Donald J. Trump looks in the mirror every morning, hoping to see Rambo, or John Wayne, gazing back. A man among men, respected by his friends, feared by his enemies, and desired by every woman. A leader with the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the strength of Samson. A man with many statues commemorating his eternal magnificence.
A man, in other words, totally unlike Donald J. Trump.
Ozymandias was fake news. Donald Trump is a fake Ozymandias.
Not that Trump has ever heard of Ozymandias, or that he would understand the poem if someone read it to him. But I’m convinced that, underneath Trump’s frantic defense of Confederate monuments, is a dim recognition that those statues are remnants of a world that is rapidly slipping into irrelevance, and taking him with it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s better to burn out, or to fade away, if both things are happening at the same time. Either way, Trump is beginning to see that he’s part of the world that’s busy dying, rather than the one that’s busy being born.
But I was talking about statues. I don’t know where I picked up the idea, but I’ve long believed that there was a consistent symbolism for military statues featuring a horse and rider. I thought the number of hooves on the pedestal signaled whether the rider died in battle (two hooves up), from a wound received in battle (one hoof up), or of non-military causes (all four hooves on the ground).
That begs the question of the symbolic meaning of other possibilities – are there any statues featuring a horse with one hoof down/three up, or with all four hooves off the ground? In the latter case, I’d assume the rider died in a merry-go-round accident. But apparently the whole thing is an urban legend, or a rural legend, or at least fake news of some sort. Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
Thus disillusioned, I find myself asking – what’s the point of statues, anyway? Why are they such a big deal? I get the impulse to pull them down, especially if they’re depicting racist scum. I even get the impulse to find a statue to pull down in your locale, racist scum or no, because you want to be one of the cool kids, someone who can tell their grandchildren that they were part of the Great De-Statue-fication Movement of 2020. Even if the statue you pulled down was one of the good guys. You can’t be performative unless you perform.
It’s a time-honored tradition for new rulers to pull down monuments to the old regime. It goes back at least 3,400 years ago, when Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (who changed his name to Akhenaten), decided to rid Egypt of his predecessors’ images. Don’t remember Akhenaten? It’s because his successors tore down his monuments. And so it goes, from one dynasty to the next. You can talk about heritage-not-hate all you want, but eventually, someone’s going to hate your heritage, and burn it to the ground.
Is it even possible to separate the heritage from the hate? I’m not old enough to remember Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, but I do remember the 1990s, and the breakup of Yugoslavia. It turned out that the citizens of that “nation” – Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians – had hated each other for centuries. Americans were like, “why can’t you guys just get along?” And one side would come back with, “Yeah, but what about that massacre in Kosovo back in 1448?” And then the other side would say, “Hell no – we were just getting even for the earlier massacre in Kosovo in 1369.”
Pro tip of the day: you’ll never get even by exchanging massacres. When you’ve got seven centuries of history weighing you down, it’s hard to let bygones be bygones.
In one way, Americans are lucky we have so little history to weigh us down. But these Confederate statues are part of the weighing down process. Statues are markers put down by the dominant culture of the time. Hey, look at us – we won the war; all hail our conquering general. Or: hey, look at us – maybe we lost the war, but we can win the peace if you let us put up statues of racist treason weasels.
It says here that we need to de-politicize public art, by which I mean government-sponsored art. And since that sort of art is almost always political, that means cutting way back on depictions of politicians and generals.
The first step is easy – no public monuments to traitors. That means no Confederates. Because we know that the bulk of the statues that are causing all the commotion were raised in the early 20th century, as part of an attempt to rehabilitate the Confederacy.
Fuck them. Let their fans start a GoFundMe for a Treason Museum and stick their Confederate statues there. That’s the easy part.
But if there’s an insatiable demand for Confederate monuments, I’d be fine with statuary commemorating Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. I think a tableau featuring Jefferson Davis in chains in his prison cell would be fine. As for those Civil War re-enactors, if they can’t-stop/won’t-stop, let them re-enact Sherman’s march to the sea.
But all of this begs the question of the rationale for putting up statues, murals, and other works of art that commemorate political events. Who should we remember, and why? And from among them, which ones deserve more lasting physical memorials?
As Hippocrates noted 2500 years ago (after Akhenaten, before Robert E. Lee), “ars longa, vita brevis.” Life is short, but art will be around for a long time. All of us need to remember that the people we think of as heroes – Eisenhower, MacArthur, Patton, Pershing, Roosevelt, Grant, Washington, etc. – were all human beings with their share of flaws to go along with their accomplishments. And future generations may have different ideas about how to weigh those competing records.
I understand the desire to honor heroes. But once you get past the Washingtons and Lincolns, the duration of public gratitude has a much shorter shelf-life. Maybe a few of you remember Audie Murphy. You can check his Wikipedia page for details, but he’s one of America’s most decorated soldiers. During World War II, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. If you’ve heard of him at all, it’s likely for his film career, not for the military exploits that brought him to Hollywood’s attention.
If you’re a member of the Lost Cause Losers Club, and your fondest dream is to actually own a black person, your heroes are losers, pretty much by definition. But for the rest of us? Is the best way to celebrate Washington, Lincoln, Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, Millard Fillmore, or [insert your favorite figure from American history here] to put up a statue of them? That seems like old fashioned thinking to me; statues just become part of the scenery. Put ‘em on money? Put ‘em on stamps? Like stamps are going to be around longer than confederate general statues?
The way to honor history’s good guys is to make sure the story of their lives are passed down, generation to generation.
Where I live (Tucson, Arizona, USA), we have lots of great public art. We have a giant African elephant sculpture at the entrance to the zoo, a giant T-Rex at the entrance to a McDonald’s, and a giant lumberjack in the parking lot of an auto supply store. We have giant tweezers at the entrance to the University of Arizona, and we have a giant replica of an Easter Island Moai outside a campus bar. The T-Rex and the Moai represent vanished cultures, in a manner of speaking, but the T-Rex is currently sporting a COVID-19 mask, so Tucson’s Dinosaur-American community is pretty woke.
Tucson is also a great city for murals, including those by the fabulous Joe Pagac. That’s a story for another time, (but here’s the link, in case I don’t get around to it: http://joepagac.net/murals#/public-murals).
We’re living in crazy times. Bad things are happening, and the bad people in charge are failing us. It’s frustrating, and I understand the temptation to lash out. But it’s important to keep our eyes on the prize. And statues are not the prize. The White House is the prize – well, the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The good guys will have an opportunity to take those institutions back on November 3.
Donald Trump is basically a weed, an organism that thrives in disturbed soil. He’s an expert at disturbing soil; there’s no need to help him add to the chaos. I say let’s dial back the short-term gratification and act strategically. Our job is to be better than they are.
The most effective way to repudiate Trump is to overwhelm him at the ballot box in November. Let’s vote in such numbers that even Vladimir Putin can’t save the Republican Party. er
In the meantime, here’s Percy Bysshe Shelley:
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
