Imagine a future where all books are outlawed and “firemen” burn books from the past. Ray Bradbury titled his dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451,” the temperature at which book paper catches fire.
Books are one way human beings share thoughts and ideas, but private thoughts and non-conforming ideas are not permitted in the Orwellian totalitarian society Bradbury depicted in 1953.
In 2020, the nightmare society this science-fiction writer foresaw is becoming fact. Racist, collectivist stormtroopers now ravage liberal cities, tearing down statues of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and others to rewrite history. Left-wing terrorists burn and loot, and kill police, to destroy capitalism, private property and our heritage of individual freedom.
All anti-Marxist public and private writings must be destroyed, these illiterates demand. More than 100 liberal intellectuals – including 1960s Students for a Democratic Society President Todd Gitlin, democratic socialist Michael Walzer, feminist Gloria Steinem, “Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood, radical Noam Chomsky and “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling – signed a Harper’s Magazine letter timidly begging for free speech and the end of “cancel culture,” at least for liberals (but not conservatives).
These thinkers were immediately culture-canceled as “rich fools” by leftist webzine The Daily Beast, and declared non-persons to be fired and silenced. How dare they seek bourgeois freedom to write and speak as they wish! Under conformist peer pressure, spineless intellectuals almost immediately buckled and began withdrawing their signatures, denouncing others, and recanting as they did under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
“You’re fired!” made Donald Trump a famous TV star. But far from torching books and authors, Trump speaking at Mount Rushmore announced an executive order to establish by 2026 a diverse “National Garden of Heroes,” a “vast outdoor park” to honor the “greatest Americans who ever lived.”
In our age of iconoclastic statute wreckers, this garden would feature permanently protected statues of John Adams, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and two others, adding up to 31 (with the option to add many more) “giants of our past.”
President Trump said he will “not abide an assault on our collective national memory.”
These memorials, Trump said, “should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations.” Of his chosen heroes, he said, “None will have lived perfect lives, but all will be worth honoring, remembering and studying.”
Much can be learned through these heroes. Trump chose pioneering feminist Susan B. Anthony, a staunch foe of abortion who supported the Republican Party, and Harriet Tubman, an African American who traveled armed leading escaped slaves to freedom; cherished our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms; and recognized that gun control was imposed to deny people liberty.
Collectivist left-wing historians quickly condemned Mr. Trump’s list, noting that it includes only five African Americans, no Latinos, and not a single Democratic president. But African Americans, who are approximately 13% of America’s population, are more than 16% of the list’s heroes.
Leftists tear down statues of racists, so why not exclude the most racist institution in U.S. history – the political party of the slave-owners, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Bull Connor and the destruction of the black family – the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party grew from President Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party – hence the Democratic annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners.
Jefferson taught that each generation is its own country. The TV series “Star Trek” includes a “non-interference directive” with other civilizations. Mr. Trump’s Garden of Heroes should reaffirm the idea that we must not “cancel” or interfere with monuments of earlier Americans because they “offend” today’s ideologues.
We should never burn down our ancestors’ statues or words. We should honor today’s heroes by adding new monuments. As philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
President Trump should be bolder – creating digital versions of the National Heroes Garden that every American can own. In “Fahrenheit 451,” each freedom fighter saved a book by memorizing it.
As with global seed banks, Mr. Trump should save our history by planting digital copies throughout the world, as well as on the Moon and Mars. We must never allow today’s barbarian totalitarians to burn down the complex whole truth of our past.
Lowell Ponte is a former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, “The Secret War,” shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against little-known economic threats. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.
