Dolt 45, our fake president, is stupidly defending the indefensible by calling racists/fascists/Nazis "very good people" and by conflating the American Revolution with the American Civil War. A historian he ain't!
Disputatious Donny has put the ugly-right's panties in a bunch by whining about the systematic removal throughout the South of statues and monuments honoring the Confederacy. His tired old argument is a version the Domino Theory: "First it's Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. What's next? George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? They were slave owners, you know."
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| Statue of Stonewall Jackson & Robert E. Lee taken down last night in Baltimore |
A statue is not history. Our history is the accumulated knowledge of the past, a compilation of all things remembered, contained in a multitude of written documents, stories and images, preserved in libraries, on the internet, on film and in song. Our history doesn't change and it never goes away. It's always there for us, recorded somewhere, somehow.
A statue, monument, or flag is, itself, nothing more than a symbol (and as George Carlin said, "I'll leave those to the symbol-minded."). It stands for something, it represents something, maybe good, maybe bad. The Nazi flag, for example, now symbolizes all the evil of Hitler's Germany, the Holocaust, concentration camps, etc. In today's Germany, you can find many memorials to persecuted, martyred Jews, but none to the Nazis. The swastika is never displayed or honored. There are no statues of Hitler or Goerring. Germans have by no means forgotten their history and heritage. They deal with it every day, honestly and appropriately. They still have Nazi flags and images of Nazi leaders, but they're relegated to the archives of history in libraries and museums. This is where they belong, not in the public square.
Washington and Jefferson fought to create and preserve this country. A statue of a Confederate soldier honors those who fought to tear it apart. It symbolizes the dishonorable fight to divide the nation and preserve our most immoral institution -- slavery.
Most of the monuments to the Confederacy were erected well into the 20th century, long after the South had lost the war. There are hundreds of these memorials across the region, and they had less to do with honoring southern "heritage" than they did with bolstering the self-esteem of southern whites while sending a "don't forget your place" message to southern blacks.
There is no real justification for these meritless public memorials to a horribly unjust cause. Get rid of 'em! Yes, the Civil War did take place and many fought and died on the Confederate side. But if you need a statue of Lee or Jackson on your Main Street, or a rebel flag on your statehouse to help you keep your infamous heritage at full strength, you have a truly weak and lazy mind. Go to the goddam library and look it up! It'll always be there.
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Interestingly, Buster himself has a Confederate statue. Let me explain.
It's a small bust of Robert E. Lee, maybe 7-8 inches tall, and I've had it for maybe 25 years. It was given to me by my late Aunt Rosalie, a.k.a. Podie, my father's sister. As I knew her, Podie was a well-off widow who lived on a former tobacco farm in rural Maryland. She was gregarious, cantankerous, generous and funny as hell. She was a bit of the Grande Dame of Upper Marlboro, and my dad occasionally called her "The Duchess."
Although Maryland was directly below the Mason-Dixon Line (and therefore part of the South), it was officially neutral during the Civil War. Public sentiment ran both ways back then, and does to this day. Aunt Podie, though, firmly maintained that Maryland was "always" a Confederate state, an opinion she signaled by displaying the bust of General Lee front and center on her mantelpiece.
Near the end of her life, she gave away a few of her cherished items and family heirlooms. I was lucky enough to receive a couple pieces of furniture, some silverware and, for some unknown reason, her little statue of Robert E. Lee.
The piece held no particular meaning to me. In fact, I always found it mildly embarrassing. Out of respect to Podie, it was unobtrusively kept in our dining room, on the bottom shelf of a lamp table. And there it sat for years, in honor of my aunt, not the general.
But this morning, I decided to do the same as Charlottesville, Baltimore, and all the other cities removing their old Confederate symbols -- I took down Robert E. Lee. Before consigning him to the dustbin of basement storage, I put him on the kitchen table for one last photo.Now he rests next to our furnace, and our dining room will survive perfectly well without General Lee.
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