Statues

Even the most ardent Trumpist must admit that it has been a bad few months for the President. The COVID-19 crisis robbed Donald Trump of his strongest argument for re-election, the economy, and made his administration seem ineffectual. He was wrongfooted by the riots after George Floyd’s death. The country has been in chaos under his watch. He has looked weak, even disorientated. His polling slid.Yet Trump, ever the reality entertainer, loves a comeback story — and last night he launched his. Under the heads of Mount Rushmore, on a blue-white-and-red dais, the President marked Independence Day with a fiercely patriotic and defiant speech. It was an address that tackled, head on, the crisis that has rocked America in recent weeks.

Will nobody think of the pigeons? That thought has repeatedly occurred to me, as beloved roosts for generations of urban pigeons have been toppled in one city after another on both sides of the Atlantic by the radical left, in the greatest eruption of iconoclasm since the era when Theodora graced the burlesque stage in Constantinople. Tearing down Confederate war memorials, it turns out, is a gateway drug to toppling statues of Catholic saints, Civil War abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln himself. Gradually, it has dawned on a horrified, watching world: they don’t hate Confederates. They hate statues! All statues!Now, thanks to the actions of a lawless few, countless pigeons in cities in America and Europe have been rendered homeless.

'While Biden was in his basement, @realDonaldTrump had 5.3 MILLION+ viewers tune in to his rally,' wrote GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week. It's a variation on a theme for the Republican party of late: take the vacant airwaves left by a subdued Biden campaign and fill them with spurious claims about the whereabouts of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sure, Biden has been quiet, relative to Trump — who isn't? — but he hasn't been totally basement-bound. The former vice president has been venturing out for socially distanced local speeches. He gave one on healthcare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Thursday, stopped off in the Pennsylvania towns of Yeadon and Darby the week before, and hosted an economic round table in Philadelphia on June 11.

The Summer Of Our Discontent is in full swing and the social guillotines — at first applied to legitimate injustice and prejudice — have now come for history itself.We watch as mobs tear down statues and monuments to the past. The destruction is supposedly performed in the name of justice, but can we seize true justice by destroying the past?American history is a fascinating and sometimes tragic tale of oppression and rebellion, injustice and progress. There is a push and a pull to it all that has led us to be the most successful and prosperous society in human history.Undoubtedly there has been much pain: but how can we know how far we’ve come if we’re not allowed to see where we’ve been?The history of black America is an exhaustive tale of overcoming.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.   The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

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.

The war of the statues is no longer a battle over the memory of slavery, or the Confederacy, or the deployment of stone dead generals to reinforce Jim Crow. It is a battle over the legitimacy of the United States which, despite all the evils, is history’s greatest and possibly final experiment in human freedom.The struggle has turned from Confederate generals to the Founders: from those who seceded from the United States to those who laid its foundations. Students at the University of Missouri are petitioning for the removal of a statue of ‘racist slave owner’ Thomas Jefferson, whose statue at Birmingham, Alabama was damaged in an arson attack. Last week at George Washington University, Washington’s bust was toppled from its plinth.

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place. In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the US is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around folks who wished the South had won the Civil War and wanted to bring back slavery.