Make a statue of THIS.

My changing attitude on iconoclasm, a timeline:

  1. 1991: When Russians pulled down Lenin statues, I cheered.
  2. 1993: When folks in Seattle’s Fremont District put up a Lenin statue, I snickered.
  3. 2003: When American forces, during the Conquest of Iraq, hit some major ancient Mesopotamian civilization sites, blowing them to smithereens, I was deeply irked.
  4. 2015: When ISIS began dismantling, destroying and selling off ancient statues from Assyria as “idols,” I was aghast that any modern would wish to treat as objects for either current reverence or irreverence millennia-old statuary.
  5. 2017: When SJWs turned against the statuary of the Civil War dead, I was more than a little irked that anyone would treat centuries-old and even decades-old memorials as objects for current reverence or irreverance — other than a reverance for history.
  6. 2017: Trump was a latecomer to my query about statues though: With the first protest against a Confederacy memorial, I wondered when the Millennial asshats would come for Jefferson and Washington. When the young demand that their country’s heroes’ statuary be dishonored, you know that they aim to set up some moralistic tyranny in which they are bound by no tradition or culture, and in which the rest of society is too morally weak to resist.
  7. 2019: I suggest setting up a few statues, plumbed for septic service, of open-mouthed Antifa goons and the stocky, homely chick screaming “No” upon the election of Trump, into which we may urinate. That is my current attitude towards the intersectionalist left today.

My attitude about the recent iconoclasm trend has been the same as regarding speech: the proper response to statuary one doesn’t like is not iconoclasm but more statuary. It is easy to destroy, not so easy to put up new monuments — they cost money. But destroying history, even ugly history, seems an awful lot like childishness. Adults should be able to look at a statue and not get sucked into its ideology.

I, for one — and like many others — am fascinated by ancient monuments, though I am quite certain I would not support the bulk of the policies of the ancient monument-builders were someone foolish enough to attempt to revive those policies.

I made peace with Lenin being in Seattle. Still . . . perhaps I should have feared the statue’s influence on Seattle politics? Could it have given succor to the socialism on Seattle’s current City Council?

The Fremont Lenin, via Josh Hallett, Flickr, some rights reserved.