The best possible public memorial for Robert Lee is Arlington National Cemetery, a landscape of American war dead on land formerly of the Lee family's estate. (IMO better if it had been expropriated rather than purchased.)
This is good news. A firearm is implicit intimidation.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how those troublesome truths are treated when you face the awesome grandeur of Rushmore, a monument so incredible it obscures the multifaceted nature of these old dudes, transmogrifying them from individuals with a capacity both for greatness and evil into pure American deities..
What I am suspicious of are monuments produced by the state, which tend to flatten out nuances and turn flawed individuals into tools of propaganda that bolster a kind of religious patriotism.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Trump and his white supremacist cohorts believe the reverence some Americans have for these statues is simply respect for history, and that tearing them down is tantamount to ripping pages out of a textbook. But monuments built by the state are not history—they manifestations of power. They don't tell you who, what, why, or how something happened. Instead, they just inform you who's in control. This is even true with the Confederate statues, even though the South lost the war. The reality is that the enshrinement of those generals in statues across the nation mostly did not happen right after the war as a tribute to lost struggle. Instead, they were built in the early 1900s and the 1960s, when it was crucial for those in power to signal that white supremacy would endure in the face of Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the civil rights movement. Erecting these statues amounted to power moves by white people who felt threatened. And now that they are being toppled, and neo-Nazis fight against their removal, their true meaning has become clearer than ever.
Good points. It probably has more artistic merit than most Confederate monuments, despite being a failed federal project on Indian land designed as a tourist trap; I don't have many defenses against its removal other than budgetary ones. Is the grandeur accidental, or just superficial after all?
Maybe heads carved out of a mountain would be more fitting for Soviet premiers than American presidents.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Re: Violence in Charlottesville
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
Unfortunately, that is exactly how those troublesome truths are treated when you face the awesome grandeur of Rushmore, a monument so incredible it obscures the multifaceted nature of these old dudes, transmogrifying them from individuals with a capacity both for greatness and evil into pure American deities..What I am suspicious of are monuments produced by the state, which tend to flatten out nuances and turn flawed individuals into tools of propaganda that bolster a kind of religious patriotism.Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
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