Of course, I am completely opposed to the destruction of monuments. Hey, I was to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece last year. And do you know why it survived? Because they had an earthquake in 373 BC that buried the temple. Then the Roman Emperor Theodosius I had the temple destroyed in 390 AD in the name of Christianity. And so the temple lay buried under a village until the German and French archaeologists came along in the 19th century with the idea to dig it up.
The reason I don't like destroying monuments is because I am really interested in how ancient and not so ancient peoples thought and acted. Of course, they were dreadfully ignorant, darling, but what can you say?
Actually, they were all people of their time. And when we think about anyone in high politics -- and you'd have to be a Somebody to have a monument built to commemorate you -- he or she is probably pretty thoroughly flawed. I'm all in favor of Winston Churchill being commemorated, and I filed past his bier in Westminster Hall in 1965. But the guy was a piece of work, and I put him in the basket with all the dumb politicians of the 1930s from Chamberlain to Hitler to FDR. Hey, maybe it took two dreadful world wars to convince the Great and the Good that maybe world wars were not such a good thing.
But you know what? I want statues of everyone from Churchill to Hitler and Goebbels. So that little kiddies can go see them and be carefully taught what idiots people were back in the day.
See I don't think it helps to say that all the Confederates were evil. Yep, they were wedded to plantation slavery, as invented by the Venetians on Cyprus. And we now, from our great moral height, condemn slavery as the worst thing ever.
Worse than Soviet Bolshevism? Are you sure?
See, I don't think we ended slavery for moral reasons. I think we ended slavery because slavery doesn't pay. Not compared with free workers. Hey, even Adam Smith thought that.
See, I think that morality very often follows the market. Just saying. I mean, how difficult is it, when evaluating two things, one that benefits you and one that does not, to decide that the thing that benefits you is a Good Thing and the other thing is a Bad Thing?
But I get what the inconclasts are doing. Thay want to erase history so that the only thing that people are able to believe is their sacred orthodoxy. Because everything else has been canceled.
But that's OK. Because it focuses the minds of the racist sexist homophobes like me that love America as it is, warts and all.
And Wokies, let me tell you that you are the biggest wart on the flesh of America right now. By a mile.
But that's OK, because you have clarified the issues rather thoughtfully. As Victor Davis Hanson said on FoxNews,
This election no longer is about Donald Trump's tweeting. It's not about Joe Biden's cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lock-down, the virus, the economy, foreign policy. It's an existential question, a Manichean choice, between whether you want civilization and you believe America doesn't have to be perfect to be good and we are not in this third century going to destroy all that people died for, or you feel that was is inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer. And that's the choice we are looking at and I'm going to vote for civilization.
Know what I think? I think that President Trump should make short videos about the eminent Americans whose monuments were pulled down. And he should prepare a few words about each of the canceled monuments. Like General Grant. He could say:
Grant was a heavy drinker. He married a women in a family that had slaves. But then he took his slave down to the courthouse and freed him. And went on to lead the Union armies to win the war against slavery. Ulysses S Grant was a great American and a flawed American. But flawed Americans are all we have, and all we will ever have, to Make America Great Again.
When I walk around my neighborhood and look at the social-moralizing yard-signs, that started with #WeBelieve and then "Hate has no Home Here" and "Be the One" and now feature "Black Lives Matter" I think about the people that have put those signs up.
And what they are is educated Gentry, People of the Creative Self, that think themselves -- know themselves -- a cut above ordinary Commoners and People of the Responsible Self. And certainly higher and better than white nationalist deplorables. Because, you see, they advocate for the victims of oppression and and fight against systemic racism.
And yet they know literally nothing.
As I have been reading and writing for these many years, I have developed the conceit that I can figure out where the pre-digested political rhetoric I am hearing from other people comes from. Because, of course, most people don't read, don't think; they just pick up memes that they hear in the agora. Thus it ever was and thus it ever will be.
And what we should all hope for and work for is for the day when it is our ideas and rhetoric that ordinary people and journalists unthinkingly repeat.
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