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.