(This lovely vista is of the International Airport named for John Foster Dulles at the moment. We are confident a better one can be suggested shortly. It is a view accompanied by apprehension at departure, and joy on return).
Ah, lovely morning here. No Buzzards present at the Barn this morning, and no line of indigent assorted people, young or old. It is a weekend, they tell me, and first Zoom call is a little early, with an off-the-property meeting with other Concerned Citizens regarding the 1,800 acres of glass they want to plant on the fertile soils just down the road.
I will try to be there in person, but of course I had to go through the digital stack of impassioned histrionics that clutters the Saturday in-basket. A couple of them took up the public education currently hot in this original post-colonial state. They used to call it the birthplace of Presidents, eight men born here rising to the highest office in the land.
They were, by name: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. I realize some of them are pretty old, and of more important relevance, I am told they were all members of the same ethnic group.
It is funny, in a way. The first person on that list could have been King, had he chosen that path. The second is so popular today that they are ripping down his statues. Actually, that would include all of them, including the last, Mr. Wilson, who was a guy who thought the nation that the first three established was not inclusive enough. He made some big changes, and might have done more, had he not succumbed to a stroke while in office, which left his able wife Edith as a sort of interim Chief executive.
I was going to speak to the issue of Falcon Codes this morning. Marlow brought it up yesterday as a matter whose time has come around again. It was a sort of “brevity code” utilized over unencrypted radio communications to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. Or damaging a career. But it is worth a longer rumination all its own. Instead, the morning dross included the remarkable pathfinding in education being conducted by the earnest folks in Loudoun County.
I have been a taxpayer in three Virginia Counties over the last four decades. They include Arlington, Fairfax and Culpeper. I should have paid more attention to what was going on around my family, but considered that duty was done the usual way: selecting the best school district in which I could afford to buy a house and give my sons a chance to get on with their lives. Loudoun could not compete with Fairfax in terms of the commute down to the Pentagon, so it never came up when the kids were still school aged.
That is why it is so funny that the school board out there has become the center of educational debate. Let me catch you up on things. You may have heard of Loudoun a few months ago when they righteously denounced Dr. Seuss for his contribution to systemic racism in America. I was surprised by that, since the good Doctor was part of my upbringing. I had no way of knowing his birthday would be selected to frame “Read across America” Day, which I support. Or used to, anyway. It is sort of funny, since I investigated investment property out in Loudoun during the real estate crash in 2008. It was a historic jurisdiction, and still is, even if the sort of history they are making today is a little different than the one they used to make.
Let me do it briefly. Loudoun County was part of the 5-million-acre Northern Neck of Virginia Proprietary granted by King Charles II of England to seven loyal noblemen in 1649. The grant was huge, and later subdivided into five more manageable County units. Loudoun had been part of “western Fairfax” county, and was named for John Campbell, the fourth Earl of Loudoun. He was a Scottish nobleman who served as commander-in-chief for all British armed forces in North America and titular governor of Virginia from 1756 to 1759. Leesburg has served continuously as the county seat since 1757. I know, sort of weird, considering Virginia’s role in periodic rebellion, but I am not aware of anyone digging him up to find a more inclusive name for the County named for his title.
Lord Fairfax still owned the land when settlers came from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland to begin farming. One of the cash crops there was tobacco, grown on large plantations that used forced slave labor. Other immigrants, many of them of legal status, came from Quaker stock oppressed elsewhere. And from Germany, Ireland and Scotland whose history of maltreatment is well documented.
After General Braddock’s defeat by the French at Fort Duquesne in 1755, refugees from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia settled in the western part of Loudoun County. I used to live off “Braddock Road” in Fairfax, which was said to have been the General’s path to death in combat against the French and their aboriginal allies.
Loudoun was in the center of more recent events. In 1861, residents of the county were split over the issue of secession from the Union. The Quakers and most of the Germans in northern and central Loudoun opposed both slavery and secession. The landed gentry in the southern part of the county favored the retention of slave labor. During the subsequent Unpleasantness Between the States, a fellow named John Singleton Mosby and his Rangers roamed the area. They even used the Colonel’s name to describe what is now a historic district, even if we are not supposed to talk about it.
Loudoun is personal, since I had a minute part of the big change that was coming to the county. For a couple centuries, Loudoun had an economy based on agriculture, and a population that remained constant at about 20,000 citizens. That began to change in the early 1960s, when an International Airport was built in the southeastern part of the county, since the one on the Potomac was too small for the air traffic attracted to the Capitol.
I am not going to blame the disintegration of public education on the airport. That would be unfair, even if naming it after former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offers the opportunity for all sorts of historic revisionism. Today, Loudoun County is a growing, dynamic county of over 400,000 people, known for its bucolic scenery, rich history, comfortable neighborhoods, and high quality public services.
When I was driving around out there thirty years ago, it was not uncommon to turn a leafy corner on a little county road and drive past a private airport designed to accommodate the needs of wealthy out-of-towners. They built those long strips of asphalt in the country to keep their horses properly.
I mentioned Loudoun’s banning Dr. Seuss on his birthday last March. The “high quality public services” part includes schools and education. The banning of children’s books is just part of it. Now, they have declared mathematics to be tainted with some of the history that lies all around us.
The Editorial Board thinks they understand the issue. It naturally includes the racial component important in everything these days. The “2+2=?” equation is part of it, since the concept of correct answers is attributed to something systemic and unfair. We discussed it at the Friday meeting to general amusement. Then we went to lunch, but it was to a place that could properly compute the bill. And keep the drinks coming.
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