Sometimes Statues Should Come Down

I approve of this statue take-down.



As best as I understand it, most liberals are still upset with this.

Go figure.

UPDATE: Obviously, I'm just yanking leftists' chains.

Let me make an observation about the Confederate statue issue. Although it is almost entirely out of my lane, it does have some historical aspect. I'm speculating, but I'm sure I'm reasonably close to the mark.

After the Union defeated the Confederacy there was an issue of reintegrating the defeated South into the country. We are aware of this issue from Iraq, Syria, and Libya, most directly. It is tough to rebuild what was torn asunder.

During the Spanish-American War, the divisions of the Civil War more than thirty years prior were still there. A former Confederate general was appointed to command American troops in the Cuba invasion in part to make the South feel they were part of America again, fighting a common enemy at the side of the descendants of the Union army. Indeed, the general is reported to have urged his troops on by yelling "we've got the Yankees on the run!" or some such thing, in the heat of battle.

So I'm going to guess that a lot of statues went up to help the South accept the loss and reintegration into the Union by celebrating Confederate military leaders for their skills, skating by what they fought for--secession and/or slavery, both bad regardless of your views on that motivation issue. Robert E. Lee was a good officer, with a good grasp of operations if not of strategy (the 1863 invasion of the North was foolish, I think). While I cannot celebrate an enemy general, he was hardly a Devil. One could respect his military ability and his decision not to extend the Civil War by resorting to an insurgency when his army was beaten. And that legacy probably had a role in making the South part of America again. It was a useful role for his statue and other such statues.

And in a pre-national communications network, those local reminders of that reintegration despite defeat were local issues rather than national issues now.

I can hardly defend keeping the statues up. And I can safely say that the purpose of reintegrating a South that was distinct from the rest of the nation is no longer an issue. So the reason for the statues is obsolete. The South is fully part of America as much as any other region.

Well, now California is all secession-like over Trump in a way no member of the old Confederacy was under Obama. Maybe when that nonsense is over, a statue of Jerry Brown should go up in San Francisco to soothe progressive feelings.

Anyway, this statue thing is a bizarre path. Shouldn't everything with FDR's name be purged because of Japanese internment camps? Is Truman to be purged because of ordering two nuclear strikes? And let's not begin to talk about Ted Kennedy the woman-killer or Klan leader Robert Byrd whose name is on every other piece of brick or concrete in West Virginia. Remember, a number of left-leaning Democrats are upset over the Jeffererson-Jackson traditional events because of the event's namesakes.

Is Lincoln the only acceptable statue?

I can't be upset over the loss of a Lee statue even if I am disgusted that Communists are exploiting the issue and sparking violence over removing the statue. Too many worked up to physically defend the statue are unsavory types--as unsavory as the leftist thugs trying to be on the right side of the issue (and those disgusting people would rally to defend a statue of Mao, Stalin, Kim, Castro, or Che--and were opposed to toppling the Saddam statue).

Anyway, I've had enough of this statue issue. I'm out. America really should just let local people figure this out without making it a national issue, I think.

UPDATE: The Lincoln Memorial is vandalized. So I guess Lincoln isn't acceptable to everyone. Unless it was just a convenient canvas unrelated to Lincoln.

I don't think the graffiti says either "f**k law" or "f**k Islam", as it has been described. It might be a rorschach test at this point. It appears to be "FUCL (with either a dot at the end of the L or a long spray at the end of the L, followed by [odd squiggle] followed by a combined U and L or badly drawn W or just another odd squiggle that starts to curve the vertical writing to horizontal, followed by a dot and L W. The W has a heavy left side that makes that perhaps an additional attempt to spray something. Or maybe by that point the tagger was in a hurry to finish and was holding the spray nozzle on in an effort to get away faster. All done by a spray painter with a poor grasp of spacial limitations. The red paint hints at some communist group. Is FUCL some group?

NOTE: It is annoying that searching for FUCL leads search engines to assume I didn't mean to type the L ... Search for what I type!!!

UPDATE: A later update. Some portion of the statues apparently were put up in the modern civil rights era, and in my opinion don't deserve the benefit of the doubt of an attempt to reconcile the Civil War losers with the winners.

I still think this is a local issue if the statue is local; and I still think awful people--communists and anarchists--are trying to cast themselves as good guys by opposing statues of people just as bad as the people those communists and anarchists honor.