The Woke Statue Wars Again See the Glory …

Letter to Romans: While Obama’s new library statue may look more like Mayberry’s Opey circa 1965 than No. 44, Charleston’s Bobby Lee of 1865 again stands in public to raspberry woke culture for trying to rewrite history. Are we about to even rediscover Columbus?

The WSJ’s intriguing headline was intriguing enough to history buffs of both the traditional & revisionist kind: “U.S. Cities Dust Off Statues They Hid Away in 2020.” The paper especially calls out how “A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is back up in Charleston, S.C., and a giant Columbus awaits a return in Ohio’s namesake capital.” What Baby Boomer would ever have thought such icons would have been murdered? And what wokester would ever have thought the supposedly disgraced slavers would be resurrected? Yet, the “Statue Wars” that reached a peak only 5 years ago have flared up again, we’re told, thanks to offended lawsuit plaintiffs & nostalgic citizens who are assaulting the courts & local governments once intimidated by progressives. As the paper noted, “Many [such] statues disappeared from town squares & other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence & racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.”

It's not that slavery’s past wrongs were right, the counter revolutionaries say, but destroying history repeats history’s mistakes rather than corrects them. If you want public displays of historical figures to be fair, they suggest, play fair. “The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said one Jack Conte, 67 years old, [and a] lawsuit organizer. You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat & you can only take so much of it.” Opined Basil Russo, a former Dem pol from Cleveland now helping to restore a giant statue of Columbus, the great explorer has become a scapegoat for Western colonization. He said he can’t believe the namesake city had taken down his statue in the first place. “It’s the name of their city ... What sense did that make?”

Davd Soul