Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Confederate park: In which the author proposes a solution to please all (or possibly none)

So they’re tearing down Confederate statues all over the US south. I am not conflicted about this issue: “good riddance!” I say.  “The sooner the better. What took them so long?” What were they doing there in the first place? Why use public funds and spaces to celebrate vanquished scoundrels? Who dedicated their lives to discredited causes?

                Robert E. Lee’s chief contribution to history was as the principal defender of the slave-holding state. Whatever his qualities as a man he lent his skills and considerable military talents to upholding an evil institution, which, but for his efforts, might have ended sooner. He might have served the other side, might have fought to free men and women from bondage, but instead actively tried to prevent it. Why is there a statue to him?

                We needn’t melt them all down into ball bearings or whatever (which I’m rarely in favour of). If it means so much to the white sons and daughters of Dixie, they could always borrow a page from the good citizens of Budapest, who took down all their communist-era statues and stuck them in a designated tourist trap. I do believe there is value in such places. I have wandered Budapest’s statue park and wallowed in the bad taste of another era. It is a strangely moving experience. To stand amongst these overwhelmingly boorish monuments is to taste another time, when human hopes and dreams were smothered under such concrete mounds. There’s no mistaking it for glorification: the sheer tackiness of it (the lady in the booth, when she sees you coming, puts on a tape of Soviet anthems) seems to emblemize the tragic pathos of the era.

                Why though do I have the strange feeling that a Confederate statue park would treat its inmates rather more romantically?

                “Those who are concerned about the erasure of history will be thrilled to learn of the existence of books.” [1] Statues, you see, aren’t used to teach history. They are used to glorify, romanticize, idealize, and fetishize it. Some folks really seem to think Robert E. Lee will be erased from memory if we take his statue down. Maybe they don’t have library cards. Or internet. But Robert E. Lee is not going to be forgotten. He just won’t be immortalized in marble (or iron or whatever they use).  Why should he be, if his cause was unjust?

                There are not many things in history that we can agree upon, but surely the abolition of slavery should be one of them. How can you claim the abolition of slavery was a good thing if you pray to the statue of a man who tried his damndest to prevent it?




[1] Letter to the editor, The Hamilton Spectator. Not me. 

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