indguard
03-09-2009, 08:09 AM
This liberal idiot is whining about the new Gettysburg rehabilitation project because we cut down some trees. Will these global warming religionists never go away?
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a46c8f5b-e03e-4c2d-9a96-13df830e8442&p=1
Gettysburg Regress
How the government is ruining America's most famous battlefield.
Last winter, I was walking with my wife along Seminary Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield when an odd detail drew into sight: piles of felled trees, stacked alongside a road. The cuts smelled as fresh as the trees looked strong. What happened to them, we wondered? I grew up in Gettysburg, and my mother still lives in the shadow of Lutheran Theological Seminary, low in the lap of the ridge it names. Seminary Ridge is one of a string of ridges surrounding the town; General Robert E. Lee stood there on July 2 and 3, 1863. The woods atop the ridge had made it a sublime place to stroll for as long as I could remember--until that winter walk, which ended with a logging truck lumbering by.
Asking around, I learned that parts of the battlefield were in "rehabilitation." In the hope of providing visitors with an authentic historical experience, the National Park Service (NPS) was seeking to restore some of Gettysburg's landscapes to their condition when the Union and Confederate armies clashed on them. And so the trees that once crowned Devil's Den--from whose crevices Confederate sharpshooters picked off Union soldiers-- were missing, also. Hundreds of acres of woodland, actually, were gone or going. (In July 1863, the battlefield contained 898 acres of woodland; since that time, the number has grown to roughly 2,000.) The "rehabilitation," many and varied in its activities, has also rebuilt fences, replanted orchards, and demolished large buildings, including a car dealership. The goal, as NPS regional director Don Barger told The Christian Science Monitor in April, is to make visitors "almost feel the bullets. ... That is what you want to have happen in a battlefield."
The project likely delights the reenactors who troop to Gettysburg every year in pursuit of authenticity, as well as those tourists who expect less to encounter history during their battlefield trip than to experience it. Academic historians also appear to approve. University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher, who advised a recent project at the battlefield, cheers in the current issue of Civil War Times that "there has never been a better time to visit Gettysburg." Those who might object to the removal of the trees, he says, are "people who don't understand the difference between a historic park and Yosemite." Rehabilitation has something for everyone: It flatters the left's suspicion of cultural authority, its invitation to ordinary Americans to participate in their history, even as it honors conservatism's fetish for an unchanged, historically correct past. Indeed, Gettysburg, the jewel of America's battlefields, is one of several currently targeted for rehabilitation, including Vicksburg and Antietam...
It is a long piece and this fool doesn't get to his point for a LONG time in the thing. But, go over to The New Republic and take a gander at this idiocy.
WTH
The RushedLimburger mess
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a46c8f5b-e03e-4c2d-9a96-13df830e8442&p=1
Gettysburg Regress
How the government is ruining America's most famous battlefield.
Last winter, I was walking with my wife along Seminary Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield when an odd detail drew into sight: piles of felled trees, stacked alongside a road. The cuts smelled as fresh as the trees looked strong. What happened to them, we wondered? I grew up in Gettysburg, and my mother still lives in the shadow of Lutheran Theological Seminary, low in the lap of the ridge it names. Seminary Ridge is one of a string of ridges surrounding the town; General Robert E. Lee stood there on July 2 and 3, 1863. The woods atop the ridge had made it a sublime place to stroll for as long as I could remember--until that winter walk, which ended with a logging truck lumbering by.
Asking around, I learned that parts of the battlefield were in "rehabilitation." In the hope of providing visitors with an authentic historical experience, the National Park Service (NPS) was seeking to restore some of Gettysburg's landscapes to their condition when the Union and Confederate armies clashed on them. And so the trees that once crowned Devil's Den--from whose crevices Confederate sharpshooters picked off Union soldiers-- were missing, also. Hundreds of acres of woodland, actually, were gone or going. (In July 1863, the battlefield contained 898 acres of woodland; since that time, the number has grown to roughly 2,000.) The "rehabilitation," many and varied in its activities, has also rebuilt fences, replanted orchards, and demolished large buildings, including a car dealership. The goal, as NPS regional director Don Barger told The Christian Science Monitor in April, is to make visitors "almost feel the bullets. ... That is what you want to have happen in a battlefield."
The project likely delights the reenactors who troop to Gettysburg every year in pursuit of authenticity, as well as those tourists who expect less to encounter history during their battlefield trip than to experience it. Academic historians also appear to approve. University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher, who advised a recent project at the battlefield, cheers in the current issue of Civil War Times that "there has never been a better time to visit Gettysburg." Those who might object to the removal of the trees, he says, are "people who don't understand the difference between a historic park and Yosemite." Rehabilitation has something for everyone: It flatters the left's suspicion of cultural authority, its invitation to ordinary Americans to participate in their history, even as it honors conservatism's fetish for an unchanged, historically correct past. Indeed, Gettysburg, the jewel of America's battlefields, is one of several currently targeted for rehabilitation, including Vicksburg and Antietam...
It is a long piece and this fool doesn't get to his point for a LONG time in the thing. But, go over to The New Republic and take a gander at this idiocy.
WTH
The RushedLimburger mess