The Taliban blew up states of Buddha. I don’t want to be like them in any way!
Even art I disagree with strongly is still art!
That said, art on public land should be as inoffensive as possible. I like Post Office mural art…but I want it to be non-controversial.
A “Confederacy Statue Garden” seems like the best answer. Find someone with private property who’s willing to host the statues, and everything’s fine. City, County, State, or Federal land? No. But Jack Jones’ private property? Hey, fine.
You can also put up the biggest cross in Christendom on every hilltop you want…so long as those hilltops are private property. Public land? No.
The Duke of Wellington, British general who finally defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle of Waterloo, is probably better known in the UK for giving his name to rubber boots, or “Wellies” as they are affectionately known. When I was a student in Leeds in the 80s his statue was regularly repainted to give him children’s red wellies. I am glad to see this tradition seems to persist…
I think most people these days could look at the Stone Mtn. thing and have no idea who these people are, if their names were taken off. Actually, that’s probably true of most of these statues. “Who is this guy?” “No idea, some military dude on a horse.”
So, take off the names, and replace it with a factual thing saying something like, “This is the biggest bas-relief statue in the world and was 60 years in the making, from [whenever] to 1972.” (1972!!!) This, obviously applies to Stone Mtn. which I only know about from recent events, I mean, I had heard the name “Stone Mtn.” but I just thought it was a mountain with an unexceptional name.
The reason that they are so expensive to remove is because of the protests and lawsuits. Any removal or modification effort is going to run into the same problem. My personal vote is for a repeat of what happened in North Carolina. Throw some straps around the statues and yank them down.
According to this account, the city paid a little over a million (the rest was covered by private donations). The city’s share included ten thousand hours of claimed police time, including three thousand hours of overtime (!). Kind of makes you wonder how much of that involved padding/corruption for which New Orleans is notorious.
Contrast their experience with that of Baltimore, where four statues linked with the Confederacy (or supporting slavery, in the case of Chief Justice Taney) came down overnight.* This article does not list the cost, but I doubt the Baltimore cops managed to run up three thousand dollars worth of overtime for an overnight project.
Long before Charlottesville, I pointed out in at least one Dope thread that it wasn’t reasonable to expect continued public glorification of Confederate heroes to go unchallenged (for example, expecting black students to be proud of attending Bedford Forrest High School). The current angst about getting rid of these remnants of Southern Pride posthaste seems in some instances ridiculously overblown to me.** The underlying argument for it remains sound (instead of comparing the anti-statuary folk to the Taliban, better to invoke those who pulled down/moved statues of Stalin after the fall of the U.S.S.R.).
And not to get into a squabble with Sampiro, but tu quoqueing about Thomas Jefferson and William Sherman says more about hurt Southern feelings than about reality, as both of them had huge positive accomplishments that outweigh their negative qualities. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, not so much.
*the city had three overt Confederate monuments and only one commemorating the Union, despite the fact that nearly three times as many Marylanders fought for the Union compared to the South.
**as does exaggerating “major problems and hurt feelings” that supposedly will make eliminating Confederate gargoyles a nearly insurmountable problem. :dubious:
Proposed by the insane monumental sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who cozied up to weirdo Confederate societies and the resurgent KKK of the 1920s in order to get the commission. Then he acted like such an asshole for several years that they took it away from him and gave the job to another concern, who were unable to finish it until 1971. Borglum went on to begin and complete the Mt. Rushmore Heads (another desecration of sacred land, if you ask me) during that time.
I consider Stone Mountain a monument to American Visionary Lunacy rather than one to Lee, Davis, and Jackson. YMMV, as silenus’s does.
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
nd not to get into a squabble with Sampiro, but tu quoqueing about Thomas Jefferson and William Sherman says more about hurt Southern feelings than about reality, as both of them had huge positive accomplishments that outweigh their negative qualities. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, not so much.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not comparing Thomas Jefferson to Lee and Jackson; I’m mentioning a case where the once romanticized racist horrors of the past, like the romanticism of racist horrors when these statues was put up, was dealt with in a way that not only deromanticized the person and the place but brought the previously suppressed dark side of the matter into full light and used it as a teachable moment. While not Civil War specific, it did seem relevant in a thread that is specifically about how to address racist monuments in such a way as to de-romanticize them and perhaps give the previously suppressed dark side light and use it as a teachable moment. And even if I had compared Jefferson, a pro-slavery Virginian, to pro slavery Virginians Jackson and Lee (which I didn’t), who were also pro-slavery Virginians (out-of-context quotes by Lee that seem to condemn slavery notwithstanding, he was pro-slavery) I’m not certain how that would qualify as tu quoque.
I’m not sure what other accomplishments you’re referring to with Sherman that would qualify as “huge positives”. His presidency of what’s now LSU? Lee was president of West Point but you don’t seem to think that counts. His wars against native Americans and call for vengeance against “all savages” after Custer’s death? That’s not something most would see as a noble thing in this day and age. His Senate and Cabinet careers? That was his brother (who he barely knew- they didn’t grow up together). His anti Catholic writings? His painting? What was his other great contribution? (He is credited with the birth of the modern demolitions movement, but even that is directly war related.)
It’s not “hurt Southern feelings”.
You have been taking my words out of context and assailing me as some kind of lost cause apologist for almost a decade. I’m not: I probably write more against Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee than anybody you’ve ever met and I’ve been actively involved with trying to get their statues removed from the two high schools (both predominantly black) in the city where I live for two decades. I’ve been called too radical on these boards because I’ve suggested a historically accurate re-creation of a slave auction just to remind people of how brutal a past the south has whenever they try to romanticize it. I simply don’t see history as a one-dimensional matters in which all people on one side of a war are evil and all on the other side are pure of heart. (There are very few real monsters in history- there are a few, but most people in history’s conflicts aren’t DC Universe super-villains and brooding heroes.)
It was in fact your harassment of me and continued twisting of my words and asinine statement that digitized Civil War newspapers cannot be primary sources if they’re on a website that has South in the title (this thread) even after I repeatedly asked for a truce because my beloved dog was dying, that led to the moment of clarity when I stopped posting anything substantive to the SDMB. (Well, that and Martin Hyde’s comments.) I’ve mainly done thread games and the occasional Cafe Society thread since then. I’ve kind of been knee deep in the statue matter- pissing off people on both sides, I’ll admit, because once again I don’t see it as a simple matter but one that requires some planning and diplomacy and compromise, especially considering the amount of money it costs and the precedents it is setting and the lawsuits and protests it is generating and giving such unbelievably valuable fuel to demagogues in a time when we are as divided as we are in 1861.
Anyway, WTF ever. You win, jackmanni. Congrats. Jefferson Davis was the greatest human who ever lived, if Jesus Christ had a baby with Marie Curie there’s no way they could improve on him, I wish I was in Dixie and hooray for the Bonnie Blue Flag, Oh Belvedere come here boy and fetch me a julep.
This is my official last post on the SDMB. It’s been real.
Sherman’s huge positive was helping save the Union, breaking the back and morale of the Confederacy and pummeling them into submission. That should be enough.
And few of the statues in question have any artistic or historical value; most are literally mass produced low quality junk, created by a handful of KKK-supporting businesses during the Civil Rights era specifically for the purpose of threatening black people. Somebody on another forum called them “KKK Garden Gnomes”.
Would it be possible to auction them off? Perhaps with a prohibition against them being exhibited publicly. It would keep possible historic evidence available and who cares if the local charter of KKK have a statue of Lee, they probably have something like it anyway.
If you want to make that analogy, what are the bad acts that blacks are doing now that are comparable to the evils of slavery and Jim Crow? Because as I see it, the main things blacks have been doing is saying things like “don’t lynch me, bro”, “Yeah, I should get to vote,” “Yeah, I should be able to eat at a lunch counter,” “Yeah, my kid should be able to go to school”. Making a ‘both sides’ argument when the side in favor of slavery and white supremacy is so obviously wrong just doesn’t work.
No, this is to continue fighting the Civil Rights fights of the 1960s, when the majority of the monuments were put up. Pretending that the statues are really about the 1860s is historical revisionism. They were about 20th century oppression of blacks, and trying to pretend that they’re distant past when they were put up to intimidate people who are alive today is absurd.
Absolutely yes, the statues are provocations from 50 years ago, not 175 years ago. We, the thinking Progressive Left, can continue poking the enraged White supremacists with exactly the kinds of hot emotional crap that will keep them enraged and escalating things. And we can parlay this into a quasi race war at least in the South if we’re not careful.
Or we can make a large-scale effort to do the things it takes to give room for calm and sober people to once again seize both the narrative and the initiative.
We should be careful not out of fear of them, but rather out of a thoughtful decision about what will actually advance our agenda, not just what will feel good for a few huors.
I’m 100% in favor of eliminating white supremacy. Along with the deeply faulty revisionist history of the South that feeds and nurtures it. I do *not *see the wisdom in handing them a gigantic propaganda victory for their echo chambers by engaging in widespread statuary genocide.
It might feel good, but IMO it will not advance our goals. So we oughtn’t do it.
Yeah, like sending in those outside agitators to register black people to vote, forcing integration of the schools and so on. It just riles up the racists.
Advertise that anyone who wants to can apply to take it away as scrap. First come, first served. Take applications and give everyone a time and date.
At their appointment time, they can come on down, with whatever vehicles, equipment, and personnel they like, short of explosives. Anything they can cut off and haul away in an hour is theirs.
No, you’ll just have a bunch of people who call but never show up and another handful who show up and say “I have $10 cash. And you’ll have to ship it because my truck is too small.”
In theory, but it would be hard finding someone willing to pay for what is basically junk. Their entire function is to be displayed as a threat and insult to black people; they can’t do that in a warehouse somewhere.
As to Stone Mountain specifically, I think the whole park should be turned into a Civil War monument, telling the whole story from as many points of view as possible - Unionist, Secessionist, White, Black, other countries.
It’s not so important to celebrate history as it is to understand it.
