Thoughts on Statue-Toppling

The recent BLM-associated protests spawned a lot of commentary, and a lot of internet memes. One of the more interesting was the one you see here: “A example of white privilege. You keep saying ‘it’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop.’ Try saying ‘It’s horrible that property is being destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop.’ Priorities. Make sense?” (Curmie cleaned up the punctuation a little.)

What’s really happening here is an exercise in rhetorical strategy: if X and Y are both true but seem at some level to be in opposition, then the speaker or writer inevitably prioritizes the one mentioned last. “X but Y” means we should pay particular attention to Y, although X is also true.  (“X although Y” works in the other direction.) Curmie was thinking about this in the light of the recent spate of statue-topplings across the country and indeed around the world.

Let’s start with a couple of general principles.

1. Statues are commemorative, and carry the implication that the person being portrayed is worthy of honor for a particular action or (very occasionally) for the entirety of a life well lived.
2. Statues are also public art, and ought to be afforded some limited status (and stature) on that basis.
3. We can know history without statues. (There are lots of memes about that one, too... see below.) Still, they can serve as useful reminders of our past.
4. Some but not all of the violence and destruction of the last few weeks was perpetrated by BLM protestors. Some was attributable to opportunists who just got a thrill out of destruction, some to white supremacists seeking to discredit the BLM movement.
5. Anyone who rejoiced at the toppling of statues to Lenin or Saddam Hussein cannot now argue that the destruction of monuments to the past is inherently wrong.
6. No mortal who has ever lived is or was perfect. If you, Gentle Reader, choose to believe that, say, Jesus never sinned, you are within your rights to do so. But surely you must acknowledge the manifold sins committed in his name, even against believers who, for example, chose to worship Him in a different way than the perpetrator.

This last point is what brings us back to a consideration of rhetoric. Which is more important: that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves or that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and served two successful terms as President of the United States? that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a serial adulterer or that he was the standard-bearer for the non-violent civil rights movement? that Winston Churchill was an entitled racist asshole, or that he led his country through the perils of World War II against someone far worse? Can you imagine the horrors that would have ensued had Britain been led during WWII by a different entitled racist asshole, someone with no more competence than Boris Johnson, or [shudder] Donald Trump?

Importantly, we commemorate the achievements of these men (and the women similarly honored, too, of course), not their failures. If we think of the great baseball player Hank Aaron, who hit more home runs than any other non-steroid-enhanced player in major league baseball history and still holds the record—even against the juicers—for total bases and RBIs, we don’t feel compelled to talk about the fact that he struck out over 600 times more than he homered. Similarly, we don’t forget that George Washington owned slaves, or that Ben Franklin had syphilis… but that’s not what the statue is about.

And now we’re at the important part. Curmie reverts to his high school and undergrad debate team days: the presumption rests with the negative, or with the status quo. In other words, if the rationale for tearing a statue down and the rationale for keeping it are equally persuasive, it stays (but a new one wouldn’t be erected in similar circumstances). The argument to remove (by force or otherwise) a statue must then clearly outweigh the argument to let it stand. For this to happen, the subject’s transgressions must be foregrounded to the extent that even significant accomplishments pale by comparison, or that the accomplishments were used as a means of doing ill (or thinking one can get away with anything): think Bill Cosby or Kevin Spacey.

Of course, one could argue that some achievements are of such paramount importance that virtually no iniquity could be sufficient to remove a commemoration: perhaps the William Shakespeares and Marie Curies of the world would qualify (although putting even George Washington in that category would be controversial, as evidenced by recent events). But such instances are very rare, indeed. Similarly, there are a handful of easy calls in the other direction: the deposed dictator, for example… or, a memorial to the Confederacy, with two statues of soldiers. Because treason isn’t really that cool anymore. Or, across the pond, the Belgian King Leopold II, whose genocide in the Congo may be the worst in human history.

Indeed, the only unquestionably outrageous vandalism Curmie has seen is that of a statue to Hans Christian Heg in Madison, Wisconsin. Heg was an abolitionist and a Civil War hero on the Union side. A less appropriate choice of target for protesters concerned with racial justice would be difficult to imagine. Curmie finds it hard to argue with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s claim that “There is a lot of ignorance out there of what people are really fighting for.” It would certainly do the protestors’ cause a lot of good to disassociate from the imbeciles.

One step, but only a step, closer to sanity was the toppling of a statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco. Grant’s legacy is complex, even self-contradictory. He was a slave-owner himself (briefly, of a man he freed three years before the Emancipation Proclamation), but he is known to history primarily as the commander of the Union army that successfully defeated the slave-owning Confederacy. As President, he sought to crush the Ku Klux Klan, but also orchestrated an illegal war against the Lakota. He believed in the intrinsic superiority of the all things white and Christian, but his post-Presidential visit to Meiji era Japan is thought by many theatre historians (including Curmie) to have been instrumental in the preservation of Nō theatre, which he was the first American ever to witness: this despite the fact that Grant was anything but a patron of the arts. He was, in short, worthy of both praise and scorn—more of both, perhaps, than most of us, but in perhaps about the same ratio. We must recognize the positives even as we remain cognizant of the negatives.

Gregory Downs, a historian specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, nicely summarizes Grant’s legacy in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. His first paragraph is probably his most important: “The toppling of Ulysses Grant’s statue in Golden Gate Park on Friday night reminds us that we need an engaged, passionate debate about Grant’s legacy, but we cannot depend upon the whims of a dictatorial mob to deepen our understanding of our nation’s troubling history.”

And so it goes through many of the statue defacings, topplings, and other vandalisms. Christopher Columbus? Sure, I guess. Francis Scott Key? OK, maybe. Miguel de Cervantes? Huh? As Steve Rubenstein and Rachel Swan write, understatedly, in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Politics seemed incidental to much of the damage.” True, that.

Edward Colston needed a bath.

Abroad, there was the widely-publicized tearing down of a statue of Edward Colston. True, he was a major philanthropist. But exactly how did he get the money for that largesse? The trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yep. Throw the S.O.B. into the river. The statue was subsequently recovered, but Historic England, the non-governmental agency charged with the responsibility for the statue's upkeep, seems in no rush to have the statue restored to its former location:

Whilst we do not condone the unauthorised removal of a listed structure, we recognise and understand the emotion and the hurt that public historical commemoration can generate and we encourage Bristol City Council to engage in a city wide conversation about the future of the statue. We are here to offer guidance and support but believe the decision is best made at a local level – we do not believe it must be reinstated.

A couple years back, Curmie was writing about the “Confederate” flag, and mentioned in passing the statue of Oliver Cromwell near the Houses of Parliament in London:

Let’s face it: Cromwell doesn’t have a lot to recommend him as a British hero, unless of course you’re so violently anti-Catholic that you’ll forgive him for his attacks on the Anglican Church, the Irish, the theatre, the celebration of Christmas, and the very concept of a constitutional monarchy. But there is no denying Cromwell was the most important single figure in England in the 1640s and ‘50s. Should there be a statue to him? Yeah, I think so… if only so I can hiss at it.

Curmie is re-thinking that position. To be important is not the same as being admirable. And Cromwell (hissssssss) did a lot more bad than good. Curmie can still hiss at his memory; he doesn't need to see the guy. British historian David Olusoga notes that “Statues are about adoration. They’re about saying ‘this man was a great man who did great things.’” He argues that the forcible removal of the Colston statue “should never have happened because this statue should have been taken down and it should have been a great collective day for Britain and Bristol when the statue was peacefully taken down and put in a museum which is where, after all, we remember history properly.” There really is a difference between putting such a statue in a place where everyone, including the descendants of the people he brutalized, must see it, and putting it in a museum, where it can be preserved and contextualized… and, if necessary, avoided.

In an editorial piece in The Guardian a couple of days later, Olusoga was referring specifically to the toppling of the Colston statue, but was ultimately writing about the entire phenomenon in saying that “this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.” He’s right… or, at least, Curmie hopes so.

Somebody Voted for These Morons

It has been another week of transcendent stupidity and borderline evil from the Trump administration, but Curmie intends to cling to his pledge to avoid talking about the Embarrassment-in-Chief and his various minions except in passing.

Still, the week gives us plenty of examples of politicians proving themselves utterly unfit for positions of greater responsibility than night-shift assistant manager at the E-Z-Squeeze convenience store. We’ll look at three, but you must understand, Gentle Reader, that there are plenty more. We’re skipping over stuff like Curmie’s own Congresscritter Loony Louie Gohmert’s petulant tantrum, for example, because saying that Gohmert would have to grow up to be considered a bratty toddler ceased being news years ago.

Greg Abbott:
It’s everyone's fault but his.  Just ask him.

We start, then, with another embarrassment to the state of Texas, Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott gave a press conference this week, touting personal responsibility while, of course, avoiding even the suggestion that his own incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic might have played a role in Texas’s surging numbers of new infections. There was a time when it appeared that the governor was actually paying attention. A few weeks back, when Abbott revealed his plan to re-open the state, it all seemed pretty reasonable. Well, except for one thing: it was too soon by at least two weeks. Curmie remembers saying so (both approval of the general strategy and opposition to the timeline) on a friend’s Facebook post. Sometimes, Curmie hates being right.

Now, in the wake of numbers that are alarming even to those who are trying to pretend everything is under control, we’re backtracking again... at least sort of. I’d say it’s to no one’s surprise, but frankly the dismissal of public safety concerns by virtually the entire Republican Party did make it less than entirely predictable that Abbott would even acknowledge the problem. (Side note: a recent article about former Vice President Cheney’s endorsement of wearing masks carries a headline saying that in doing so he “crosses party lines.” Was there ever a more scathing denunciation of the GOP?) So it’s probably too much to expect Governor Abbott to be a grown-up admit his own culpability in facilitating the scale of the outbreak.

Mike Johnson:
Smug, stupid, and amoral.

In related COVID-19 news, a hitherto unknown little turd named Mike Johnson, who happens to be a Congresscritter from Louisiana, made his play for the coveted title of Asshole of the Week. Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, was about to testify remotely regarding the (alleged) politically-motivated interference of Attorney General William Barr in the Roger Stone case. As is so often the case among those who seek to curry favor with the powerful but obviously guilty, and in the spirit of the badly performed farces that were the Kavanaugh hearings and the Trump impeachment trial, Johnson scrambled to find a way to prevent or at least discredit relevant testimony: because nothing says “nothing to hide” like suppressing evidence.

In this case, Johnson claimed (not merely without evidence, but indeed intentionally falsely) that House rules disallowed remote testimony, and then, upon hearing that Zelinsky was physically absent under the advice of his pediatrician in order to protect his newborn child, Johnson began mocking Zelinsky for “phoning it in.” Curmie would pronounce Mr. Johnson as evil, except one doubts the Congresscritter is sufficiently intelligent to be immoral. Amoral it is, then. Either way, Johnson seems to be begging for someone to remove the reptilian smirk from his visage… with a tire iron, perhaps.

Lyda Krewson:
long on intimidation, short on sense

But lest this week’s review seem too partisan, there’s the Democratic mayor of St. Louis, whose outrageous behavior this week may even surpass Johnson’s in audacity. Mayor Lyda Krewson responded to a question in a Facebook Live briefing by reading out the names and addresses of citizens who had urged defunding of the police. It’s tacky but not altogether unreasonable to identify the protestors by name: anonymity is no more appropriate among those we agree with than among those we don’t. But the addresses? Yes, the Alderwoman who accused the Mayor of “doxxing [her] constituents” is exactly correct. 

There is no reason to release that information publicly except to attempt to intimidate the citizenry into compliance with mayoral and police dictates. People don’t trust the police—and St. Louis has had at least its share of not merely questionable incidents (the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case), but of less-reported but well-documented cases of police gleefully strutting their toxic masculinity at the expense of demonstrators. Obviously, the solution to that problem, in the bizarro universe inhabited by Mayor Krewson, is to tell those same armed, arrogant, and often racist cops where protestors live. She subsequently apologized. That isn’t enough.

Anyway, there’s this week’s round-up of despicable pols… well, some of them, at least.

And herewith a poll. Vote for your... erm... favorite.

POTUS Is Pwned

This blog used to have a lot of political content—this or that piece of proposed or enacted legislation was, in Curmie’s opinion, a good idea, a bad one, or (more often) good in this way but bad in that one.  Then came the 2016 election, which featured the most corrupt pair of candidates ever assembled.  The eventual winner of the election, although receiving millions fewer votes, is one of a handful of people anywhere who would make Curmie vote for Hillary Clinton.  His administration belches forth little that falls outside the boundaries of outright evil, let alone which could be considered good policy.  Writing about that all the time is boring, so Curmie went into semi-retirement.  Once in a while, apparently giving some credibility to the “enough monkeys and enough typewriters” scenario, POTUS will do something right.  Still, Gentle Reader, you’ll save Curmie a lot of time and be right far more often than not if you just assume that Curmie thinks literally everything the current inhabitant of the country’s most expensive public housing does is some combination of stupid, insane, and venal unless you’re explicitly told otherwise.  (Ah, for the days when Curmie agreed with the candidates he’d voted against 30-40% of the time…)

The K-Pop group BTS.  (Or so Curmie is told.)

Anyway, there will be no policy posts about the Trump administration until further notice.  That extends to his boot-lickers—McConnell, Graham, Abbott, et al., as well.  That said, there are some stories about non-policy issues that are still in Curmie’s remit.  Now, if someone had told me a month ago that Curmie’s second post after a long absence would be about Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans, he might still be laughing.  Or, rather, would have found the idea ludicrous until that loose collection of mostly teenagers hijacked racist hashtags and disrupted police forces’ Big Brother surveillance tactics by flooding social media outlets and websites with clips of their favorite groups in performance, thereby either crashing the site or making it impossible to filter through all the clutter to find the “real” stuff posted by racists and narcs.

Over 12,000 rally attendees came disguised as empty seats.

Now, Curmie is laughing again, this time at the huge massive paltry Trump rally in Tulsa last night.  It need hardly be mentioned that the Narcissist-in-Chief and his minions crowed incessantly about the “million” requests for tickets for their little Covid-Fest.  We were even told they needed to book an outdoor space to handle the overflow.  Photos of the gathering crowd offered no surprises: the Trumpster Fire was overwhelmingly male and even more overwhelmingly white.  Ah, but when it came time for the actual rally, the venue was over two-thirds empty.  Why?  Well, there are claims of responsibility from the new guardians of truth, justice, and the American way: the Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans.  Apparently they ordered hundreds of thousands of free tickets without the slightest intention of showing up.  Yes, the President of the United States was punked, owned, rolled, you name it, by a bunch of teenagers.  Actual attendees were outnumbered by no-shows named Emma.  (Maybe not literally; go with me, here.)

Part of this, of course, is a little distasteful, even if hilarious.  “Everyone does it” and “they deserved it” may be (largely) true, but they ring a little hollow as slogans in the ethics department.  This campaign by (mostly) Gen Z doesn’t lie about the opposition (à la Donald Segretti’s infamous “ratfucking” campaign of the late ‘60s), but there’s still a level of subterfuge… the same kind as was employed by, say, the French Underground in World War II.  Curmie raises an eyebrow, but isn’t sure this even rises (or stoops?) to the level of “dirty tricks.”

But there’s something else at play here.  The Trump campaign is as incompetent as their boss.  Curmie has actually run box office operations, and knows there are manifold ways to guard against this ghosting technique, which has been around a long time.  You can charge a deposit for a ticket which is then refunded when the ticket is picked up in person.  The easy way to do this is to require a credit card for a reservation; the card is then charged a nominal fee if the ticket isn’t used.  You can double-check addresses: if you're holding a free event in Tulsa and you're getting a lot of ticket requests from Bangor, Boise, and Tallahassee, you might get a little suspicious.  You can guarantee a place in the outdoor gathering (which can presumably move to another space if necessary) and make each such ticket a standby ticket for the main event inside.  They’re numbered, and you call people in groups—there’s plenty of time for that, as POTUS probably won't arrive on time, anyway.  That brings in as many folks as are interested, and you aren’t faced with the embarrassment of national coverage of your big event showing a, shall we say, less than packed auditiorium.

Oh, one more thing: an experienced box office manager anticipates no-shows, especially if the event is either free or potentially controversial (let alone both!), and is prepared to accommodate as many actual patrons as possible.  If a sold-out show starts at 7:30, the house manager is counting empty seats by 7:25.  Customers high enough on the waiting list get to see the show if the seats aren’t claimed by starting time.  Hell, Curmie expects this level of competence from the volunteer student help at theatre productions at our university.  So, perhaps the person handling front of house for the President of the United States knows nothing about the job.  The alternative is even more damning: that only 6200 people showed up at all.  The estimates Curmie has seen suggest that perhaps 800,000 tickets were involved in the spoof operation.  That leaves about 194,000 other no-shows.  And that would be pretty damning.

 

Of course, the Trump campaign is claiming that approximately 50 gazillion people watched online.  (The bots must have been very busy indeed.)  Oh, and the reason for the low in-person turnout was blamed on the media scaring people with (totally true) stories that several Trump advance staffers tested positive for COVID-19, and the assertion (without evidence, of course) that “demonstrators blocked access to the metal detectors.”  OK, first off, if you’re enough of a sociopath that you schedule a political rally during a pandemic in a state that had just set its single-day record for most new cases, you deserve to be embarrassed.  Even the MAGA crowd will eventually run out of Stupid.  And, Gentle Reader, if you believe that Tulsa police would arrest and drag away a ticket-holding woman because someone didn’t like her shirt (1^st amendment be damned) but wouldn’t clear out demonstrators blocking the entrance to the event, then two things are true: you have an even lower opinion of the Tulsa police than Curmie does, and you might be interested in this really interesting e-mail from a Nigerian prince who’ll pay you a million dollars for a little help transferring money.

Today is, for purely personal reasons that needn’t be enumerated here, kind of a sad day for Curmie.  But there is some good news.  The youth of America seems to have a good deal of savvy.  Curmie doesn't know a single song by a single K-Pop group.  He’s not a fan.  But he’s kind of a fan of their fans.

Grammar Nazism with a Twist

Curmie hasn’t written a blog piece in over 20 months, and at first glance, at least, this seems an odd choice of topic with which to break silence.  But there’s a twist coming; hear me out, OK?

One of those internet riddles has been circulating for a while now; Curmie’s seen it three or four times.  There are a couple of variations, but the essential elements remain the same.  One version goes like this:

OK math versus English people, and everyone else… Here you go:

The battle of Mathematics and English. Let’s see who can get it right 🧐

Question:

1 rabbit saw 9 elephants while going to the river. Every elephant saw 3 monkeys going to the river. Each monkey had 1 tortoise in each hand.

How many animals are going to the river?

The question inevitably leads to a host of “wrong” answers because, you see, “you need to read really carefully,” quoth one of Curmie’s friends who posted it.  If you, Gentle Reader, don’t want to know “the answer,” stop here.

OK, so the “correct” answer in 10.  (Or at least that’s what was counted as correct on a friend’s Facebook page; Curmie wouldn’t be surprised if someone else decided 0 is the correct answer; see four paragraphs down.)  There’s the rabbit who sees the elephants while going to the river.  There are three monkeys “going to the river,” carrying two tortoises apiece (presuming that the correct nomenclature for simian appendages would be two hands and two legs).  The elephants aren’t necessarily going to the river, and they all could have seen the same three monkeys.  So: 1 rabbit + 3 monkeys + 6 tortoises = 10 animals.

Except, Dear Reader, if you’ll pardon the expression, that’s bullshit.  Notice the key words in the explanation: “necessarily,” “could have.”  The elephants might well have also been going to the river; the set-up doesn’t say they aren’t, it just doesn’t say they are.  Rabbits are pretty quick; the rabbit might have passed them.  In an exercise that purports to be about close reading, it’s pretty sloppy to say the rabbit merely saw the elephants.  He (I’m making the rabbit male for pronoun purposes) could have “met” them if the intention was to exclude them from the tally: in this case they’d be either stationary or moving away from the river.

Similarly, there’s nothing to indicate that the elephants were grouped together, so it’s perfectly possible that the monkeys each one saw were all different.  They could have been the same, but we don’t know that.  In other words, there might have been 1 rabbit + 9 elephants + 27 monkeys + 54 tortoises = 91 animals all going to the river.

Moreover, the question isn’t how many of these animals are going to the river.  It’s how many animals.  What about the zebras and the kangaroos and the tigers?  (Let’s make this a truly international zoological exercise!)  The fact that we don’t know about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just as Juneteenth was celebrated before POTUS knew of its existence and people infected by COVID-19 have the virus whether or not they’ve been diagnosed.  So there may be hundreds, even thousands, of animals going to the river.  The question wasn’t “what is the minimum number of animals going to the river?” or “how many of these animals do we know are going to the river?”

But—as they say on the late-night infomercials—wait, there’s more!  Notice the tense shift.  The descriptions are all in the past tense: “saw” (twice) and “had.”  But the question is in the present tense: “are going.”  All of the specifically mentioned animals may indeed still be going to the river, or they might have gone to the river and are already home watching Netflix.  The monkeys may have been seen carrying the tortoises at some point in the past but decided that was too much work and put them down.  Etc.  In other words, the only really correct answer to the question is WE DON’T KNOW.

But what Curmie realized upon waking up in the middle of the night was not his own Grammar Nazism; that’s hardly news.  Rather, the failure of this riddle as an exercise in close reading or logic may make it an ideal metaphor for contemporary events.  What if each animal represents a Person of Color (no, Curmie isn’t saying that POCs are animals: this is for analogy purposes only), and “going to the river” means being beaten, choked, shot, or otherwise brutalized by the police?

That makes George Floyd, for example, the rabbit.  He was unquestionably “going to the river,” as were many of the others whose names have been invoked of late: Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, et al.  Of particular interest here are the elephants, who, for the sake of this analogy, might be said to represent those who have been assaulted by police but we don't know the circumstances (let's be fair: police do have the right to legitimate force in self-defense, for example).  Because we don’t know whether they’re going to the river, the “correct” answer assumes that they aren’t.  In terms of the riddle, it’s an unspoken rule to exclude “irrelevant” details.  But in real life, we have those unspoken rules, too.  We’ve been acculturated to believe absence of evidence is evidence of absence, that “going to the river” only happens when we’re certain: when there’s a video, for example.  But now more than ever, we need to examine the assumptions upon which our conclusions are based.  Such is the essence of epic theatre and of engaged citizenship alike.  Are one or more of those elephants, in other words, actually going to the river?  Silence in this case borders on willful ignorance, and does not merely fail to reveal the truth, but actively conceals it.

Even more telling is the omission of other animals—the zebras, kangaroos, and tigers I mentioned—who were also going to the river, but whose stories aren’t even deemed worthy of mention: those for whom “going to the river” is so much a part of daily life that it doesn’t bear mentioning.  Perhaps they are heading not to the river per se, but to a stream that feeds it: not violence, in the terms of our analogy, but “stop and search,” inappropriate interrogation, or slow response times.

Of course, if what’s really important about the riddle is the tense shift, the fact is that we don’t know where any of those animals are going now.  Maybe now the elephants are going to the river and the rabbit isn’t.  Maybe the monkeys have been to the river, returned, and are going back again.  We can be sure, however, that the past does indeed impact the present; pretending that all incidents of river-going are in the past is not merely naïve, but reckless.

Finally, of course, there’s the realization that wherever our little scenario plays out—in the jungle, the grasslands, or the tundra—virtually every animal will sooner or later go to the river, or at least to one of its tributaries.  Here is where we can but pray our analogy breaks down.  

But we all know it doesn’t.