Never enough, Yale edition

Wherever craven liberal authorities hold sway, the quest to bring our past into conformity with the wave of our totalitarian leftist future continues with token resistance, it any at all. Yale University presents a useful case in point. At NRO Kyle Smith notes that “Yale’s determination to take a giant jar of Wite-Out to history has reached a new level of fatuousness.” Smith points to the Yale Alumni Magazine report that a stone carving of an Indian and a Puritan over an entrance to Sterling Memorial Library had been bowdlerized, with the weapon the latter was holding covered up.

Smith notes that a head librarian, Susan Gibbons, said that she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces found that the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Yale ordered the musket of the Puritan to be covered up with a layer of stone that Gibbons said “can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving,” as the YAM report has it.

Smith notes the subtle evidence of second thoughts as we approach the dystopian territory of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

It’s instructive that even as Yale’s administration rampages through history with a censor’s eye and a vandal’s paint pot, someone like Gibbons can tacitly acknowledge that the hysteria might die down in some future generation and that we should therefore make some of the cover-ups reversible. At the same time, though, it’s impossible not to rue the irony of a period when librarians take on the duties of literally covering up the past. Perhaps the definition of librarian will gradually morph over the coming decades to “one who protects us from the historical record.”

Where will all of this end? This is the salient point: “[C]ampus activists are always looking for something to be outraged about. Giving in to their demands simply whets their appetite for more….There is no limiting principle in play here[.]”

This is a point that can be widened to encompass the works and days of the progressive left. As Bill Voegeli puts it in the title of his book: Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State.

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