As people may have read from me, I see the statues/monuments arguments as an informal, ad hoc truth and reconciliation commission. Statues and monuments are what tells a society what it values. I am therefore okay with a tear down of most statues, as they obscure the nasty truths we often want to cover up, ignore, or lie about. I want to see a whole different set of statues, of people we don't have to defend for heinous acts, including my saintly Abe Lincoln, who did stand up for African-Americans more than any other president of his time, but who nonetheless was largely willing to let US Cavalry slaughter Sioux and other Native American nations in the middle of our own nation's Civil War. This short piece at History.com shows how what we want to whitewash as a part of a continuing policy of starvation, removal, and ultimately extermination of Native Americans. This article from a historian, however, does a more thorough job showing how Lincoln acted more in an ad hoc way, reduced the number of executions of convicted Native Americans in the reprisals from over 300 to 38, and immediately sought to reform US policy regarding Native Americans in a more humane and helpful way. However, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has stated, in her brilliant polemical history, The Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (see Chapter Eight, "Indian Country"), Lincoln's range of policies were still part of a pattern of destruction of Native Americans' nations, and extermination of most of their people.
However, we should also see this growing and continuing argument over these statues and monuments as something much more hard to face. This statues/monuments argument sadly reflects how our nation's politics are drenched in mere symbolism, whether it is this argument over 100 and 120 year old statues/monuments, Trump holding a Bible, Nancy Pelosi wearing a kente, or Congress critters arguing over adding a substantively meaningless one line amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that refers to "lynching," even though federal laws against the act of lynching--without using the actual term "lynching"--have been in existence for over two decades. These types of arguments reflect a sad, hard truth, which is our nation's political structures are substantively unresponsive to most Americans--and how we are essentially an oligopoly, where only rich people and corporations have and receive representative government when it comes to economic power distribution, and with respect to how our nation conducts its foreign policies, both economic and military.
Worse, our corporate-owned media continually distract us with their incessant focus on symbolism, and, how they tell us to vote for people based upon superficial levels of gender, skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, the place one attended school, and the like. Or, when that same corporate media want us to vote for an old white guy--cough, cough, Biden--they tell us he is "moderate," "centrist," "no drama," etc. all while pushing (and influencing) us to think our own world views, political policy proposals, and reformed structures have no validity, or any significant support across the political duopoly of the Democratic and Republican Parties--when of course, the polling data they won't talk about tells us the majority of Americans actually agree with us.
This week, we saw how people voted, in various elections, for candidates who openly demanded a particular change in particular public policies. Corporate media talking heads then hastened to tell us what we saw did not happen, and told us the elections merely showed people are being driven by anxiety and anger without knowing what precisely was being talked about.
It is why I am both happy and sad over the debate over statues and monuments. It is great to see people arguing over history in a way they learn more than they did in school. It is sad because it is about symbols and it is reflective of the way in which we feel powerless in the face of the owners of our nation, and the way the owners control substantive policy-making in all three branches of our national government, and our various state and local governments.
