Attempted Statuary Murder

Do you, too, long for the good-old days when the philistines tearing down statues did so on their own dime and on their own time?

“The National Park Service proposes to rehabilitate Welcome Park to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors,” read a press release announcing William Penn as the latest victim of statuary murder. The public did not regard Penn’s erasure from a park bearing the name of the ship bringing Pennsylvania’s founder to Philadelphia as “accurate,” to say nothing of “inclusive” or “welcoming.” Uproar caused the National Park Service to reverse course on removing the Quaker’s statue.

Destruction of public art, de rigueur in the heady summer of 2020, now moves from the rabble to our representatives. Just as we went native in forcing masks not just on women but everybody after years in Afghanistan, we also embraced the Taliban practice of destroying public art out of fashion with the ruling ethos.

Shortly before Christmas, the Congressional Naming Commission succeeded in removing a 32-foot bronze Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery. To honor the Southern dead in a cemetery built on land expropriated from Robert E. Lee’s family struck some as too much to tolerate.

“This was a memorial to men who committed treason in defense of the supposed right of some humans to ‘own’ other humans as property,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, opined. “The very idea that this monument was still here until today reminds us not just how far we’ve come but how much further we have to go.”

The following week, Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan ordered the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” removed. She denied erasing history or destroying art. “By removing the Confederate monument from Springfield Park,” she strangely claimed, “we signal a belief in our shared humanity.”

Recall that those pushing to remove public art once argued it belonged not in parks but in museums. It turns out they really did not want it in museums, either.

Houston, years after taking down statues of Christopher Columbus, Confederate officer Dick Dowling, and an angel representing the “Spirit of the Confederacy,” advanced the process of removing them from the city’s art collection in October.

Around the same time, Charlottesville secretly melted down a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Andrea Douglas, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s executive director, exclaimed as the artwork melted in a furnace. “There will be no tape for that.”

The previous year, New York tore down the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt” that had long sat in front of the Museum of Natural History, a place owing its existence in great part to the former president.

“The board of the TR Library believes the Equestrian Statue is problematic in its composition,” the chief executive officer of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library divulged in a statement. “Moreover, its current location denies passersby consent and context.” He noted the agreement meant hiding the statue in storage while the library’s decisionmakers thought about “context,” its “problematic” composition, and much else.

In so many instances, governments forbidden from “abridging the freedom of speech” do just that — or, at least, something contrary to the spirit of freedom of speech. Beyond this, historians, museum curators, artists, and others professionally bound to oppose Talibanning art memorializing history instead cheer it on. The Orwellian shift of San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Committee and the city’s Arts Commission, for instance, witnesses people charged with protecting art and history destroying it in a city that nevertheless tolerates more than a half-dozen memorials to mass-murderer Jim Jones’ aiders and abettors.

The unforgettable Doctor Who episode “Blink” features malicious white statues that come alive when people look away. Neither bronze William Penn nor marble Robert E. Lee possesses this power. But the statuary murderers act as though they do. Their hateful behavior toward inanimate objects makes one wonder what they would do to flesh-and-blood political opponents should the rest of us blink.

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