MONUMENTAL PROBLEMS

“Our monuments are representations of myth, not fact.” ~ Ken Burns 

 An early 20th-century European thinker wrote after WWI that “there is nothing as invisible as a monument.” During the past month, monuments have once again become not only visible, but lightning rods of attention.

Although our advancing, covid-based circumstances have brought out the humanity in many people, the media isn’t all that interested in such positivism. Far more prominent are the clashes and divergences.
     One of the latest of such clashes is what I liken to Monumental Problems. Especially those that are related in some folks’ view to events connected to the recent, unlawful and criminal deaths of Black people. The latest victims include George Floyd, Emmet Till, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Rayshaard Brooks and Ahmaud Arbery who themselves have become the now-justly-memorialized foundation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The bronze monuments of George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Robert Gould Shaw, Teddy Roosevelt and other leaders from the past have been sundered, toppled, defaced or removed by spirited crowds. Removing Mr. Lee and all of his Confederate cronies is completely warranted.

San Francisco protestors took down a statue of our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, whose military successes ended the Confederacy. But because he was given a slave whom he later freed before the Civil War, his sinful calumny was complete according to the activists. I don’t believe statues of President Grant should be destroyed. His personal fault is outweighed by his noteworthy and substantial public efforts to preserve the US and halt its disunion.

The protestors’ searing focus rests on specific facets of the bronzed leaders’ broad careers. The protestors, using their severe standards, want to demonstrably rectify these leaders’ past injustices. Meaning deposing these leaders’ no longer invisible statues. Thirteen (13) of our first 18 presidents were slave-holders. In retrospect, it’s a thoroughly ghastly record. The 1860 US Census documented that 12.6% of our national population – over 3.9 million people – were slaves. Should we now topple the Washington Monument because George (and Martha) had over 300 slaves at Mt. Vernon, or demolish the Jefferson Memorial because he had about 200 slaves?

The challenge is how we reconcile our distinctly-different, present-day moral judgments together with a recognition that our past describes an utterly differing nation. Can we the public resolve the protestors’ solitary focus on a single attribute of these leaders’ lives as a rationale for these statues’ destruction? Honestly, I find it difficult. Does that make me a racist?

Monument denouement is by no means new. On July 9, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was read aloud for the first time in Manhattan, NY to George Washington and his soldiers. Afterwards, his American patriots quickly went to a near-by park and toppled the statue of King George III of England, the colonies’ then-ruler. Soon thereafter the king’s lead sculpture was melted down to make musket ball-bullets for the muzzle-loading, flintlock rifles of Gen. Washington’s army. King George was thus converted into 42,088 bullets. This transmutation of the king’s statue into revolutionary ammunition has a certain exquisite irony. It was a-propos both of the patriots’ spirit of 1776, as well as the logistical realities of our war for Independence. The picture below shows a lead musket ball mold that my long-ago family ancestors used during the Revolutionary War and afterwards.

Monumental Problems are not limited to the present day nor to the US. Next year will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the toppling of Napoleon Bonaparte during the Paris Commune revolt. Not of Bonaparte’s rule or the man himself (he died 199 years ago), but of his memorial statue atop the Vendôme Column in Paris.

Similarly, three decades ago freedom-fighters in Ukraine and Hungary knocked down statues of their historic tyrants, Lenin and Stalin. A statue of Winston Churchill, who helped save the free world from massive Nazi brutality, was vandalized in London last weekend because of racist statements he once uttered.

Alas, there is no such thing as a pure past, or present. Like everyone, leaders are filled with human frailty, bias and defects. The past provides no untainted innocents. Utopian-minded protestors, understandably angered by present-day and past atrocities, demand retribution from bronzed likenesses of leaders who, despite other achievements, have strayed from the protestors’ thin, imagined lines of currently-defined purity.

I believe this movement offers yet another signal of refocused generational shifting. In many Millennials’ and Gen Z’s view, us Boomers’ facile dismissals of such egregious wrongs merits utter distain. How dare there be a statue of slave-holder President Grant prominently displayed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

We should recognize that inter-generational criticism is a timeless truism, present throughout the past and present. Perhaps the only certainty about the future is that some aspects of today’s life will be disparaged by generations to come.

Young people inevitably are accused of having insufficient respect for their elders, enjoying outrageous music and practicing increasingly strange rituals. Conversely, today’s younger folks disparage the ignorant beliefs and behaviors of their parents and earlier generations.

Really? What beliefs and behaviors of ours could possibly be belittled? Here’s a partial list: criminalizing homosexuality, not stopping or at the very least mitigating climate change, eating meat, prohibiting women and minorities from voting and not sufficiently combatting racial, economic and social inequities. Young people and others believe slavery, although legislatively outlawed in 1865 by the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, has continued to exist in other, not so sub-rosa forms ever since. Its continued presence now needs to be halted.

Hence, the inevitable Monumental Problems.