Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406270148
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Safire
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Hours later, they streamed back in panic. The rebels had won; the capital itself was in danger. That first battle of Bull Run, as well as Second Manassas later, sent a frisson of fear into the heart of the Union.
Fast-forward 13 decades.
A little band of well-credentialed historians, litigating greens, liberal columnists and self-protective landowners have drawn together in paternalistic protection, rendering the principle of artistic expression weak and contemptible.
Wait; sometimes iconoclasm goes too far. Artistic expression? It's a commercial Disney theme park, a magnet for hot-dog stands and exhaust-belching traffic, ripping off the public for $163 million in road-building costs just three miles from the hallowed ground where an Alabama officer shouted to his troops: ``There stands Jackson like a stone wall - rally behind the Virginians!''
If Bull Run III is to be merely a battle between history-minded preservationists and profit-minded land developers, that's fine; environmental impact will compete with the benefit of thousands of new jobs and will result in a compromise balancing property rights with zoning powers.
But if it is to be a clash of cultures, with armies of elitists drawn up in vast array against the multitudes of average families that Lyndon Johnson used to call ``the pee-pul,'' then we have a war of taste worthy of the field near which it will be fought.
A theme park is a fantasy; no matter how frightening its plastic dinosaurs or appealing its Cinderellas, the park is an idealized world. The critics say that's OK when you're marketing Mickey Mouse, but wrong - worse than wrong, vulgar - when dealing with anything as sacrosanct as American history.
My colleague Russell Baker satirized the growing success of theme parks with his ``theme family'' living artificial lives in a theme town. My colleague Frank Rich dissected the ``larger struggle between theme-park America and authentic America.''
Going overboard, The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley foamingly denounced the conservatism opposed to the curtailment of theme parks as ``a force for the diminution or elimination of barriers erected by government against the uncontrolled exercise of individual and institutional avarice.''
Hold on, again. Historians fear that the theme-parkers will deliberately falsify history. The professional historians worry that the wrong people are going to interpret - overdramatize, perhaps prettify - the reality of our past.
Those historians are right when they warn of the encroachment of any commercial enterprise on park lands set aside for reverential study of past wars, on the limited ground of protecting historic sites.
But they are intellectually arrogant when trying to block the construction of a commercial project on the grounds that it might misinterpret the past.
Oliver Stone, the film director, was wildly kooky in his film about JFK, claiming that the entire government was involved in a vast conspiracy. I happily derogate the film, as do most historians. But I would not join a movement to block his filming of his nutty interpretation, or in any way censor it.
Faced with inauthenticity, historians should compete with what they believe is the way it really was. If they cannot persuade the developers to let them influence the portrayal of the past, then they are obliged to denounce fuzzy interpretations and to rebut the rewriting of history - and should their worst fears come true, to picket Disney's America.
But not to join the pretentious amalgam of self-appointed arbiters of culture, greenpeaceniks, local zoning lawyers and Virginia's fox-hunting set to stop its presentation.
Historians don't own history. Some say that the Alabaman who gave Stonewall Jackson his sobriquet was complaining that Jackson wouldn't charge.
New York Times News Service
by CNB