'Our Beautiful Statues'

It looks like the President is going to give love to those who love him, and not give a damn about anyone else's opinion. In the continuing debate over the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, Trump at least has a leg to stand on when he asserts that both "alt-right" and "alt-left" (antifa, etc) were violent, though that means neither that both sides are equally to blame, as some infer him to mean, nor that the left has any share in the blame for the vehicular homicide that climaxed the day. The President might have furthered a useful conversation about an emerging violent streak on the left or the question of whether the alt-right has a right to assembly without molestation. But he's just about blown any chance of that conversation happening soon with his tweets and other comments in defense of Confederate monuments.

Trump reached a new low this morning when he took to Twitter to decry the removal of "our beautiful statues." For the most part he reprised his arguments of the other day, in which he equated the removal of Confederate statues with the rewriting of history and worried that Washington and Jefferson might be purged from "history" because they owned slaves. But that "our statues" bit was an insult to most of the country. Donald Trump may be our President, some far-leftists notwithstanding, but those definitely are not "our" statues, and it's sad, to use words Trump will understand, to think that he thinks of them as his statues. For all I know, the fool may simply like them because they're pretty. That's what I get, in a generous frame of mind, when he tweets about "the beauty that is being taken out of our cities." I suppose he'd find statues of Lenin and Stalin beautiful as well, when he visits Russia, and he might well feel the same way about statues of Mao in China, or the Kims in North Korea. As for the good old U.S.A., he tries to justify his stance by tweeting, "You can't change history [even though that's what he accused the statue-removers of doing], but you can learn from it." But what exactly can you learn from a statue? That Robert E. Lee was a handsome man, or a brave one? In fact, we do need to learn from history, but can we learn anything we need about Confederate heroes from these statues? All they really teach us is that the defeated foot-soldiers of a defeated conspiracy still saw their leaders as heroes, when they had no cause to that the rest of us are bound to respect. The old idea that even we in the north should look at the generals, at least, as tragic heroes of an American Iliad is garbage and has rightly been trashed. The right attitude toward those statues is probably something closer to what Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos etc. express whenever Japanese politicians visit the Yasukuni shrine where convicted war criminals are memorialized. As I wrote before, I understand the President's need or desire to pander to his perceived base, but for him to think, in the 21st century, that no one should be offended by the memorialization of slaveocratic secessionists, is maliciously ignorant. Maybe if he read books instead of admiring statues he'd have a better sense of history. And as for the "you will not replace us" crowd, if Confederate statues represent what they're worried about, then maybe they or their forebears should have been replaced a long time ago.