Don’t blame snowflakes – grown-ups are the idiots

San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted this summer that ‘manholes’ must hereon in be called ‘maintenance holes’.) But when the lofty run out of real enemies, they often turn on their own kind. Moreover, too much success in achieving a raft of progressive purposes means a runaway train with no sensible destination careens off the tracks.

That’s the only explanation for the disconcerting San Francisco School Board spat over what to do with a series of 13 massive murals on the interior of the city’s George Washington High School. The murals’ now-esteemed creator, Victor Arnautoff, was a Russian immigrant and a committed communist. Painted under the aegis of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration during the Depression, ‘Life of Washington’ depicts a series of scenes that cast the father of the republic in a decidedly unflattering light. I grew up with sappy stories about young George Washington refusing to tell a lie and admitting to chopping down a cherry tree (a tired tale that may itself have grown controversial, by elevating the character-building of a straight white male over environmental preservation).