Dan Flores

Yeah, and it was unfortunate that he blurbed Madison Grant's book, of course, which is a book that a lot of people regard as an unfortunate production from someone in the United States who shouldn't have been thinking in those terms.

Mm-hmm.

But, you know, what I will say, and I said it in the script here, is that you, you know, as someone who's interested in history—and I know, Randall, you know this, too, because we used to talk about it in graduate classes—

You have to think about people in terms of the times they live in.

And, I mean, you can't look at someone like Teddy Roosevelt and say, okay, so this guy, he should be smart enough to understand the way we think in the 2020s.

I mean, the truth is, a century from now, we have no idea what –

thoughts and expressions and values that we have that might be regarded as completely unsatisfactory to somebody living 100 years in the future.

And so I have a difficult time looking back on people like that and divorcing them from their time and the period they're living in and trying to evaluate them based on

how we would look at them today.

It doesn't mean I'm not willing to say things, as I did in the script, about the particular statue.

I mean, that wasn't Teddy Roosevelt.

That was other people using the Roosevelt image.

But he did do the Madison Grant thing, and he did say some unfortunate things about what groups of people might actually share the

cultures and abilities of wild animals, and it wasn't, you know, Western humanity in his view.

It wasn't the people who sat around the dinner table with him, in other words.

So I think that you can be critical and understand somebody in the past, but also try not to, you know, to just completely dismiss them.

I mean, I think that's an unfortunate thing.

that we've been doing recently.

And I'm encouraged a little bit by the fact that I think we're getting to get over that.

Yeah, there does seem to be a bit more pause.