There are people who despise Harvard University as the spawn of the devil, and all its faculty and works his imps, who at the same time believe symbology is a real academic discipline, laudable because Robert Langdon, who teaches at that benighted school, uses it to do fictional things in real places in Dan Brown's novels.
In David Macaulay’s classic children’s book, Motel of the Mysteries, the illustrator “skewers the idea that America’s greatest accomplishments will be recognized for what they were long after they’re gone”, as a Washington Post story explained last year:
In “Motel of the Mysteries,” America has been destroyed, and largely covered up, by a mysterious catastrophic event that the book suggests is related to rising pollution levels. Archaeologists speculate over the little that remains, deciding that our freeways were signals to aliens and that fast-food neon signs were totems to our most important gods. But everything changes when a trust-fund-enabled dabbler, Howard Carson (an obvious riff on Howard Carter, who discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt) accidentally stumbles on the site that becomes known as the Motel of the Mysteries, and mistakes a humble roadside way station for a critically important tomb and religious site.
The fun of “Motel of the Mysteries” is not that Carson and his colleagues treat the motel and the human remains they find there with disrespect. To the contrary, they treat everything from a “Do Not Disturb” sign, to a shower cap, to a bathtub plug as precious and meaningful artifacts, and do their best to place them into a coherent narrative that explains the great civilization they believe they’ve deciphered.
In some cases, they get certain things right, but for the wrong reasons: Carson, for example, becomes convinced that the motel’s television is an altar and was the subject of intense worship by the inhabitants of the room. And other times, he and his colleagues are disastrously, comically wrong, turning toothbrushes into ceremonial earrings and the paper seals on toilets into important documents.
America’s being remembered, all right, but for none of the things that we see as important about ourselves. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis has become the new Blarney Stone, a cheesy attraction tourists kiss in the hope of good luck. New York’s skyscrapers are all but buried; only their top floors poke out of the earth, giving a tiny hint of their former majesty. And our founding documents are nowhere to be found. The remnants of our supposed greatness in Macaulay’s version of the future are actually the most mundane, routine things that made our lives function in the twentieth century. Our true innovations and accomplishments are lost.
There’s another, subtler swipe at us in the book, too. When American fiction considers the end of the country, we tend to assume our own crude, arrogant form of domino theory: that when we go, everything else will swiftly follow into the abyss. Our agonizing about our fate is often just another way of explaining that we don’t believe the planet would last long without us.
But without ever addressing it directly, Macaulay puts the lie to that egocentrism. For all America’s been destroyed by this undefined catastrophe, in “Motel of the Mysteries,” the rest of the world seems to be getting along pretty well without us. Archaeology and tourism continue. The contamination that buried America’s great cities hasn’t spread, and in fact has settled down enough that people can visit and explore it.
The fun of “Motel of the Mysteries” is not that Carson and his colleagues treat the motel and the human remains they find there with disrespect. To the contrary, they treat everything from a “Do Not Disturb” sign, to a shower cap, to a bathtub plug as precious and meaningful artifacts, and do their best to place them into a coherent narrative that explains the great civilization they believe they’ve deciphered.
In some cases, they get certain things right, but for the wrong reasons: Carson, for example, becomes convinced that the motel’s television is an altar and was the subject of intense worship by the inhabitants of the room. And other times, he and his colleagues are disastrously, comically wrong, turning toothbrushes into ceremonial earrings and the paper seals on toilets into important documents.
America’s being remembered, all right, but for none of the things that we see as important about ourselves. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis has become the new Blarney Stone, a cheesy attraction tourists kiss in the hope of good luck. New York’s skyscrapers are all but buried; only their top floors poke out of the earth, giving a tiny hint of their former majesty. And our founding documents are nowhere to be found. The remnants of our supposed greatness in Macaulay’s version of the future are actually the most mundane, routine things that made our lives function in the twentieth century. Our true innovations and accomplishments are lost.
There’s another, subtler swipe at us in the book, too. When American fiction considers the end of the country, we tend to assume our own crude, arrogant form of domino theory: that when we go, everything else will swiftly follow into the abyss. Our agonizing about our fate is often just another way of explaining that we don’t believe the planet would last long without us.
But without ever addressing it directly, Macaulay puts the lie to that egocentrism. For all America’s been destroyed by this undefined catastrophe, in “Motel of the Mysteries,” the rest of the world seems to be getting along pretty well without us. Archaeology and tourism continue. The contamination that buried America’s great cities hasn’t spread, and in fact has settled down enough that people can visit and explore it.
In other words, as Eddie Izzard brilliantly summarized in his comedy special, Dressed to Kill, we make up history and tradition and all the rest entirely on the fly:
Which brings me to Confederate Man in Shelby, North Carolina.
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People I know- who ought to know better- are up on their hind legs over monuments, and the animal spirits are high.
I say “ought to know better” because they are vaping the issue with vigor, but pretty much unencumbered by thought.
They veer back and forth between an imagined hell of empty plinths in public squares (in every other situation they deplore investments in public art) and arguments over the merits of particular honorands of the sculptor’s skill. General Lee was a great American who help bind the wounds of the Civil War. Yes, and he also helped cause those wounds, comes the rejoinder. And when his father-in-law’s will called for freeing some of his slaves, Lee- who would have stood to inherit them- sued to overturn his familiar’s wishes.
They veer back and forth between an imagined hell of empty plinths in public squares (in every other situation they deplore investments in public art) and arguments over the merits of particular honorands of the sculptor’s skill. General Lee was a great American who help bind the wounds of the Civil War. Yes, and he also helped cause those wounds, comes the rejoinder. And when his father-in-law’s will called for freeing some of his slaves, Lee- who would have stood to inherit them- sued to overturn his familiar’s wishes.
So my friends jabber, either about an imaginary one-size-fits-all erasure of history, or the utterly un-statue-related issue of whether particular people deserve pedestals, by their lights or ours.
I urge my friends to unclench and chill. Then to reboot their heads, and do some reading.
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First, let’s deal with the generalities of generals on horseback or standing, seated, or recumbent. Or not even generals.
I don’t know of anyone in a position to do anything about it calling for Confederate monuments to be pulled down and destroyed simply because they are Confederate monuments. Serious people are dealing with the issues I outline here, and the public discussion of them would be improved if more tried to do the same- seriously, rather than angrily and, largely, ignorantly.
I am sure there are some absolutists, just as there are those who will argue that once a public monument goes up, it can never, ever, come down. People millennia from now must be given the right to ignore those monuments, just as we do now.
I am sure there are some absolutists, just as there are those who will argue that once a public monument goes up, it can never, ever, come down. People millennia from now must be given the right to ignore those monuments, just as we do now.
Here is an example.
There is a generic Confederate soldier memorial on the former court square in Shelby, North Carolina, a place I called my home town mostly out of politeness to my ever-dwindling elders.
That monument is a handsome structure, big and well-made without being grandiose, and completely without meaning in the day-to-day life of Shelby, and Cleveland County, for decades.
That monument is a handsome structure, big and well-made without being grandiose, and completely without meaning in the day-to-day life of Shelby, and Cleveland County, for decades.
When it was put up, in 1906, Cleveland County was suddenly, and fabulously, rich. It produced more cotton per capita than any county in America. The seeds of a political dynasty that lasted fifty years were sewed in the cotton fields and mills of the county, and a memorial to the glorious past was a fitting ornamen to a city on the way up.
I never read, in either of the histories of Cleveland County published by the local newspapers’ then-owners, anything about why it went up. Certainly, it was not a stop on the seventh-grade public school local history pilgrimage in 1968. I never saw ceremonies involving it.
Researching this essay, however, I see where the Daughters of the Confederacy- who spent over $2500 ($62,000, in today’s cash) to erect it 111 years ago- “restored” it in 1991.
Researching this essay, however, I see where the Daughters of the Confederacy- who spent over $2500 ($62,000, in today’s cash) to erect it 111 years ago- “restored” it in 1991.
But according to a 1906 account, it was built to defy removal:
Today the statute is not even at the center of civic and commercial life as it was when dedicated in 1907. The department stores that anchored the local economy are long gone- as are the mills that employed the customers. The ground floor retail spaces are mostly chi-chi cafes and bars and brewpubs for the well-off.
The Confederate Soldier stood guard on our commercial center, at the entrance to the court house. Only it’s not the court house anymore. All of those functions have been moved blocks away to a complex of stupendously ugly modern structures inflicted by the imaginations of several local architects.
The old courthouse-also completed in 1907- is now a country music museum tied to a local who did well, left, and never came back.
The old courthouse-also completed in 1907- is now a country music museum tied to a local who did well, left, and never came back.
So Confederate Man in Shelby has no importance, and no context any longer. Life has, truly, passed him by. Few stop to look at him. He gazes down an alley.
But there’d be hell to pay if someone tried to move it.
Shelby has its official past as The City of Pleasant Living- home to governors, senators, and great Southern writers (among them Thomas Dixon Jr, author of The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots. Filmed as “Birth of a Nation,” they were the basis for the first movie ever screened at The White House- at the request of America’s last great segregationist president, Woodrow Wilson, in 1915. He raved over it).
Shelby also has a darker past, unacknowledged but in memory and, when triggered by events, to lash out in its own defense. There is where the importance of Confederate Man lives, and thus arises our present fuss. America didn’t deal with the aftermath of the war; we just said, “devil take the hindmost” to millions of suddenly-emancipated slaves and privatized their continuing privations for another century.
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Context, after all, is important. Monuments are as much- if not more- about the people who put them up and the times in which they did so. If you try to ignore those facts, you do the very thing you claim not to be doing: you make the monuments ahistorical, just objects in space, and locked into eternity by the iron whims of the dead.
So a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center is instructive, as will be the reaction to my citation of it. If you retort that they are just a bunch of liberals trying to impose an agenda, you are right, and it’s an agenda they pursue in spite of people like you who have no better ideas than to simply cry “Hell, no!” when anything is ever proposed for the first time.
But I leave the work of the SPLC for another day- except to mention that in the 1990s they pretty much killed off the KKK with a series of brilliantly innovative civil damages suits that forced the Klaverns and the Kleagles into bankruptcy. If you are now spouting pious bromides about how all lives matter and all forms of generalization are the best, you owe SPLC a debt of gratitude. They are saddling up to go into battle against the racists now resurgent.
The Center’s report on monuments is a worthwhile read because it is about facts: how many monuments there are. When they went up. Whom they honor.
I did know, for example, that North Carolina is tied with Georgia for second place among the states with the most Confederate memorials. We have 90 each, trailing only Virginia’s 96: in total, a third of all the monuments of that conflict in the entire nation (a News & Observer story from 205 says there’s even more: “North Carolina has more than 200 Civil War memorials, statues and markers, according to Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, a project of the UNC-Chapel Hill Library. Most of the 54 statues and 20 memorials honor Confederates”).
Why so many? We dithered and dallied over secession- going out next to last- and almost none of the war happened in the Tar Heel State until its death rattle.
Try to find Mrs Stonewall Jackson’s home, or the bank where the last Confederate cabinet meeting as held, in Charlotte.
They are long gone. History is for plaques and museums in Charlotte. Nothing stands in the way of commerce in Charlotte, where a fifty-year-old car dealership was called iconic as it was being torn down.
Try to find Mrs Stonewall Jackson’s home, or the bank where the last Confederate cabinet meeting as held, in Charlotte.
They are long gone. History is for plaques and museums in Charlotte. Nothing stands in the way of commerce in Charlotte, where a fifty-year-old car dealership was called iconic as it was being torn down.
In the SPLC report we see that the vast majority of Civil War monuments are 20th century creations. There was a surge around World War I and in its aftermath. The combination of President Wilson’s resegregation of the civil service and its wartime hyper-nationalist loyalty and anti-German propaganda campaigns fueled the rise of the Klan to its greatest numbers ever; in 1924, for example, the KKK nearly got its preferred candidate for president nominated by the Democrats. That was a dream deferred: it was not until 2016 that that happy day came at last- curiously, at the hands of the Republicans.
The second great wave of Civil War monuments came in the 1950s and early Sixties, then powered by McCarthyism, anti-Communism, and the modern civil rights movement. All coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Civil War.
Very few monuments fate back to the reconstruction era. The South had no money to erect any. The North had no interest. The first national civil war battlefield park was not created until the 1890s.
But as servants of other times, and other messages, monuments are useful, highly visible, and arguably permanent bilboards. That is why, with so little Civil War history to commemorate, North Carolina does so much commemorating. So much commemorating, the President would say, and no one dare bid it to stop.
But as servants of other times, and other messages, monuments are useful, highly visible, and arguably permanent bilboards. That is why, with so little Civil War history to commemorate, North Carolina does so much commemorating. So much commemorating, the President would say, and no one dare bid it to stop.
Read the SPLC report before you jump into the coming debate. Public policy is best reached through the participation of an informed citizenry.
At least, that’s the theory.
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There’s another aspect of context to consider, brilliantly illuminated by Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.
Lowry is a thoughtful man, a proper voice for the intellectual powerhouse NR has been since William F. Buckley, Jr founded it in the 1950s. Buckley brought honor to American conservatism by reading out of its ranks the radical right: the John Birch Society, the white nationalists, the Nazis, all of whom are celebrating the prodigal son feast the President threw for them on August 15.
Lowry is a thoughtful man, a proper voice for the intellectual powerhouse NR has been since William F. Buckley, Jr founded it in the 1950s. Buckley brought honor to American conservatism by reading out of its ranks the radical right: the John Birch Society, the white nationalists, the Nazis, all of whom are celebrating the prodigal son feast the President threw for them on August 15.
Lowry makes the case against the reductionist reaction that to remove one statue is to remove them all, and that any one that comes down must be intended for destruction and the rewriting of history by communists, homosexual academics, and minority women, all working under grants from George Soros.
In other words, no, there’s no Federal Wipe Out The Monuments Agency. Some people deserve their memorials less over time. Many are better studied- and preserved- in museums, where they are placed in more informative context that honors them better and with more respect.
An example of the former is the South Carolina state capitol confederate flag. Once it flew over the state capitol building- starting in 1961- as a reminder to all who came to do business with the state and invoke its power for their aid and benefit. Then it was reduced to a flag pole.
Now it is part of the Civil War history in a museum: the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia.
As for the latter point, the British government has made an effective case, over two centuries, that the Parthenon’s frieze- removed by Lord Elgin and later sold to the British Museum- have fared much better in that care than the Greeks could have managed with the best of intentions. In that debate, too, people carry on, decade after decade. That is how democracy works. The Greeks taught us that.
That, in turn, means, that if you believe- as a bedrock principle of conservatism, or just good, responsive democracy- that local government deals best with local issues, you have to just STFU when they do stuff you don’t like, in places where you don't live.
Let Lowry make his case:
The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields, and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense. Some discrimination is in order. There’s no reason to honor Jefferson Davis, the blessedly incompetent president of the Confederacy. New Orleans just sent a statue of him to storage — good riddance. Amazingly enough, Baltimore has a statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the monstrous Dred Scott decision, which helped precipitate the war. A city commission has, rightly, recommended its destruction.
Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, is a more complicated case. He was no great friend of slavery. He wrote in a letter to his wife “that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country” (he added, shamefully, that it was good for blacks — “the painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race”). After the war, he accepted defeat and did his part to promote national healing.
Yet, faced with a momentous choice at the start of the war, he decided he was a Virginia patriot rather than an American nationalist. He told one of President Abraham Lincoln’s advisers: “I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” He betrayed the U.S. government and fought on the side devoted to preserving chattel slavery.
The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention. That is a grievous political sin, although he obviously wasn’t the only one guilty of it. The Civil War was an American conflict, with Americans on both sides. An honorable soldier, Lee is an apt symbol for the Confederate rank and file whose sacrifices in the war’s charnel house shouldn’t be flushed down the memory hole.
The Baltimore commission has called for moving a striking dual statue of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to the Chancellorsville, Va., battlefield where the two last met before Jackson’s death. This would be appropriate, and would take a page from the Gettysburg battlefield. A statue of Lee commemorates Virginia’s losses and overlooks the field where General George Pickett undertook his doomed charge. If you can’t honor Robert E. Lee there, you can’t honor him anywhere.
...For supporters of the Confederate monuments, removing them from parks and avenues will be a blow against their heritage and historical memory. But the statues have often been part of an effort to whitewash the Confederacy. And it’s one thing for a statue to be merely a resting place for pigeons; it’s another for it to be a fighting cause for neo-Nazis.
Lee himself opposed building Confederate monuments in the immediate aftermath of the war. “I think it wiser,” he said, “not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.” After Charlottesville, it’s time to revisit his advice.
Yet, faced with a momentous choice at the start of the war, he decided he was a Virginia patriot rather than an American nationalist. He told one of President Abraham Lincoln’s advisers: “I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” He betrayed the U.S. government and fought on the side devoted to preserving chattel slavery.
The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention. That is a grievous political sin, although he obviously wasn’t the only one guilty of it. The Civil War was an American conflict, with Americans on both sides. An honorable soldier, Lee is an apt symbol for the Confederate rank and file whose sacrifices in the war’s charnel house shouldn’t be flushed down the memory hole.
The Baltimore commission has called for moving a striking dual statue of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to the Chancellorsville, Va., battlefield where the two last met before Jackson’s death. This would be appropriate, and would take a page from the Gettysburg battlefield. A statue of Lee commemorates Virginia’s losses and overlooks the field where General George Pickett undertook his doomed charge. If you can’t honor Robert E. Lee there, you can’t honor him anywhere.
...For supporters of the Confederate monuments, removing them from parks and avenues will be a blow against their heritage and historical memory. But the statues have often been part of an effort to whitewash the Confederacy. And it’s one thing for a statue to be merely a resting place for pigeons; it’s another for it to be a fighting cause for neo-Nazis.
Lee himself opposed building Confederate monuments in the immediate aftermath of the war. “I think it wiser,” he said, “not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.” After Charlottesville, it’s time to revisit his advice.
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Which brings me back to Confederate Man in Shelby.
The other day Governor Roy Cooper published an article calling for the removal of Confederate monuments in the Tar Heel State. That is as much as nearly everyone railing against him and and his idea knows. If you have ever shared an article with all your Facebook friends based on its headline, not what it actually says, or from when, you will understand how gratifying is anger untethered from fact.
Here’s what the Governor actually proposed:
It started with a monument, stone and metal, inanimate and yet more provocative now than ever. Charlottesville could have been Raleigh, or Asheboro, or any other city in North Carolina that is home to a Confederate monument. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like for a person of color to pass by one of these monuments and consider that those memorialized in stone and metal did not value my freedom or humanity.
Unlike an African-American father, I’ll never have to explain to my daughters why there exists an exalted monument for those who wished to keep her and her ancestors in chains.
Some people cling to the belief that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. But history is not on their side. We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.
These monuments should come down.
Unlike an African-American father, I’ll never have to explain to my daughters why there exists an exalted monument for those who wished to keep her and her ancestors in chains.
Some people cling to the belief that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. But history is not on their side. We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.
These monuments should come down.
Our Civil War history is important, but it belongs in textbooks and museums — not a place of allegiance on our Capitol grounds. And our history must tell the full story, including the subjugation of humans created in God’s image to provide the back-breaking labor that drove the South’s agrarian economy.
I understand the frustration of those fed up with the pace of change. But after protesters toppled a statue in Durham Monday night, I said there was a better way to remove these monuments.
My first responsibility as governor is to protect North Carolinians and keep them safe. The likelihood of protesters being injured or worse as they may try to topple any one of the hundreds of monuments in our state concerns me. And the potential for those same white supremacist elements we saw in Charlottesville to swarm the site, weapons in hand, in retaliation is a threat to public safety.
It’s time to move forward....
Conversations about race and our past are never simple or easy. They are deeply personal and emotional. As President Lincoln said, we must do this work “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds.” President Lincoln was on point: we must do what we know is right, and we must do it the right way.
Let’s pull out the elements of what the ill-informed are calling the erasure of the past:
1. “First, the North Carolina legislature must repeal a 2015 law that prevents removal or relocation of monuments. Cities, counties and the state must have the authority and opportunity to make these decisions.”
2. “Second, I’ve asked the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to determine the cost and logistics of removing Confederate monuments from state property as well as alternatives for their placement at museums or historical sites where they can be studied in context.”
3. “Third, the North Carolina legislature should defeat a bill that grants immunity from liability to motorists who strike protesters. That bill passed the state House and remains alive in the Senate. The Senate should kill it. Full stop. Those who attack protesters, weaponizing their vehicles like terrorists, should find no safe haven in our state.”*
North Carolina Republicans have controlled state government since 2010, and they have put the “react” into “reactionary.” Most of what they do is a kneejerk response to an old grudge or a new slight. For example, they were for independent redistricting until they got power. Then they justified overwhelmingly race-based election districts that not only cemented their control for a decade but gave them veto-proof majorities, answerable to no one.
“That’s what the Democrats did,” they explained.
“That’s what the Democrats did,” they explained.
When voters chose a Democrat for governor last fall, the Republicans sprang a secretly-planned special session to strip that man of most of his appointment powers, and collect control of elections to themselves.
“It’s what the Democrats did,” they explained.
“It’s what the Democrats did,” they explained.
When marriage equality loomed as the law of the land, the Republicans ran through a constitutional amendment to try to stop it. When it was overturned, they passed a law to let ocal judges spurn the wedding of same-sex couples. When Charlotte wanted to extend civil rights protections to its LGBT residents, the Republicans took less than a day to strip every city and county of its existing ordinances as well as well as the right to adopt or extend them, forever (after a year of economic disaster, they passed a pretend repeal that keeps the law mostly in place for two more election cycles, with options to renew once they gerrymander themselves in for the 2020s).
“Discrimination polls really good,” they explained.
And when South Carolina took down its Confederate flag, and talk of removing monuments swept the South, the Republicans in Raleigh passed Senator Tommy Tucker's Historic Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, which even prohibits local governments from doing anything about monuments or plaques on local government property.
"ISIS takes down monuments," one honorable said. "Not us."
"ISIS takes down monuments," one honorable said. "Not us."
Tucker’s notion of himself and the General Assembly, in the scheme of democracy, is a grand vision indeed. As a reporter wrote in 2013,
Challenged by a reporter to record a voice vote on a bill that would allow city and county governments to post public notices, traditionally published in newspapers, how did Tucker respond?
I AM THE SENATOR.
YOU ARE THE CITIZEN.
YOU NEED TO BE QUIET.
Not surprisingly, Senator Tucker still knows better, and with a touchingly Pollyannaish twist. WFAE reports,
"They've been there for decades and decades and it's part of our history. And to remove those monuments would eliminate discussion in the future and many of the monuments just are honoring the Confederate dead," Tucker said Tuesday.
Tucker was quick to say hate groups like the KKK and white supremacists have no place in our society. He said they've created a situation where monuments are becoming a target.
"Hopefully time will heal enough wounds that it won't be perceived in a racist manner and if these outlier groups like Neo-Nazis and white supremacists will detach themselves from the Confederacy, there won't be as much anger toward the monuments in the future," Tucker said.
Tucker was quick to say hate groups like the KKK and white supremacists have no place in our society. He said they've created a situation where monuments are becoming a target.
"Hopefully time will heal enough wounds that it won't be perceived in a racist manner and if these outlier groups like Neo-Nazis and white supremacists will detach themselves from the Confederacy, there won't be as much anger toward the monuments in the future," Tucker said.
And there’s the rub. Monument absolutists frame them as under attack by left-wing anti-Americans. In fact, they are being made objects of controversy by real anti-Americans. After all, you can’t get much more anti-American than Nazis. They have a track record.
You can’t get much more anti-American, either, than Christianist militiamen and KKK dress-up partiers, who want to deport everyone in America to somewhere, anywhere- it not just hang the expense and bring back lynching.
These groups hate democracy. They descended upon Charlottesville to try to overturn the expressed will of the people by fear, force, arms and reckless driving. Their work done, they slunk away in darkness.
They will return, only to new places, with the old tactics amped up for renewed shock and awe.
Charlottesville officials did what Governor Cooper proposes. They had meetings and discussions and hearings about renaming Lee Park, and by the democratic process of local government, that has been done.
The Nazis and the Klan didn’t say a word about that this past weekend, that renaming that is surely as big a slap in the face to the myth of the lost cause as anything.
But a change of name isn’t twenty feet tall. The Nazis and the hatemongers came to Charlottesville because they wanted a stage and a prop- a big one.
General Lee’s statue- already approved for removal, served the purpose. And in a university town where the university was founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence- well, who could say no to symbology piled upon symbology?
General Lee’s statue- already approved for removal, served the purpose. And in a university town where the university was founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence- well, who could say no to symbology piled upon symbology?
And they will rove now, from town to town, knowing the President of the United States has their backs. And, when challenged, they will sneer, “Do you have a flaaaag?”
Let the people where the monuments are decide their fates. Their ancestors put them up, not yours.
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*This was a no-brainer for House Republicans when they passed it April 28, by an all-but party-line vote of 67 to 48. Now that we see how it works, it out to be a no brainer for the Senate not to pass it.
But we used to say that about denouncing Nazis, too.
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*This was a no-brainer for House Republicans when they passed it April 28, by an all-but party-line vote of 67 to 48. Now that we see how it works, it out to be a no brainer for the Senate not to pass it.
But we used to say that about denouncing Nazis, too.
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