In Defense of Ed Burke. Almost Like Herding Cats.

Three posts ago, I was talking about memorials of various kinds.  I opened with the list of memorials in BP, and I then moved to national memorials.

The issue about the national memorials was that I thought the disputed ones should in fact be eliminated.  They are memorials to people who advocated to preserve the worst behavior in the history of civilization, who wanted to destroy the United States as it then was, by having about half of it secede, and who lost a very destructive war over this.  What, exactly, are we celebrating by having these heroic statues?

Regarding the BP ones, I said two things.  One was that I didn't approve of personal memorials in this neighborhood at all, and the other was that former BP resident/Commissioner/mayor Ed Burke, whose memorial is in some respects the most prominent, was not necessarily an entirely positive influence in BP.  I also pointed out, because I know it to be true, and because I anticipated some blowback, that Dan Keys considers Burke to have been a treasured "mentor" (that's Dan's word for it) to Dan.

The blowback didn't take terribly long to begin, and it sputtered along for a few days.  And leaked into an unrelated comment thread under some other post.  At first, Dan just categorically upheld Burke, and the mystique Dan sustains about him, but he did not express disagreement with any of the particulars I listed.  At one point, I wrote to Dan in a blog comment that it seemed he agreed with everything I said, but he just didn't like the implication.  He didn't respond to that.

Perhaps it's a matter of laziness for me.  And I've been spoiled.  For years, I would get an e-mail from blogspot to let me know there was a new comment, and to which post the comment applied.  But those e-mails mysteriously stopped.  The laziness is that as new posts are created, and new conversations occur, I don't patrol the old posts in a continuing way, to see if there are new comments to which blogspot has stopped alerting me.  I was just browsing this morning, when I happened to look back a post or two, and it seemed to me the number of comments listed was not the same as I thought I remembered.  So I looked to see if I misremembered the number of comments, or, alternatively, if some had been added, and I just didn't know about them.

Yup, it was the latter.  Dan Keys is still going on about how perfectly reasonable Burke was, and how unreasonable I am.  Dan, by the way, has some unexplained antipathy toward me, and he appears unable to stop challenging and criticizing everything I say.

But the point is that it seemed to me that Dan was essentially burying his defense of Burke, by entering comments when it was unlikely anyone would ever know about them.  So no one would challenge them.  For example, in the "Goodbye, Columbus" post, which was where I talked about memorials, and about Burke, Janey Anderson said that my recapitulation about Burke was just how she remembered it, too.  Dan might not know that I am no longer alerted to new comments.  (Or he might not know I ever was.)  But he could certainly assume that Janey wouldn't know about new comments of his.  So I thought, frankly, that what Dan was doing was sneaky and lacking an element of courage, or at least confidence.

So here's today's post.  I would like to treat the comment section as Dan's opportunity to defend and uphold Burke any way he likes.  He can dominate the comment section, and show me, and Janey, and anyone else who may not be enamored of Burke, how wrong we are.

Dan, you're up.