I am impelled to disgorge stuff that can only properly be labeled as absurd, but you will remember the ancient argument in logic, reductio ad absurdum, that is, reducing the position of your opponent to the point of absurdity. The subject here is “The Statues.”

You’ve heard, in purple outrage, seventy-eight dust-ups about our need to rename or destroy various statues, many relating to Founding Fathers and Civil War generals. Some might have escaped your notice:

(1)  A kerfuffle has arisen here in Texas calling for the re-naming of Ft. Hood (but one of tens of thousands of potential re-naming efforts in Texas alone) because John Bell Hood was a Confederate general in the Civil War.

(2)  And surely the Jefferson Memorial in D. C. has to go. Or be re-named, since Jefferson famously owned slaved. 

(3)  If one US memorial must be demolished (re-naming not being sufficient to erase the degradation of its honoree), it is the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. Re-naming it wouldn’t be severe enough because of his miscreant life of white supremacy. But didn’t he say plainly a thousand times that slavery was an evil thing which must finally die, and that the only reason he didn’t seek immediate abolition where it already existed was that to do so would destroy the union, i.e., the United States, and didn’t he send a nation to war, costing over 500 thousand lives, in behalf of blacks (the one time in human history when any nation went to war for the deliverance of blacks), and didn’t he actually pen, and fight for the adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation? Well, yes, he did all that and much more for blacks, but remember: many say he shouldn’t have cared a fig for saving a slave-honoring union. Further, we can’t be sure, we are told, that he was severe enough with his wife’s slavery connection. Her family, the Todds, owned slaves, which puts her too close to slavery to give her, and thus him, a pass. (Lincoln does confess to the Todd family pride; said God needed only one “d” and they needed two. Yes, of course, the war was about other matters, but had there been no slavery there would have been no civil war in America.)

(4)  Naturally, and logically, Mount Rushmore has to be demolished as well. Or have the faces re-done. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln simply cannot be allowed to remain. And Teddy Roosevelt could easily, upon closer scrutiny, be classed as a “white supremacist.” He was assuredly a supremacist something! And could have, should have (as with millions of others of us) “done more for blacks.”

5)  And how can we allow Big Tex to continue standing over Texas State Fair multitudes when he represents a cowboy and cowboys killed Indians? Or allow the Dallas Cowboys to retain their now-besmirched name?

(6)  Allow me to bypass a massive number of other changes required—hundreds of thousands of institutions of every sort: parks, streets, rivers, rivulets, mud-holes, cats, dogs, autos, horses, songs, movies; because, dear reader, you can bore yourself as easily as I can.

(7)  Another as-yet-unmentioned (!) mother lode of worthy investigation of racial toxicity? There is the matter of finding and punishing the posterity of the black slave-traders in Africa who rounded up their cousins and sold them off to the white slavers. And black slavers. And what about the ship-builders, ship-owners, food and tackle suppliers? Add those who created the astrolabes, sextants, and such, enabling safe passage across the Atlantic. Must be dealt with. 

How long will it go on? Only God knows. No good man argues that the blacks were not mistreated in every nation of any size on earth, among all classes, and, alas, are still mistreated in many places and ways, even in America. Sometimes. By some.  And what that good man knows as well, is that, despite tectonic progress made in behalf of all minorities in America, legitimate arguments can be made, and should be, that changes must still be made. What no good man knows, however, is when we’ll ever get paid up. Is there any single good, or assortment of goods, for whatever length of time, at whatever cost, to however many, which will suffice to atone for our national sin against the first black slave who arrived on our shores. 

There is something else no good man, or bad man, knows: how much will future Americans lose in the abolition of much of our history, bad as a lot of it was. There is no easy answer. And we are not close to one, easy or not. 

While we’re on the subject: for years a 7-ton statue of Lenin has stood in Seattle. It is owned by an individual who will sell it to you for a reputed $250,000. Most people, we are told, are rather blase about it. A statue of Lenin doesn’t spark as much interest as does that of an American Founding Father because—for all his astounding moral latitudinarianism—Lenin never truly debased himself by being a white American.  

How does one go about putting out the fire in one’s hair while listening to some idiot defend a “no border wall” rule for one’s country?

I kindly repeat a line from our rustic friends: “It oughta be a law ‘gin stupid.”

The story of walls is intriguing: the “Great Wall” of China, Hadrian’s wall, the Berlin Wall, the modern Israeli wall, but THE WALL which currently produces the ocean of vitriol is the one proposed on America’s southern border.

We are told by the left that we shouldn’t cringe behind walls, living in isolation and fear; we should fearlessly, and lovingly, move out from behind our walls and embrace, well, whatever walks in.

In fact, your life and mine are, in every way, literally defined by walls of one sort or another, even if we are the freest human on the planet. There are the walls of your own living space—your house. If the no-wallers are right, do we really need them? And “walls” called doors? If you’re serious, take them off tonight and lie down to pleasant dreams, free and unrestricted and unafraid, embracing your freedom. Have you a fence about your property? What a waste of time, effort and money and what a frank declaration of your fear-stricken pathetic little life.

You are a young mom and you have three caterwauling (i.e., normal) sprouts running through your house, and you don’t want bathroom walls?

Most operating rooms I have ever seen are seriously walled spaces. Hotel walls? Sports walls? Driving “walls?” Movie walls? Study walls? Zoo walls? Ranch “walls?” Prison walls? Et cetera, ad infinitum.

None of that speaks of the unseen walls inside of which our treasured liberties are found: the wall of police protection, the wall of our military, the endless walls of our national Constitution (what is it, at bottom, but a compendium of walls within which we are privileged to live out our lives?), the walls of our innermost thoughts, our psychical and spiritual life. (“Oh, no problem; I open all the doors of my soul to everyone; feel free to walk in wherever and whenever you wish in your hob-nailed boots!) Your cranium? A tough and necessary wall, I should think.

You and I don’t possess a single solitary liberty of any kind which does not, by definition, involve a wall of one sort or another.

Our ex-president’s calm and assuring, almost pastoral, words pleading with us to abandon our walls was speaking, specifically, about that aforementioned literal wall on our southern border, a wall designed to prevent uncounted hordes from entering, and a wall which he and his leftist friends demonstrably detest.

None of what I have written here represents a plea for a national anti-immigration policy. The historic fact is that America has allowed more immigrants into our country than any nation in human history. We allow more than a million new legal immigrants in every single year. Perhaps we could and should allow several more millions into the country annually. That would be an interesting conversation. What I am arguing here is that to say that 7.4 billion people should feel free to walk in at any time they wish, and that we should welcome them, feed, clothe and house them is provable idiocy. It is, in fact, expressive of a deep hatred for America, and a wish for its demise. Will someone please name a nation which does not—for all the obvious reasons—have borders? If you ask why Europe’s nation-killing non-wall policy doesn’t bother the left, the answer is: Europe is what they want here. They lust for Europe on American soil. Belgium writ large!

Robert Frost has that hauntingly beautiful line which opens his “Mending Walls:” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Well, yes and no! Walls may, at times, be painful to our kinder sensibilities, but the brutal fact is: to be fenceless is to be defenseless. Frost’s sentiment touches something essentially human in our psyche, but so does the sentence his pragmatic neighbor continues to say in response to him: “Fences make good neighbors.” Maybe both are right. While pondering that issue, I say build the wall.

Oh, and, for the record: the place of greatest freedom ever imagined is heaven, with its impenetrable wall, a wall that does what all walls do—keep bad things out and good things in.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas