to spur similar reflections in certain other states -- say, those of the defeated Confederacy -- where the public landscape is littered with memorials to iactual/i slaveholders and their political and military defenders, all of which would serve a more useful purpose if they were hauled away by crackheads and sold as scrap metal. I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath on that one.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7163938-7753502295124644014?l=lefarkins.blogspot.com'//div

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