What Will You Do During the Statue Wars, Daddy?

From Forrest to Roosevelt, Confederates to Cervantes, Washington to Whittier, a discussion of iconography politics on The Reason Roundtable.

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What Will You Do During the Statue Wars, Daddy?

Let's see: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, (checks notes), uh, George Washington? Ulysses Grant? Francis Greenleaf freakin' Whittier? Sometimes it's protesters, sometimes it's the museum, sometimes it's a tagger, sometimes it's a Twitter troll—by whatever form, America in monthus bizzarus of June 2020 is suddenly having a convulsive conversation about iconography.

On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch nominate statues to protect, remove, and erect, while chewing over just where this tumult is heading, whether symbolically or concretely, policy-wise. The quartet also talks about President Donald Trump's weird Tulsa performance, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's weird final coronavirus presser, and which precise character Gillespie's haircut is ready to play in All the President's Men.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music: "Atlantis" by Audionautix.

Relevant links from the show:

"The Rights and Wrongs of Taking Down Monuments," by Ilya Somin

"Confederate Monuments Are Participation Trophies. Thankfully, Some Are Coming Down," by Billy Binion

"Police Violence, COVID-19 Lies, and the End of Legitimate Authority," by Nick Gillespie

"7 Race-Neutral Solutions to Racially Skewed Law Enforcement," by Jacob Sullum

"What Do Recent COVID-19 Trends Tell Us About the Merits of Lockdowns?" by Jacob Sullum

"Another Round of Coronavirus Lockdowns Might Be Coming. They'll Be Far Less Enforceable Than Before," by Eric Boehm

"A Hard Day's Night: Beatlemania Revisited," by Kurt Loder

What are we consuming this week?

Matt Welch

• A Hard Day's Night

Katherine Mangu-Ward

Peter Suderman

• Fleabag, season 1

Nick Gillespie

• The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter

---

Comments

[jhanial]

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[Rich]

What's magic about *statues*? If you're serious, go after the more common two-dimensional images.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

Statues are symbols. I am with George Carlin and leave the symbols for the symbol-minded.

[Nardz]

Fuck marxists, and their apologists

[loveconstitution1789]

Im sure you will say that when people tear down MLK statutes, AmerIndian markers and statutes, and the Washington Monument.

[Nardz]

Eunuch finds the Washington Monument very threatening

[mtrueman]

Puritan iconoclasm (destroying idols and images) goes back to the 1600s and before. It's also enjoyed state sponsorship from Henry VIII, Cromwell and others. Puritans also gave us witch hunts, criminalized adultery and blasphemy, banned the theatre and forbade May Day and Christmas celebrations.

[BigT]

ISIS agrees.

[darkflame]

Didn't the Byzantines also go through a whole iconoclasm as well? Part of the reason no one ever goes "oh look at that neo-Roman art?"

[mtrueman]

"Didn’t the Byzantines also go through a whole iconoclasm as well? "

Everyone does. Ever hear the phrase 'bonfire of vanities?'

You might want to read Romola by George Eliot (pen name for Mary Ann Evans, a female woman). It's about Florence under Savonarola when disease, warfare, famine and political upheaval plagued the republic.

Romola is not Eliot's finest work, in my opinion. That would be Middlemarch, arguable the finest English novel ever.

[Jayburd]

Nothing racist about Old 142. But it was removed anyway. Cornbinders rule! https://abcnews.go.com/US/wild-bus-airlifted-alaskan-wilderness-due-concerns-tourist/story?id=71342462

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I believe they removed it because too many flatlanders were traipsing to it and needing too many rescues.

[Jayburd]

White privileged hikers.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Frostbitten, yes, I bet some were.

[John]

And eaten by bears.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

I love Krakauer, but he fucked the pooch with that book. Poor Chris died from starvation, because he was woefully unprepared, and not because he ate a poisonous plant.

[Earth Skeptic]

Also, he was an idiot. Wild lands do not tolerate stupid.

[Dillinger]

clinically apathetic.

[Rossami]

I didn't pay attention to the Taliban or realize how evil they were until they destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan.

I'm starting to think the same things about the current crop of statue vandals.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

At least the Taliban are consistent in their ideology. The far left is a moving target.

[68W58]

Say what you will about the tenets of fundamentalist Islam, but at least it's an ethos.

[IceTrey]

A terrible one which requires its adherents to initiate force which is immoral.

[OldGuy]

Way to miss the funny movie quote reference

[Pyoucef]

I quit working at shoprite and now I make $65-85 per/h. How? I'm working online! My work didn't exactly make me happy so I decided to take a chance on something new.DXs after 4 years it was so hard to quit my day job but now I couldn't be happier.

Here’s what I do…...............Home Profit System

[John]

If Reason employed actual thinkers and writers rather than conformist hipster posers, they would publish something similar to this article on the statue issue. The money quote is:

But by far, the greatest danger in burning books and destroying statues is that it dehumanizes the persons or peoples represented by them. It could lead to a repeat of the political assassinations of the 1960s, a cold civil war, a new inquisition, or a bloody revolution.

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/iconoclasm-prelude-woke-horrors/?fbclid=IwAR3_E6hzT8wo-diIX_ltFTtcZXKAA27JilNAlk0aDwBLNoEqHuhbPKO2dsM

People don't naturally want to kill other people. To get a group of people to commit mass murder takes time. And the first step in that process is to dehumanize the people you want murdered. That is what is going on with these statues. It is a process whereby the left get's it's adherence to no longer see the other side as human beings. After that, the killing can begin.

[Paulpemb]

According to Joe Biden, 10%-15% of Americans are just 'bad people'. Hillary says half of Trump's supporters are 'irredeemable'. Trump got 62,000,000 votes, so the Left is looking at about 30,000,000 people.

The guy who helped Obama launch his political career wrote that about 25,000,000 Americans would have to die before he could create his ideal society, but that was 30 years ago and there's been some population inflation since then.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

That is the dumbest take on this ever. That's taking the "violent video games cause violence" idiocy to the next level.

[John]

No. You are just illiterate moron who knows nothing about history. They didn't start killing Jews in Nazi Germany or Kulaks in Soviet Russia. They started by burning books and tearing down symbols as part of a general effort to dehumanize people. It is process that starts with symbols and moves to real people.

Chipper, you are too stupid to have this conversation. You don't know anything and you are not bright enough to learn anything. I honestly don't think it is possible to dumb this topic down enough for you to participate. Just don't bother. You don't understand what is going on. We know that. You don't need to remind us.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

You know what dehumanizes people? Calling gay people degenerates. Calling all muslims terrorists. Calling women not rational. You know, things that you have done on here repeatedly.

[Mother's lament]

I've never seen John do any of that, you dishonest weasel.

[R Mac]

Says the guy who is a fucking racist.

[Liberty Lover]

Or calling Conservatives 'Deplorables'!
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-basket-of-deplorables/index.html

[mad.casual]

People are degenerates.
People are terrorists.
People are irrational.

I'm sure there's a woman, a homosexual, and a terrorist out there thrilled that you're standing up for the paper-thin personas you've constructed on their behalf. They're probably saying right now, "That Chipper Morning Wood guy, he's really humanizing. A real champion of humanity."

[Mother's lament]

Chippers not being stupid, he knows that.
Instead he's deliberately lying because he doesn't want to give away spoilers.

[mtrueman]

" It is process that starts with symbols and moves to real people. "

The destruction of Kulak symbols doesn't make sense. It was the food that the communists wanted and it was food that they confiscated. The Kulaks were predominantly Mensheviks in any case and their 'symbols' wouldn't be all that different from Bolshevik ones.

In Nazi Germany laws to punish Jewish businesses, bar Jews from the professions and Hitler's calls to boycott Jews were enacted early in 1933, before the book burnings which began in May.

If you are a dictator, you can start right in with the real people. There's no need to warm up with symbols.

[Sam Haysom]

Lol the Kaluks were absolutely not primarily Mensheviks. Lol state school fo sho.

[Liberty Lover]

The kulaks were hard working, successful farmers who had become just a little bit wealthy. In other words capitalist, which is why Stalin had them eliminated.

[mtrueman]

Being a 'little bit wealthy' did not make you a capitalist in Russia at the time. Donations from wealthy bankers financed many a Bolshevik operation like the newspapers Lenin put so much stock in. The wealthiest in Russia were apt to be monarchists, who feared capitalists almost as much as they did the socialists.

It's a mistake to project modern conceptions (wealth=capitalism) to other times and places.

[loveconstitution1789]

Ayn Rand’s family disagrees with you.

[mtrueman]

Ayn Rand's family were not kulaks or mensheviks. Neither did they donate to the Bolsheviks. Her family agrees with me completely and thinks you are retarded.

[mtrueman]

"Lol the Kaluks were absolutely not primarily Mensheviks."

That's what the results of Russia's last free election seem to indicate. But you already knew that, didn't you?

[IceTrey]

Yeah but in America the left does the dying.

[Juice]

I recently learned that there are over 200 confederate statues and memorials in the state of Virginia alone. These kids will be busy for a while

[Juice]

I recently learned that there are over 200 confederate statues and memorials in the state of Virginia alone. These kids will be busy for a while.

[John]

I bet that doesn't include all of the memorials on battlefields. It is a good thing that these people are as ignorant as they are. If they were not, they would know to go to the battlefields. As it is, they have no idea such places exist, for now.

[68W58]

Most of the battlefields are Federal property so damaging a monument there could draw a Federal charge. They won't risk that so long as Trump is in office, but with Biden and God knows who as AG all bets are off.

[Juice]

That Albert Pike statue was federal property, if I'm not mistaken.

[68W58]

Charges may be yet to come-it only happened a few days ago.

[Juice]

It was in front of a police station. No one stopped it from happening. It took a while. Those kids were out there for at least an hour rigging it up and pulling on it. Today the mayor was on TV talking about how destruction of property is unacceptable. Uh, ok.

[Adans smith]

This movement has become a pile of crap.

[Earth Skeptic]

Most movements lead to crap.

[loveconstitution1789]

Government has been out of control for decades with murder of unarmed people and more militaristic tactics.

Lefties dont want less government murder, they just want to control which political rivals get murdered.

[Ricport]

It always was a pile of crap. It's just now seeping into the groundwater that is civil society.

[Jayburd]

Captain Cook https://mustreadalaska.com/mayor-of-kenai-borough-says-hell-take-capt-cook-statue-mayor-ethans-hands/

[Mauser]

Reason is spineless in its pandering coverage of the fanatical leftist scourge taking place.
This is a culture war on the West and it’s been going on for a long time, the extreme fruits being bore after years of indoctrination by the education system and the media, but hey let’s keep virtue signaling.

[Mother's lament]

Class loyalties, that's why.

[Juice]

I just remembered a funny thing last on TV either last night or the night before. They interviewed an old black man about the statue thing and he said that it was a good thing that people are finally trying to wipe out all this racism that's all around us. He was wearing a Redskins cap.

[Earth Skeptic]

Come on, you know that only white people can be racist.

[loveconstitution1789]

The Black Caucus in Congress cannot possibly be racist.

[Earth Skeptic]

So, what happened to the idea that if people hate the country and society around them, they pick up and move? That was a good solution for at least 10,000 years, and still seems to be the choice of millions of people around the world today. In fact, many of the same progressives who hate fundamental things about the US heritage and modern society are the same people who champion immigration and open borders. How about some of them migrate?

[TJJ2000]

"How about some of them migrate?"
I'm thinking the only excuse they have left is because STEALING from their own failed ideology (communism) isn't nearly as great as STEALING from the success of capitalism.

The cry rings loudly in every "wealth inequality" banner. No sense in trying to STEAL from Cuba; its already robbed blind. But the USA, well the USA still has a little wealth in it.............. STEAL, STEAL, STEAL. It's a human "right" they infer on every desire they make.

[American Socialist]

I see no reason why we shouldn't tear down these statues. They are monuments to slavery and Jim Crow. We should partner with some museum in Poland, import a bunch of commie bureaucrat statues, mix and match them with these confederate monuments and play "commie or confederate" douche.

Tell us more, John, about why you think its important to keep a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest around in the town square.

[Mother's lament]

Stuff like this makes me think AmSoc's actually Rush Limbaugh astroturfing.

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug]

That's not the real AmSoc, he's just some fucking dickless handle thief. Can't even get the style right.

[Mother's lament]

Gosh I'm sorry. And you put so much work into it too.

[IceTrey]

Take down is fine tear down is the beginning of the end of civilized society. I don't know about you but I like running water and electricity I don't want to live in a tent in CHAZ.

[EWM]

I'll pretend I'm Atlas and shrug.

[Qsl]

This whole episode parallels the hoopla around religious monuments on public land, but at least that moved slow enough and through a process for people to work through the hypocrisies. I'd rather much like a statue of Baphomet on public grounds, especially if someone else is paying for it.

But this, where do you think this ends? That people will come to their senses that maybe a monument to Forrest isn't such a good idea?

Or that statues of MLK are the next to come down since he was an adulterer?

[BigT]

FDR on the Mall should go. That I can support.

[Sheldonius Rex]

Since the Republic of my birth has chosen not to defend it's history, I have chosen to no longer defend it. Nor will my sons. We will escape this Republic, or participate in building a replacement. God willing we will not have to share any new Republic with the likes of Biden, Kaepernick, Red Cortez, or their racist, sexist, bigoted authoritarian co-conspirators.

[God]

Or you could just get a hobby.

[Sheldonius Rex]

Fuck you.

[Vishal]

I don't think vandalizing statues proves any Point

[bill steigerwald]

Down with all statues -- on government land. Privatize them. De-sanctify them. Defund them. Humans are imperfect, especially politicians. Half of this generation's heroes will be tomorrow's villains. If Disneyland wants to put up a statue of Mickey Mouse or Joe Biden, great. If the Pittsburgh Pirates want to put up a statue of Roberto Clemente on the grounds of its subsidized ball field, maybe. But no statues for politicians or generals. While we're at it, let's quit naming bridges and highways and schools after politicians, bureaucrats and state policemen.

[Echospinner]

I am with that. Not a fan of these war statues with generals on horseback or whatever. War is horror. A war memorial should be just that. Something to remember those who died and those who were there.

[Ricport]

I had to scroll through a lot to finally get to your posting, which proves the woke leftist morons posing as Libertarians running Reason (and many commenters here) fail at understanding. The government shouldn't be in the art business. Nor should they be in the naming buildings/roads/airports/etc. business. Wanna put up a statue/name a building/etc.? Fine. Buy your own land, and put up a statue/build a building and name it after Donald Duck or whoever else you want. Just don't make those of us who are left paying taxes support it.

[Moderation4ever]

Unlike Nick Gillespie I have never thought that President Trump had any comedy styling. Nick says he lost it, I say he never had it. Most of Trump rants were just mean and vulgar. I think people finally are starting to realize this is true. His shtick was intend to be divisive and to keep people from seeing he has no plan and no talent to follow a plan even if he had one. Tulsa showed that the act is wearing thin.

[BigT]

Let he who is without sin tear down the first statue.

[Cy]

That's the problem, if you never do anything, you'll never do anything wrong.

[AlbertP]

As to which statue I would like to see erected? Alfred E. Neuman

[Moderation4ever]

Agreed

[Kimberly23]

The quartet also talks about President Donald Trump's weird Tulsa performance grand rapids electricians

[TD]

No more statues of people. Everyone falls out of favor sooner or later. Only statues of animals. Cut off the rider but save the horse.