I am sometimes a bit late to come to things, and certainly Lizzo is one of them. But her profile in the November issue of Vanity Fair and the pearl-clutching kerfuffle over her playing of James Madison's crystal flute at the Library of Congress (more on that in a moment) made me spend a nice Saturday morning watching Lizzo videos and tracking down the batshit ramblings of people like Ben Shapiro. I like her videos and I liked her profile. She's entertaining, raunchy, loving, high spirited, confident and fun. The flute thing? Back in September, Carla Hayden, director of the Library of Congress (who also happens to be the first woman and first Black person to be director of the LoC), reached out to Lizzo, who is a trained flautist, to play a crystal flute belonging to James Madison, the fourth American president who was a slaveowner (who never freed his slaves, even at his death), architect of the three-fifths-of-a-person calculus for slaves in the Constitution and head of the effort to deport all freed Blacks to Liberia. She played it at the LoC and then later at her Washington, D.C., concert (videos of both are easily found online). And, to make it even more special, this Black woman of pop culture fame was the first person to ever play the flute, given as a gift to Madison by Claude Laurent, a French crystal flute maker (I guess that was a thing then), to celebrate his second term. And Western civilization collapsed, at least on the right side of the political seesaw, because Lizzo, in playing the flute at her concert, twerked when she did. (Though, if you watch Lizzo's entertaining TED Talk on the origins of twerking – dubbed in one link as a TED Twerk – what she did in D.C. when she played the flute was, at best, a twerkette, a slight butt shake to make a funny point.) Forbes did a nice job of compiling some of the strenuous right-wing upchucks, to wit: For some reason, the simple act of twerking is a move guaranteed to boil the blood of right-wing culture warriors; it's their kryptonite, a dance move which practically requires a trigger warning in advance, lest they burst a blood vessel in blinding rage. Jenna Ellis, a former campaign lawyer for Donald Trump, said Lizzo's performance was a "desecration, purposefully, of America's history." Matt Walsh, a right-wing influencer, described Lizzo's performance as "a form of racial retribution, according to the woke Left." Strategist Greg Price tweeted: "The Library of Congress really took out a 200-year-old flute that belonged to James Madison just so Lizzo could twerk with it. They degrade our history and then call you racist if you actually value it." James Bradley, who is currently running for US Senate in California, compared Lizzo's performance to somebody taking "a dump on the American flag." Of course, Ben Shapiro also chimed in, framing Lizzo's actions as deliberately provocative, essentially blaming her for the reactionary backlash. "If all we had seen was the clip of Lizzo playing the flute in the halls of the Library of Congress while wearing a semi-modest outfit, everyone would have shrugged. But that's not the clip everyone championed as groundbreaking: it was the clip where she bragged about twerking." Shapiro, on one of his podcasts, talks about how the actions of this "significantly overweight African American woman" vulgarized (that was his word) American history and degraded both the culture and the gentility (yes, that was his word) of America's founders. And cue the long sigh, the rueful shaking of the head. Would that we lived in a country that could see that what the LoC and Lizzo did, without a great deal of fanfare or hype, was the closest thing this country can have at this moment to an act of grace, a salvific act that was, at the same time, historic, fun, shattering and healing: a woman James Madison would have enslaved playing a flute owned by the American people offered to her by another woman Madison would have enslaved in a building owned by the American people in a moment of common enjoyment infused with a feeling of satisfaction at the progress made by the American experiment to create a multidimensional democracy. Like Lizzo said, history can be freaking cool.