Sunday, 12 of February of 2012

It’s OK, Half Pint. We’ll Impeach That Man Tomorrow.

This morning, as I was sending off the latest set of anti-Bush buttons in the mail to people who had ordered them, I lingered for a moment over the address of one recipient: Mankato, Minnesota. The name “Mankato” brought me right back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, which I read over and over as a kid, and the Little House TV series, complete with Melissa Gilbert flying down a hill with her little arms stuck out wide at the end of each show.

Another town I think of is Skokie, Illinois. When I hear “Skokie,” I think of Nazis, and so for me the name Skokie is associated with white racism. That’s unfair, because Skokie is a fairly liberal-friendly place, picked on by Nazis outsiders back in the 1970s because it has a lot of Jewish people living there.

What place names can’t you hear without some association, fair or unfair, to the past?


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