When not up to all the work and study required to learn from history, readers of Arkansas' Newspaper might find themselves tempted to settle for nostalgia--history's pale imitation. It's a lot simpler and more fun. Maybe because the outcome of historic clashes has already been settled for good or ill. Any suspense is gone, and with it the danger of actual bloodshed. The wars that competing historians wage against one another may become bitter and unending as the past is rewritten to suit current fashion, but those wars tend to be bloodless affairs as sentimentality replaces real pain and suffering.
All of which might explain why the colorful mural going up at Tate's Station in civic-minded Lonoke, Ark., is such a welcome addition to the list of local landmarks. At last count, a group calling itself Lonoke 150 had donated hours and hours of its labor and about $800 in paint to put up the mural and paint the old gas station on U.S. 70, too. Call it a labor of love and a demonstration that a "little bit of paint can go a long way," to quote Trae Reed, of the many hard-working volunteers taking part in this ambitious civic project.
The new mural can't rightly be called historic restoration for it restores a past that exists only in the minds--and hearts--of those who imagine how they'd like it to have been. Think of this whole venture and adventure as just a pretty postcard from a past that never really existed. But one that's pleasant to contemplate in fictional retrospect. The work of such well-meaning painters might be compared to that of the photographic refinishers of yesteryear who kindly added a blush to the cheek or a little dimple to the chin of the subject to make reality not more real but more attractive. So that when mirror, mirror on the wall was asked who was the fairest of them all, it could respond with an answer more assuring than accurate.
So what's the difference between someone who falsifies the past for partisan or even wicked purposes, the way Stalinist propagandists used to do, and someone who in all innocence wants only to gussy up the past here and there? It's all a matter of motive. The mural painter in Lonoke is only attempting to unify the community by presenting a rosy-hued picture of a shared if prettified past. So long as all recognize the final product as a trick-of-the-eye, a semblance of reality rather than an attempt to duplicate it with exactitude. It helps--immeasurably--to have a sense of humor so one can laugh at the shared joke rather than treat it as an assault on historical capital-T Truth.
So let's hear it for Lonoke's paint-and-polish brigade which has found a way to make history a hayride. It's a quite American approach to the past, viewing it as a story with a happy ending or at least a manifest destiny instead of an inescapable tragedy. What we have here is one more testament to the cumulative influence of good people in their own Lonokes all across the country who are determined to shape their own happy ending.
Editorial on 10/14/2017