I should have seen this coming way back then, but at the time I just dismissed the kerfuffle as an incident of local idiocy

The current craze for tearing down statues of abolitionist Walt Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant has now extended to Rhode Island, which is moving to drop “Providence Plantations” from its official name. “Plantation’ meant ‘settlement” in Colonial days, and the slave plantations had nothing to do with those in New England (the Mickster might bring up the Irish plantations here, but that’s a side issue). That’s not stopping the proponents of the change:

“Whatever the meaning of the term ‘plantations’ in the context of Rhode Island’s history, it carries a horrific connotation when considering the tragic and racist history of our nation,” [State senator Harold] Metts said in a statement to the Providence Journal.

In other words, it’s not the facts that matter, it’s how they are misunderstood.

All of which brought to mind the successful battle waged from 1992-1998 to prevent a statue of Portuguese princess Catherine of Bragazana, wife of Charles II of England, from being erected near and overlooking New York City’s harbor.

The statue's ''hands are bloody with the murder of millions of Africans,'' said Betty Dopson, the most vocal leader of a group formed to oppose the sculpture. ''Do we really need a statue of a slave mistress? To erect this monstrosity shows disrespect to every African-American whose ancestors were raped and shackled and shipped off.''

Dopson and her crowd stormed Borogh meetings dressed in bloody shirts, screaming and in generl havig a grand old time of it until after years of crap, the Borough caved:

While historians find Catherine's connection to the slave trade tenuous at best, the Queens Borough President, Claire Shulman, one of the statue's earliest and most devoted advocates, has come to agree with critics who say guilt by association is guilt enough.

''Decent people are offended and that troubles me,'' she said. ''I don't think of Catherine of Braganza as necessarily evil,'' but, she added, the queen did live in a slave-trading nation ''in an age that was terrible to a portion of the world.''

All this happened at the same time a Washington D.C. school administrator was fired for using the term “niggardly” at a board meeting because, even the word is of Scandanavian origin and has no connection withe the Spanish word for black (it means cheap, miserly), the offender should have known that his fellows on the board wouldn’t know that, and would be offended.

So Miss Betty Bopson’s reation to her own ignorance stuck in my mind. It turned out that she had confused Queen Isabella of Spain — Columbus and all that, don’t you know — with poor Catherine, who was despised as a Catholic in Protestant England, suffered three miscarriages and after the death of her husband fled back to Portugal, leaving behind her only contribution to her adopted land, the custom of drinking tea. Told that two hundred years and three different countries were involved, Bopson shrugged it off. It didn’t matter who that white lady was, there were people who thought she was a slave trader, and that was sufficient. And indeed it was, as was recounted by the NYT in 2017, “The Statue that Never Was”.

Logic and facts mean nothing today. Way back in 1976 a classmate of mine, a budding doctoral student in philosophy – I’d guess her age at 27 — responded to a flaying by our professor conducting a seminar on Plato, B.U.’s president John Silber, by conceding her argument made no logical sense, then wailed, “but don’t you care how I feel about it?!” Silber was outraged (“Madam, I don’t give a damn about your feelings”, and I was amused, unaware that I was witnessing the future. Today, Silber would have been fired, and the sensitive soul awarded a participation doctorate as compensation and reparation.

God help America.