What’s the market price per pound for MM (Melted Monuments)? Help for a local budget?
Melt the racist monuments down and blast off the faces of Stone Mountain.
Hey kids, case you hadn’t noticed over the last week or so, the USA has one hell of a racism problem, so let’s be clear: those are monuments to racism, erected by racists, and perpetuated by racists. The racists have had over 155 years to get over it and start behaving like decent people, but instead they take pride in their racism, trying to fool people, and certainly fooling themselves, into believing that despite their being racists, they are really only just respecting racists of the past when racism was openly noble rather than discriminated against as it is today.
Sheesh, what is it with multi-generational racists: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions from being smacked in the forehead too many times? I don’t know and I don’t care. What I care about is that they perpetuate their rancid belief system in which racism is at the core, so at least remove their shrines and rub their noses in their racism, rather than continue to pretend that there were noble people on both sides, for there were not.
Really?
And blasting away Stone Mountain will do…what??? Such a move would be very expensive and remove a major tourist attraction for the area.
And they better blow up Mount Rushmore also because 2 of the presidents owned slaves and did bad things to indians plus it was carved by the same man who carved Stone Mountain.
No statue or carving ever hurt anyone. A kid wont suddenly learn more because his school was renamed from Robert E Lee High to Malcolm X High.
Now if a community votes to remove them, remove them. Put them in some obscure park or sell them.
But giving anyone license to just run around pulling statues down is stupid. It does about as much to ending racism as banning plastic straws does to save the oceans.
Doubtful. People don’t go just because of Lee, Davis, and Jackson. People would still visit the huge rock/mountain.
Remove Lee, Davis and Jackson from Stone Mountain.
Hardly. That’s like saying no flag or icon ever hurt anyone. Try that with a Nazi swastika. Symbols and statues can celebrate, and symbols and statues can also incite anger and hatred.
Agree with you about not giving just anyone license to run around and pull down statues. But I sure hope you’re avoiding plastic straws.
Mount Rushmore was designed by Gutzon Borglum. He was the initial designer for the Confederate Memorial Carving at Stone Mountain, but was fired from the project soon after carving started and all of his work was removed. Augustus Lukeman then took up the project for a few years before it was halted due to property rights issues. Finally, Walker Hancock and Roy Faulkner finished the design and carving almost 60 years after its conception.
That said, it’s a gigantic memorial to racism, created by racists for racists, in a state park specifically created to honor racism. (Did you know that the park opened on April 14, 1965? One hundred years to the day after Lincoln’s assassination. Just a coinky-dink, I’m sure.) If it were economical, I might be convinced that carving the relief out of the mountain and putting it in a Museum Of Abject Ignorance and Stupidity is an option. But, since I’m sure that would cost more than a few dollars, I’m good with just sandblasting away.
It would signify that America is serious about rejecting any semblance of honoring people who fought for white supremacism. A symbolic gesture, sure… but symbolic gestures can be powerful.
If your high school is named after someone who fought for the right to enslave and rape your ancestors, then maybe you’d consider its teachings a bit less legitimate than if it was named after someone who fought for your freedom. These symbols matter, like it or not. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
No, it just makes people feel a little better.
Look, almost every major city has a school named after Martin Luther King. Are those schools so great?
Why doesnt every liberal white parent who “claims” to be so enlightened and non-racist put their own kids in such a school?
It’s ironic that someone from Kansas is so pro-Confederecy.
It’s much better than Adolph Hitler Middle School, or Ted Bundy High.
If glorifying the literal Ku Klux Klan is a significant tourist attraction, then that tells you that there’s something seriously wrong that needs to be fixed.
And yes, Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. And yes, that’s bad. But, and here’s the key point, that’s not why we celebrate those people. We celebrate Washington because he was the general who won our independence, and helped form our nation in a democratic, just way. He did this despite the fact that he owned slaves. If it weren’t for slavery, he would be no less great.
Compare to Lee, whose sole claim to fame is committing treason against his state and nation, for the sake of the cause of owning slaves. Were it not for slavery, he would be a nobody, and he was squarely on the wrong side of the issue. Glorifying Lee is glorifying slavery, plain and simple.
Easy for you to say – but these folks didn’t fight for the right to enslave and rape your ancestors. Maybe if they did, you’d feel differently. Their experiences are different than yours, and you can’t insist that you know how they should or would feel.
Many of them are!
Some do. Perhaps more should. But the potential hypocrisy of some liberal white people is irrelevant to whether we should memorialize and honor the history of people who fought for the right to rape and enslave black Americans.
There’s a place for monuments to Confederate troops killed in battle. Cemeteries.
Monuments to a (mostly) outstanding general like Robert E. Lee? Military museums.
The public square, courthouses and state capitols? Nope, not any more.
Hard to believe anyone still thinks it’s acceptable to send kids to a school named for someone who fought for the right to oppress their ancestors.
And my opinion on Stone Mountain–it is the largest sculpture in the world, and a staggering artistic achievement no matter what the subject matter. Anyone who would destroy it is absolutely in no way whatsoever even remotely better than the Taliban who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Really? No matter the subject matter? So a swastika would be okay? How about a bunch of KKKers burning black children? How about Hitler on a mound of Jewish corpses? If those images were done with the same “artistic” skill and ability as Stone Mountain, would you fight efforts to change it?
:dubious: That’s a pretty ridiculous comparison. The Bamiyan Buddhas were a 1500-year-old priceless repository of historical information and irrecoverable cultural and artistic heritage. The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving is a modern artwork completed less than fifty years ago, for the express purpose of commemorating and glorifying a cause built on fundamental denial of human rights and reinforced by centuries of atrocious acts of oppression.
We don’t need the Confederate Memorial Carving as a historical or cultural monument, and the fact that any of us in the 20th century ever thought that its cause deserved an impressive monument in the first place is a national disgrace.
Sure, we should document everything we can about its creation and workmanship, for the historical record. But we don’t need to keep it proudly on official display, any more than you’d keep your great-grandfather’s KKK robes painstakingly displayed on a mannequin in your living room, although you might store them in a box somewhere as a curiosity of family history.
Failing that, I have an alternative suggestion: The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving should be maintained in its present form as an official monument, but a system of carefully maintained latrines should be constructed on a ledge above it, where African-American park visitors are invited to shit into receptacles emptying directly onto the statues. The resulting ordure is to be either left in situ or cleaned up in person by white officials of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association. Sounds to me like a perfectly reasonable compromise.
I have a better idea than sandblasting, and it would set up such magnificent cognitive dissonance in the 2nd Amendment proponent/Confederate apologist community. Rent the 155M howitzer from Battlefield Vegas and sell the right to shoot at the mountain. Shooting a single round goes for $2500, so double that to pay for transporting the gun, cleaning up the rubble when the project is done, etc., and it pays for itself.
I grew up in Georgia (ATL specifically). Just about every year, we would have school field trips to Stone Mountain.
The Confederate generals celebrated on the side of the rock were not the point of our visits. Rather, we were brought there because hello! It’s a gigantic rock and spectactular in own rights!
It is also a tourist draw because it’s a state park. There’s a big swimming hole there as well as a water park. As a kid, the family used to watch the nightly laser shows–don’t know if that’s still a thing. And OMG can you get a good work-out walking up the “mountain”.
There’s a concession stand at the summit. Once on a field trip, I bought a much-needed hot dog after practically killing myself on the hike. Right when I was about to bite into it, it fell out of the bun. To my horror, I watched it roll all the way down the mountain. I had no more money left for a replacement. There was not a 12-year-old more bummed out than I was in that moment, lemme tell you! Thirty years later, that is still the first thing I remember when I think of Stone Mountain. I imagine there’s a bunch of lost hot dogs on that thing. Which is a hilarious image.
Confederate generals are not even in the top 2000 images that come to my mind when I think of Stone Mountain. So I would shed nary a tear if the carvings were rubbed out.
I have been to Stone Mountain and it is indeed an impressive park and tourist site. It would be so even without the Confederate monument.
I think a better idea than destroying it and damaging the rock surface even more, is to hire someone to chisel next to the existing monument: “Black Lives Matter”. This will serve as a better reminder of where we came from and where we need to get to - all in one.
It has a terrific dance program.