The [Washington] Post should join this campaign for sanitized names, thus purging the present of disquieting references to the past. The newspaper bears the name of the nation’s capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was — trigger warning — a tobacco farmer. Washington, D.C., needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, D.C. She had nothing to do with her husband’s World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.
What? Most of those interned were native-born? Hey, I was born here, too. (As Mr. Bloom tells the Citizen in Ulysses, "I was born here.") So I'm a native American, even though, as far as I know, none of my ancestors hailed from the indigenous population. OK, so Jackson treated the Indians badly. Well, some Indians treated some other people pretty badly. Why should they be let off the hook?
Seriously, this historical Puritanism is ridiculous. Humans have been treating each other badly from the start. There's plenty of room for all of us to do penance.
Oh, and to add to Will's point, what about that District of Columbia? That Columbus guy did some bad stuff, too.
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