Statues of Limitation

Why does it suddenly feel like the French Revolution around here? The frenzy of statue-toppling and name-changing brings that event to mind. This modern revolution isn’t exactly new, though. It started way before the killing of George Floyd.

It began several years ago with the effort to de-romanticize the Old South, the campaign to take the Confederate “stars and bars” off state flags and remove tatues of Confederate military and political figures.

After the tragedy in Minneapolis, those statues have really been taking it on the chin, or the pedestal, as it were. I do understand the anger about the battle flags and the renderings of prominent Confederates, like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, or even US President Andrew Jackson, a racist and Indian persecutor. But hey, why be upset with General (and President) Ulysses S. Grant? Didn’t he fight on the right side in the Civil War? Didn’t much of Reconstruction happen on his watch? Yes, but he was wobbly on slavery in his early years. He married into a family of slave-owners and he actually owned one himself, but freed him in 1859. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star Spangled Banner under the rockets’ red glare during the War of 1812, owned slaves. His statue came down in San Francisco recently.

So what, exactly did Theodore Roosevelt do wrong? Well, nothing really related to all this, but a statue of him on a horse with a Native American and a black man standing on other side, in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History, is offensive to many.

In the name-change department, Monmouth University in New Jersey plans to remove President Woodrow Wilson’s name from one of its major buildings because of Wilson’s support of segregation in federal offices. Several years ago, at Princeton University, of which Wilson had been president, the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs almost had its name changed for the same reason.

Some think it may even be time to talk about replacing the names of Washington and Jefferson because of their relationships to slavery. I’m almost afraid to mention Christopher Columbus, actually said to have been a slave trader himself. If we start changing these names, it could prove touchy.

Statues come down and names change as heroes morph into villains. I was thinking that one solution might be pedestals with standard detachable brackets to allow sculptures and nameplates to be easily swapped out as attitudes change. Toppling statues when the blood is boiling, however, is clearly more satisfying. But in the end, it’s not about what needs to be torn down. It’s about what needs to be built up -- societal structures that aren’t made of stone and bronze.

At Least, Make It Funny

The late-night and early-morning talk show hosts have had a good time with the President’s West Point speech – not about the speech itself, but about two other things: one, that he seems compelled to use two hands to drink water while speaking (and he can drink a lot of water) and two, that he seemed to shamble when walking down the ramp after the speech. I am no Trump fan, but I just couldn’t find the humor angle. OK, so he’s 74 years old and is careful about how he drinks water and where he puts his feet. One could make the argument that it’s just karma because he himself has mocked disabled people. But don’t we have better material to find the funny in? I’m almost his age and have to be careful where I put my feet.

President Gerald Ford was known to lose his footing, which Chevy Chase turned into comedic pratfalls. The first President Bush threw up on the Japanese prime minister at a state banquet. Maybe those things lent themselves to comedy,  but making fun of Mr. Trump’s performance at West Point seemed like nit-picking, compared to many other things worthy of the good-natured, and not-so-good-natured, mocking they  have received, like the hair color, the face-bronzing, the toilet paper stuck to the shoe, and the tweet misspellings, to name just a few.

A President’s health can be dangerous ground for jokes. Franklin Roosevelt could barely stand after being stricken with polio, and he did everything to hide his condition, but managed to fight off excruciating pain to speak to a convention audience. His cousin Teddy gave a speech after being shot. President Kennedy had to wear a back brace. And President William Howard Taft’s weighed well north of 300 pounds. I don’t remember jokes being made of many of those things, though I have a history book with a picture of Mr. Taft from the rear with the caption, “Taft aft was an imposing sight.”

Someday we will have a female President. I wonder how that’s going to go with comedians. Will there be jokes about hair style or color or modes of dress? My rule has always been, as long as the humor significantly outweighs the meanness, it’s probably OK. And for those who don’t worry about OK, there’s always the White House Correspondents’ dinner, the next time we have one of those. Just make sure it’s funny, that’s all.

 

Silver and Other Spoons

Recently, a Facebook friend posted a photo of a little white girl holding a sign that said “Privileged” on it. Being of the same shade as she, I didn’t know quite how to feel about that, but to be honest, I was a little defensive. “Great,” I thought. “Now I’m supposed to feel guilty for being white.” 

Guilt usually follows having done something we know to be wrong. But when it comes to skin color, that was out of my control. I didn’t get to pick mine.

The other thing about guilt is that it typically produces two responses. One is defensiveness, as you see me exhibiting here. The other is self-punishment. But the good news is that guilt is not the issue. What it is about is recognition of where our racial attitudes come from, and how we change them.

These things are deep-rooted, visceral, and even unconscious. A white person sitting down with a black one for a coffee, a couple of weeks’ worth of marching, or even rebuilding police departments, are all important, but these measures are just the start of a process. Epiphanies have meaning only if they result in changes that last. In the 19^th century, Reconstruction worked for a while, but it didn’t stick. Maybe the country wasn’t ready for it. But that was then. Are we ready now?

I used to be in favor of financial reparations as compensation for the white sins of the past, but am no longer, because they are simply too easy. If African-Americans are paid as penance for systemic exploitation, those paying them will prematurely believe the debt has been settled once the checks go out. The root of the word “reparations” is “repair,” and throwing money at what’s broken doesn’t necessarily fix it. We can accomplish much by seizing this moment to make those repairs, but they won’t happen overnight. It may take generations, during which time not race, but racism, will have to be bred out of us.

Not to trivialize all this, but in the backyard here at home, we have both black squirrels and gray ones. They are not separate species, simply the same animal with genetic variations. The squirrels seem to get along well and don’t seem conscious of the color difference, or maybe it’s just not important to them. They are too busy doing squirrel stuff. That may give us a clue to knowing when we can say we are healed. But the road to that place is a long one.