Irony is a bitch. Last week, just in time for Juneteenth, an appeals court reversed a previous judge’s decision and ruled that Trump and his minions can replace the exhibit panels at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia. This means they are free to install their own panels, which de-emphasize and arguably whitewash the story of the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the site.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit heard the news and said, “What’s so ironic? What’s gonna be in the replacement exhibit?”

I told him the appeals court ruling is ironic because it undermines the meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by allowing the Trump gang to suggest it wasn’t all bad to be enslaved by Washington, who privately acknowledged that slavery was evil even as he used it to his advantage. The judges apparently were persuaded by the wording used by the National Park Service in composing the replacement panels:

Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.

“That’s kitsch, not history,” I said. “Whoever wrote it doesn’t know what autonomy means.”

“Those lucky slaves,” Swamp Rabbit said, acknowledging the irony. “Free tickets and a roof over their heads. They didn’t even have to pay rent.”

Only a few of the new panels mention the individual slaves. The revised version of the exhibit text reads more like a homogenized overview of slavery in general, meant for tourists – slavery was a terrible institution and here’s why, but the past is dead, somebody give me a cheeseburger.

Swamp Rabbit stroked his pathetic goatee and said, “The new panels don’t make no sense. I thought the exhibit was supposed to be about what it was like to be a slave in Washington’s house.”

I told him the new exhibit makes perverted sense if you realize it’s part of the Trump gang’s campaign to remove or alter all exhibits at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

“This one just happens to be in our hometown,” I said.

And it helps to know that the Trump lapdog overseeing the campaign is Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has cut the National Park Service’s maintenance budget by 40 percent and moronically defended Trump’s national effort to eliminate wind power installations.

I couldn’t help thinking of Cynthia M. Rufe, the district judge who ordered the Park Service to put back the original panels when the Trump gang had them removed in February. She wrote, “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts… It does not.”