The problem with monuments is not only or mainly that some of them are dedicated to assholes.
The problem with monuments is that all of them are lies.
Monuments are always to ourselves.
Check it out: most of the monuments to heroes of the American Civil War on the Confederate side were erected well after the war was over. A monument to Robert E. Lee is a monument that reflects the aspirations of the people who erected it: to restore the cultural and political values of the Confederacy. It’s a monument to the people who erected the monument– not Robert E. Lee.
So when people go around looking at monuments of Robert E. Lee or John A. Macdonald or Bernard Montgomery or Martin Luther or Napoleon, and find out that he really was an asshole, they suddenly– in self-righteous indignation (remember, monuments are always to ourselves)–demand it be removed.
I would challenge these people. Find me a historical figure about whom you can not find some horrible facts. Churchill? Demanded the fire-bombing of Dresden. Patton? An over-rated egotist. George Washington? Owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson? Sally Hemming. Ulysses S. Grant? Committed loads of atrocities, particularly against captive Confederate soldiers.
Yes, a few exceptions: Martin Luther King Jr., though he apparently cheated on his wife, for whom they built the ugliest, most over-bearing monument in Washington. And Dwight Eisenhower, who also, apparently, may have cheated on his wife. And let’s talk about that Eisenhower monument: in spite of his own expressed wishes, to have a monument that reflected his fundamental modesty and humility, and his humble origins, it was decided to build a big, big, big monument. Huge. Let’s show the world how big (we) he was.
Paris is full of monuments dedicated to wars they lost and assholes who led thousands and tens of thousands of credulous young men to horrible deaths.
Monuments are always to ourselves.
Nobody really cares about what people think of Ronald Reagan when they go through an airport named for him. They don’t. What the people who named the airport for him care about is what you think of them, the people who made a monument to Ronald Reagan, the greatest president ever, and the conservative political values they continue to embrace. Reagan was divorced. He multiplied the nation’s deficit. He was mean to hippies.
Mother Theresa? Terry Fox? Both monuments to the idea that we, who erected the monuments, are fabulous, because we like Mother Theresa or Terry Fox. Both of them would probably have preferred that you take the cost of the monument and make a donation to a good charity that continues their work. Well, Terry Fox probably would have. Mother Theresa was no saint. It is one of the great misconceptions of our time that she wanted to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. She did not.
In the rare instance when the idea of a monument is brilliant and expressive of a real historical issue, this is what happens: smart people devise a process to select a great monument. They publish the objectives and rules. They hold a contest. The best entry is selected, like the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.– that amazing scar on the landscape of black basalt with the names of all the dead engraved on it, in random order– and then, realizing that too much truth is too much, they immediately choose another monument or, in the case the Washington Viet Nam Veteran’s Memorial, idiotically undermine it by erecting a hugely conventional, preposterous monument nearby, as a sap to the ignorant who never got the winning design, or who want to insist that war is a glorious enterprise that brings honor and dignity to everyone. To top it off, they printed an index to the names so that people did not have to scan through 50,000 names to find their loved one. Which, of course, was the whole point.
The Viet Nam Veteran’s monument is a marvel, perhaps the greatest monument in Washington D.C., or anywhere. It’s moving. It’s powerful. It’s beautiful.
The same thing happened in Hamburg. Hamburg, Germany, has a large, intimidating monument to the glories of war. Enlightened people of Hamburg decided they needed a counter-monument to express the more modern distaste for militarism. They held a contest– sound familiar?– and selected a brilliant design– sound familiar?. (The original showed powerful soldiers marching around a solid block of granite, “protecting” and guarding it; the winning counter-design showed similar soldiers slowly marching into oblivion under the pavement. It was, like I said, brilliant.) Then they realized it had too much truth and immediately broke their own commitments to the process and castrated the design to erect an abstract, ambiguous moment that pleased no one.
Sound familiar?
[whohit]Monumental Mistakes[/whohit]