Good Morning Charles,
I think pulling down these statues a bad idea. Here's what I wrote the other day regarding Jefferson being torn down:

"Good Afternoon Charles,
First of all, check this out:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/not-all-slopes-are-slippery/

It's a pretty sober view.

I've said this before but the USA isn't the only republic, country, monarchy etc. to practice that "peculiar institution" or slavery. The UK, France, Imperial Russia, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and not a few Asian and African countries did as well. Read, not just white people. If the USA has this reckoning why not the world?

Personally, better time can be spent than destruction or changing names. I want a better a human being. I don't tend to look at statues and country, state, city etc. names and necessarily believe the representative "decent" according to today's standards.

I believe children and older should know warts and all, why this person has a monument or state named for him or her. It could be selective as Baggini suggests. What if its found out that MLK did witness the rape of a woman? (Evidently from FBI recordings, he might have). Should his statue come down? Or the holiday be rescinded? Destruction is foolish without a thorough examination. I think we, the USA have bigger problems to solve.

Yes, I think Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln & Theodore Roosevelt great humans/Americans warts and all. Leave Mt. Rushmore alone. BTW, near that South Dakota site is a great carving of Crazy Horse, the Native American warrior."

I think we should celebrate Juneteenth. I think we should remember the past all of it, the terrible, the beautiful and the extraordinary. Let's recall it with scrutiny and endeavor NOT to repeat the awful part of it.

I'm sure tearing down statues of the nation's founder and possibly the most revered person in American history is going to be very popular!

Look, there's an argument for removing Confederate iconography, because those statues and symbols glorify a traitorous movement that existed to resist social change and freedom for millions. But Washington's slave ownership pre-dated that social change. It was normal for his time. And to blame a person for the act of living in his own time is irrational and illogical.

Not sure what’s more dangerous, attending the Trump rally or hunting with Dick Cheney...

Leave the statues up, tear them all down - I don't care. And I'm not going to venture any guess as to how popular this act of iconoclasm will turn out to be. But the manner of its doing is vandalism which, again, I don't presume to judge but that defines the symbolism.

When you can get the authorities to de-sanctify these idols, then something profound will have changed.

Well I don't know how Trump's clan rally will go, what inanities he will spout, but I do feel confident making one prediction-
His campaign will make sure that a lot of black faces are standing behind him on the podium, and front and center in the crowd... I imagine they are sweeping a three state area trying to recruit black Republicans to attend.

@3: Just because African tribes at the time aided in the slave trade didn't absolve the moral culpability from anyone else involved in trade. Nor does the existence of slavery over centuries or by other cultures on our planet. In fact, there is no equivocating argument one could possibly make to elevate slavery out of absolute and total immorality.

But you already knew that.

Charles I know you have enough seniority to do pretty much what you want there, but it's cool that you did the Juneteenth AM and cool that everyone else stepped aside for you. Thanks. Keep it up.

To be honest, showing disregard for Trump is another GREAT reason to wear a mask.

The shift from removing Confederate monuments to removing monuments to the founders is where I get off the movement.

Not because I disagree with the historical facts. I don't!

Nor is it because I think they were perfect men, even necessarily good men. Like every other human being, they had an admixture of both good and evil in their hearts.

The reason I stop here is that you mess with your foundation myths at your peril.

Why do we teach kids about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? Why do we tell that stupid, untrue story about the cherry tree? The Boston Tea Party? To teach kids that social order is legitimate. Take the myths away and what do you have to bind society together? Nothing.

Mythology, more than anything else, is the foundation of civilization. Without myth, anything becomes possible. And when anything is possible, things generally do not end well. Russia is still suffering the effects of losing the tsars more than a century later. France likewise took at least a century to process the effects of 1789.

We need to expand the myths, tell more stories, not fewer. This is not a zero sum game. George Washington does not need to go away to make room for George Washington Carver. On the contrary, to a large extent, Carver has been successfully integrated into that mythology. That's a very real part of civilization building. That's how we evolve towards a better, fairer, more just society.

But to "expose" a nation's deepest truths as lies? Down that path chaos lies. You won't like the result. I guarantee it.

I am totally down with renaming the state after the other George Washington, and replacing certain statues carefully.

If aliens arrived tomorrow, landed their huge and alien ships down there on the waterfront and came out brandishing weapons of unimaginable power and then said, "We'll pay anyone $1,000,000 in gold for a live human. No questions asked." How long do you think the line would be? How soon before you were slipping a mickey to your asshole brother-in-law who beats your sister and her kids? How much longer until you took your sick-and-dying father down there? Maybe one of your kids -- like your surly teenager who burned down the garage? I mean, we're talking about a lot of money here...

It's stupid to blame the Africans for slavery. Stop it. You'd all have done it and you know it and that's why it makes you so mad when people start calling it out and tearing down the statues. It's guilt and you don't want it because you, personally, never owned a slave. Well, you did. And I did, too. And we, the white people of the USA, have all benefited tremendously from that arrangement. It's time to give back, and while that debt can never be fully repaid (and I'd argue that it shouldn't) we can make reparations.

Want to move forward? Tear down the statues. Call out the slave holders. Correct the historical record. Pay the reparations. We know we owe black people for the nation we have. All this ranting and raving about the past being the past is just a failure to accept your own culpability in it all.

@14 largely ignored is that institutionalized, but not technically hereditary, slavery persisted for quite a while. Many Scots and Irish and some English "criminals" (frequently rebels or those who had property legally stolen from them) were transhipped to America. Some places like Vermont outlawed slavery, but contractual indentured servitude and "rentier" tenant farming was around until the middle of the last century.

Smart non-white citizens frequently moved far away and founded their own towns where such practices did not exist in other states and territories. But slavecatchers would still be enabled by the federal government to go after them. Even when the people armed themselves, they were frequently ambushed on their way to vote or participate in democratic activities.

@10 You voted for Trump. You say you're not a white supremacist, but you think a white supremacist is what will be good for America. That makes it very clear that you are a racist, you are a white nationalist, and you are a coward who hides the fact because you know it would get you shunned by decent people.

This is a sad time for America. Nobody seems to care why statues of GW and TJ exist in the first place. THEY WEREN'T KINGS. This is crucial. What was started in England became the basis of what the founders tried to build--the very concept of ANY individual rights. You can say that idea was poisoned by slavery and that only wealthy white men had the franchise. But that fault line broke open over time and was extended to every citizen. This is a miracle and why for so long the US lead the world, warts and all, to greater freedom for individuals. It's painful for everyone to confront where we all fail to live up to our ideals, but think for a minute what would happen to CHAZ in Beijing. That it is not going down that way is the legacy of men like GW and TJ.

Charles: How common in the 1780s were freedom of the press; freedom to practice--or not--the religion of one's own choosing; a constitution outlining in great, still-relevant detail a balance of power between three branches of government; radical denunciation of monarchy; constitutional protection against self-incrimination, illegal search-and-seizure, and a host of other abuses kings commonly indulged? These were extremely rare. No one with any sanity or empathy could or should justify the slave-owning of Jefferson and Washington. It was wrong, and it was a major fault. But... I for one give them HUGE credit for the remarkable, near-unprecedented advances in civil rights the US constitution offered the country's citizens, and many amendments later have seen the constitution improve. But Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, et al were the pioneers, the originators. They were deeply flawed people with many faults beside slave-owning--but radical trailblazers who pushed humanity in the direction of respect for basic civil rights. With all their stupid feuding, petty politics, and horrific acceptance of slavery, they realized an astonishing, revolutionary advance in articulating the terms of the relationship between government and citizens. Tearing down statues without any attempt to go through an elected city council to seek approval for it suggests a reductive view totally indifferent to the benefits we still enjoy because of the Founding Fathers and Mothers. I'm not desperately needing statues to honor these people, but I have zero need to see them torn down. I consider the horrific abuses committed by theocratic, near-omnipotent European monarchs--the presumption they represented God and that they and they alone could determine who had rights--and I am goddamned, red-white-and-blue grateful to the people who composed our insanely good constitution. It was flawed, obviously--but later amendments have addressed many of its flaws. I have no need to see statues--but I sure as hell have no need to see them torn down and dragged around like they were so much trash. If mine is the minority view amongst our self-important cultural elite, then so be it. I'm big-time grateful for those who composed our original constitution--and for reformers who added amendments to make it even better. How about educating people about later reform efforts rather than taking pious cheap-shots at people who lived 240 years ago.

@3:

African tribes wouldn't have sold those captured from other tribes in the first place if first non-African Persians, Arabs and Indians, and later white Europeans hadn't made it worth their while.

Also, it would serve you to remember that white chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in feudal European societies prior to the initiation and expansion of the Atlantic black slave trade in the 16th and 17th Centuries - but you dumb-ass racist crackers never mention that.

Shorter @10: "I'm not a white supremacist - I just believe in all the same things as white supremacists."

Shorter-shorter@10: "No, really - I'm a white supremacist."

Pulling down the statues of the people who founded our country is shameful and I hope they find each and every person involved and punish them to the full extent of the law.

Take down as many confederate monuments you want though.

Interesting philosophical question though, isn't it, what causes a community of people to come together to put up a statue in a public space.
I think we can rule out the Lenin statue, that was a private doing that is ironic from its inception, pure kitsch.
I was part of the community that put up the Troll - that is sort of an anti-statue, and again ironic in nature.
But to put up a big statue on a proper pedestal in a public space to a real human... I guess we have that statue of Chief Seattle. That is kind of cool. Speaks well of us I think. Not too many other local statues like that I can think of off-hand... I think I have seen a JP Patches statue somewhere, maybe that is at Safeco Field, along with all that hideous Dave Niehaus crap.
There should be an Ivar statue, and a Jimi Hendrix statue and there probably needs to be a Boeing statue and eventually a Bill Gates statue... all men.
You know who I would nominate for a woman to have a statue put up in her honor? Princess Angeline - talk about ghosts.
Read memoirs of early white Seattlites and they all mention her...that tenacious spirit of the indigenous people hanging on and on and on ... kind of an uncomfortable reminder of our past rapaciousness and double dealing. There should be a big public statue of her right at the foot of harbor Steps, right about where she lived for all those years.

18

I agree with the majority of what you say here, especially the part about an additive approach to our mythology.

But, does removing statues or public monuments to these figures = erasing the myth? Schools have already been long engaged in the process of critically examining these myths. Do we need the public monuments?

I'd like to see some other figures from American history elevated into more public celebrations. We have a history rich with examples of folks perhaps even more worthy of publically representing the American ideals and mythology than the "Founding Fathers." Respect to Washington for his achievements, but I'd rather see Frederick Douglass on our money.

@30 Yes, of course. Good point. Please note: several good statues/sculptures of Frederick Douglass are on public display: one in Rochester, New York, one in Washington, DC; one in the Maryland State House in Annapolis; and there might be others. I think ADDING to the mix (e.g., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman) rather than having an unelected group of protesters tearing down statues of Jefferson is a far better way to go. And there's nothing contradictory about respecting the achievements of Jefferson and Washington AND those of Douglass and Tubman. There is more than enough us-versus-them in our politics already; this is a case of some--at least some--common ground.

I hate Trump. I have never voted republican. My entire family are liberal activist. I did not mind the protesters tearing down statues of confederate leaders. However, when I heard protesters tore down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, my heart sank. The foolish idiots just made Trump the winner.

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