Those wacky Canadians are covering over historical murals in the British Columbia legislative building because “some people find the colonial depictions of aboriginal people to be offensive.” Seems the murals, titled “Justice,” “Enterprise,” “Labour” and “Courage” are just too aggressively, well, European, for the tastes of the Canuck P.C.-compliance brigades.

I’ve wondered when the insanity of political correctness would begin this kind of re-education with regard to folk singers. One of those who needs to worry is Gordon Lightfoot, whose “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” extols the virtue of Europeans coming to North America and actually making something out of it (emphasis added):

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
But time has no beginnings and histry has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from all around
They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the forests tall
And they built the mines the mills and the factories for the good of us all

Wow! For the good of us all. Imagine that being written today. “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” was in the long tradition of folk tunes that praised workers and the things they built. Woody Guthrie’s “Grand Coulee Dam” romanticizes a large dam project in a manner that surely makes environmentalists cringe today, especially the part about facilitating capitalist ventures like mines and factories, and fueling the Big War Machine:

Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of ‘thirty-three,
For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me,
He said, “Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea,
But river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me.”

Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum,
And there roars the flying fortress now to fight for Uncle Sam,
Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Of course this was after the Hitler-Stalin pact dissolved with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Before that, folk singers like Guthrie and Pete Seeger cheerfully did Uncle Joe Stalin’s bidding with regard to international communism’s friend, Adolph Hitler.

Exit question: When will “some people” insist we pull down all the Confederate monuments in the town squares and in front of courthouses all over the South?