Today, as I watched a group of Americans topple a statue in Durham, NC, my mind was racing. This group of thugs dancing around, almost like a caricature of savages around a fire. They were hitting and kicking this inanimate piece of bronze like it was Reginald Denny*. Somewhere in that melee there had to be a “Love Trumps Hate” sign. I wasn’t seeing the love.
My first reaction was: Change their clothes and change their names, and these aren’t Americans, but ISIS and Taliban, razing Palmyra and blowing up statues of Budda.
As Don Corleone asked, “How did we ever get this far?
My second thought was about the marble statue of the soldier that had stood outside the RICO courthouse for many years. Now removed for restoration, he, along with his Durham counterpart, facing the unknowns of war, both living with the mores of the time, going to fight for their respective countries. The main difference these 150 years later is that the guy in Durham, his side lost the war.
Then I thought about local monuments. There’s a Confederate cemetery on the Rock Island Arsenal. Should those headstones be crushed to powder? Should we disinter those slave-loving SOBs and scatter their remains to the 4 winds?
What about the “Buffalo Bill” Cody museum in LeClaire, IA? He killed thousands of buffalo, contributing to the genocide of Native Americans. Then he exploited those same once proud people, parading them around the world like zoo animals, calling them “Indians”. How can this be allowed to stand? Burn it down!
Finally, Velie park in Moline has a statue of a man with a rifle. It’s a Spanish-American war memorial. That war ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US, stripping those people of their sovereignty. Worst of all, it led to our occupation of Guantanamo Bay, where we have tortured and abused the rights of thousands of practitioners of “The religion of peace”. It’s got to go.
I’d say I was using the gimmick of “Illustrating the absurd by being absurd” but in today’s world…… I dunno.
*L.A. riot reference.
Eugene Mattecheck Jr.
Excellent commentary Mr. M.
More historical perspective in this short piece than our school children will get in 12 to 20 years.
Wait until John Deere’s steel plow becomes, not the tool that allowed America to feed the world, but the device that turned a vast bio-diverse prairie into a highly erodible desert of wheat and corn and soybeans.
Are you suggesting those plowshares should be beaten into weapons? And stamp out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored? Oh, the horror!!!