Confederacy

Wednesday

Julia Friedman

What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves

Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end.

monuments

Wednesday

Cockburn

Why is Ellie Kemper being targeted? 

Comedienne Ellie Kemper is in trouble! What for? Well, it’s a bit hard to understand. Let Cockburn go and take a couple of hours to figure it out. … … ... OK, Cockburn is back — and more confused than ever. Apparently, Kemper, 41, is in trouble because she won a local St Louis beauty pageant 22 years ago, when she was 19. Why is that bad? The pageant was the Veiled Prophet Ball, put on by the Veiled Prophet Organization of St Louis. OK — and why is that bad? Well, the Veiled Prophet Organization was founded by white people, and didn’t admit black members until the 1970s. Also, sometimes its members dress in goofy outfits befitting organizations founded in the 1800s. And that’s it!

ellie kemper

Sunday

Daniel McCarthy

Self-righteous vandals

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

statues vandals history

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Cotton, slaves and arrogance: the message of Gone with the Wind

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

gone with the wind

Wednesday

J. Arthur Bloom

Does Ralph Northam know his great-grandfather was a white supremacist militant?

The great-grandfather of Virginia governor Ralph Northam was a leader of the Red Shirts, a quasi-Klan militant group known for terrorizing black Republicans during Reconstruction. Captain John Brownlee, who died in 1912, has his membership of the group mentioned in two obituaries. One obituary refers to ‘his valiant company of “Red Shirts,”’ and that ‘he did as much to redeem his country from Radical rule and tyranny as any other man in upper Carolina.’ The other obituary states that he ‘took a very active part in the red shirt times of ’76, being captain of one of the Abbeville companies.’ [caption id="attachment_10406766" align="alignnone" width="416"] An obituary to Capt. John E.

ralph northam