LIONEL SHRIVER
At this rate, we’ll have to rename New York
never reading the inscriptions — and the
older the statuary, the more oblivious the
public. They’ve no idea who’s up on that
pedestal, and they don’t care; at best, little
girls fancy the horses. (Don’t imagine that I
recalled those two bronzes around Raleigh’s
capitol. I had to look them up.) The only
folks I see study big dated statues are bored
foreign tourists. Consequently, the terrible
injury these tributes ostensibly cause a range
of minorities feels manufactured.
Thus, while I’m happy for statuary to
be ‘recontextualised’ with a contemporary
slant on subjects that can’t pass today’s puri-
ty test, the real effect would be negligible.
No one to speak of would read the plaques.
In contrast to the spontaneous, celebra-
tive destruction of homages to Stalin or
Saddam in the heat of overthrow, this drive
to politically decontaminate public memori-
als is a cool power contest. The social justice
brigade is muscle-flexing. Yet their right-
eous efforts will have little palpable effect
on people’s lives. Perhaps the most expedi-
ent solution is to ‘recontextualise’ what a
monument is: a three-dimensional record of
what and whom some predecessors wanted
to remember at the time it was erected, rath-
er than a lauding in the present of absolutely
everything these figures ever said and did.
Symbolism is important, but purely sym-
bolic gains belong low down the list of vital
social reforms, when in the US, blacks’ medi-
an income is half that of Asians and two-
thirds that of whites. Take a jackhammer
to Jefferson’s visage on Mount Rushmore
and what have you got? Gesture without
substance. Do American progressives real-
ly want to confront, ‘Never mind that we let
cops shoot whomever they like and never
serve a day in jail, because we chucked that
bronze of Robert E. Lee that you’d never
even noticed before’?
Bulldozing statuary long part of a local
landscape is gratuitously divisive (people do
notice memorials when you smash them).
We’ll have too little to show for these scuf-
fles once the dust settles. Neither the UK
nor the US needs more discord. This short-
of-monumental matter is an elective con-
flict. Amid the Trump/Brexit turmoil, this is
a time to pick battles with care.G
rowing up in Raleigh, North Caro-
lina, I took the monuments around
the state capitol for granted. The
first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil
War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into
the wind on those grounds for 100 years.
Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Caro-
lina women of the Confederacy’, a mother
in billowing skirts reads to her young boy,
his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood
have I done a double take. I was raised in a
slightly weird place.
In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional
distinction in the US is hard to come by, and
I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t
grow up around folks who wished the South
had won the Civil War and wanted to bring
back slavery. For much of my lifetime (OK,
NC isn’t in a salutary political place in Trump
World), cities like Raleigh have had better
race relations than many Northern ones.
Up against the movement to cleanse the
American South of Civil War tributes, aes-
thetic attachment to regional oddity consti-
tutes a weak argument. I’ll make it anyway.
These sculptures are curious, interesting,
specific to one part of the country and often
better crafted than anything that would
replace them. Some are defiant; many oth-
ers have a mournful cast. They are sobering
reminders of a dreadful juncture in Ameri-
can history, and you have to remember a war
even to regret it. Junking all these memorials
off in some cluttered museum would result
in an ineffable atmospheric loss for my com-
plicated home town.
Yet post-Charlottesville, any reflec-
tive discussion of the fate of these relics is
regarded overnight as over. Mysteriously,
after one unfortunate woman was murdered
by a single right-wing malefactor with a driv-
ing licence, it’s a given that every Confeder-
ate monument must come down. Dissension,
even ambivalence (like mine), means you’re
a white supremacist.
Predictably, the push to politically sani-
tise public spaces isn’t stopping at Civil War
monuments. In New York City, a mayoral
commission will examine what iconography
might get the axe. Under consideration for
removal is the statue of Christopher Colum-
bus towering over 59th Street, at an inter-
section perhaps soon to be called something
other than ‘Columbus Circle’. In the past few
weeks, a smaller Columbus statue has been
defaced with red paint; another Central Park
statue, of a renowned gynaecologist who
experimented on slaves, was also vandalised.
Columbus cost indigenous peoples dear.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. As Oxford
University was recently reminded, Cecil
Rhodes was an imperialist. Prior to 1960
or so, every celebrated man in the Western
world would probably qualify in today’s
terms as a ‘misogynist’ (a strong word thrown
around with well too much abandon).
We now require those we admire for
particular achievements to be blameless in
every respect, while the very definition of
blamelessness, ever more strict, is a mov-
ing target. Applying today’s demanding
standards of rectitude to previous genera-
tions — requiring all past notables to haveembraced racial equality, feminism, disabil-
ity rights, anti-colonialism, non-smoking and
gender fluidity — means pulling down virtu-
ally every statue standing. Named after the
Duke of York, involved in the slave trade,
New York could be in for rebranding.
This campaign is potentially limitless, not
to mention anti-historical. More, any drive
for ideological purity is flat-out creepy.
Can we have a little more ‘Let he who is
without sin cast the first stone’? This ram-
page against any regard for ancestors who
didn’t tick every modern political box has a
totalitarian texture, and would leave Ameri-
cans a sterile public environment with only
statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet
Tubman — until, that is, some eager bea-
ver unearths, say, their insensitive remarks
about cross-dressers.
Aside from contributing to a general
ambience — a sense of something having
happened once, of someone having done,
you know, whatever — most public statuary
functions as outdoor furniture. It’s decora-
tive. With signal exceptions (DC’s Vietnam
memorial), most people ignore monuments,We require those we admire to be
blameless, while the very definition of
blamelessness is a moving target