One less confederate monument to vandalize...

Dr. Keith said:
Right? I haven't watched that show in what, 30 years? I don't remember much beyond Catherine Bach's shorts.
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A "fashion" item named after a fictional character. I swear we used to call 'em Daisy Maes (after L'il Abner's pursuer), but everyone tells me I made that up.
 
Mike! said:
I'll expand on my thinking. Display them in a confined area, a park like setting, but add a new historical marker to each, stating where it was, when it was erected, by whom, and what the social climate was at that time. That sort of historical context would hopefully serve to de-glorify what they were originally intended to represent, while preserving the history of each one. Sort of a "Park of Shame" if you will. Or, "Welcome to the island of Ill Purposed Monuments to the Confederacy".
And frankly, without putting them in any historical context of just what and who they represent, many are well crafted visual works of art, with the unquestionable exception of that statue Mumbles uses as an avatar. Blowing that thing up would be doing the world a favor.
I still think seeing that thing come to life and go on a rampage would make a great Twilight Zone episode.
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This was a proposal long ago upthread. Put them in a Museum of The Sociology of the Post War Era. Right next to copies of the literacy exam blacks were given and Colored and White rest rooms and water fountains. Not just a wing for Misguided Monuments, but juxtaposition.

Maybe some black corpses swinging in trees. Buckets of tar and feathers. (There's a good chance for and interactive display here. Maybe give museum-goers the opportunity to experience "Jus' Clete and some good old boys having theyself some fun...." and let them see how it is to be dragged on a tow rope behind a Dodge pickup.)
 
Foolmewunz said:
This was a proposal long ago upthread. Put them in a Museum of The Sociology of the Post War Era. Right next to copies of the literacy exam blacks were given and Colored and White rest rooms and water fountains. [...]
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I think I remember seeing restrooms in public parks marked "Men", "Women", and "Colored". I couldn't have been more than 6-7 years old. This was in the very early 1960s. Even at the time, it seemed a relic of the past.
 
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John Jones said:
I think I remember seeing restrooms in public parks marked "Men", "Women", and "Colored". I couldn't have been more than 6-7 years old. This was in the very early 1960s. Even at the time, it seemed a relic of the past.
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A building I worked on at Duke University years ago was connected at one point to an existing lab/classroom building which dated from the mid-Fifties. I needed to look at the original blueprints for that building as part of the prep work for the tie-in.

It had the standard multi-stall gang toilets for the students on all the classroom floors. A few smaller ones on each floor conveniently located near lecture rooms and offices and complete with small lounge areas, designated for faculty. In the sub-basement under a service stairwell at one far end of the building was a single toilet in a room about the size of a broom closet labeled "Colored".
 
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Foolmewunz said:
Dr. Keith said:
Right? I haven't watched that show in what, 30 years? I don't remember much beyond Catherine Bach's shorts.
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A "fashion" item named after a fictional character. I swear we used to call 'em Daisy Maes (after L'il Abner's pursuer), but everyone tells me I made that up.
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And I'm sure it was purely coincidence that Catherine Bach's character in Dukes was named "Daisy".

:p

:rolleyes:
 
John Jones said:
I think I remember seeing restrooms in public parks marked "Men", "Women", and "Colored". I couldn't have been more than 6-7 years old. This was in the very early 1960s. Even at the time, it seemed a relic of the past.
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I've told this before but it's germane so worth repeating. When I was a kid and taking multiple bus/streetcar connections to school and back, which would've put it at about 9 years old, I can remember for several days running, pressing the "Colored" water fountain in the FW Woolworth's and being disappointed that a stream of rainbow-colored water didn't come out; it was clear just like the White water fountain. My older sister finally explained it to me.

Ain't kids, great. Like the song says, "You have to be carefully taught". My innocent little mind never grasped that there would be different facilities for the regular folk and the mud races.
 
quadraginta said:
Very well written.

Thank you for the link.
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...scendants-confederate-statues-charlottesville
Lee’s great-great-grandson Robert E. Lee V told CNN that it actually might be better to remove the statue from Charlottesville and put it in a museum.
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Bertram Hayes-Davis, the great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, also spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon. Hayes-Davis called for moving the statue of Jefferson Davis into a museum: "In a public place, if it is offensive and people are taking issue with it, let's move it,” he said. “Let's put it somewhere where historically it fits with the area around it so you can have people come to see it, who want to understand that history and that individual."
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Even Stonewall Jackson’s great-great-grandsons wrote an open letter published in Slate addressed to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney. They requested the removal of all Confederate statues from the Virginia city’s Monument Avenue.
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ETA:

The relatives, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, wrote that another one of their ancestors, Laura Jackson Arnold, would be a better fit for a memorial than the Confederate general:

In fact, instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to celebrate Stonewall’s sister — our great-great-grandaunt — Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood, she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of history with Laura Jackson Arnold.
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Foolmewunz said:
I've told this before but it's germane so worth repeating. When I was a kid and taking multiple bus/streetcar connections to school and back, which would've put it at about 9 years old, I can remember for several days running, pressing the "Colored" water fountain in the FW Woolworth's and being disappointed that a stream of rainbow-colored water didn't come out; it was clear just like the White water fountain. My older sister finally explained it to me.

Ain't kids, great. Like the song says, "You have to be carefully taught". My innocent little mind never grasped that there would be different facilities for the regular folk and the mud races.
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And this is the thing that I don't get. Skeptic Tank asserts that kids are born racist. I have seen toddlers of different races playing very happily together. *Obviously* their parents haven't taught them racism, but equally, they haven't *taught* them non-racism - it's just what happens without intervention.
 
jimbob said:
And this is the thing that I don't get. Skeptic Tank asserts that kids are born racist. I have seen toddlers of different races playing very happily together. *Obviously* their parents haven't taught them racism, but equally, they haven't *taught* them non-racism - it's just what happens without intervention.
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Completely and utterly true.

Personal anecdote, when I was at nursery school (the UK equivalent of kindergarten) in the early 70s, it was arranged that my mum would pick up me and another chap Lionel from class for a playdate.

When questioned about what Lionel was like, I apparently told my mum he was very nice and had curly hair. That was the major distinguishing feature that I noticed at that age.

And of course, the punchline is that he was black and from Trinidad. He was the only black kid in the nursery school, and probably the only one I ever knew until secondary school, so it wasn't as if I was used to other kids with different skin colours.

It had simply never occurred to me as a child to mention that he wasn't white.
 
GraculusTheGreenBird said:
Completely and utterly true.

Personal anecdote, when I was at nursery school (the UK equivalent of kindergarten) in the early 70s, it was arranged that my mum would pick up me and another chap Lionel from class for a playdate.

When questioned about what Lionel was like, I apparently told my mum he was very nice and had curly hair. That was the major distinguishing feature that I noticed at that age.

And of course, the punchline is that he was black and from Trinidad. He was the only black kid in the nursery school, and probably the only one I ever knew until secondary school, so it wasn't as if I was used to other kids with different skin colours.

It had simply never occurred to me as a child to mention that he wasn't white.
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Ditto for my son but with the opposite sampling; he has a mix of Thai, European Caucs, Korean and South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) schoolmates. He can't tell them apart. In a conversation a couple of years ago, he was getting flustered because he was sure I knew which girl Amy was because he'd seen me talking to her and her mom once. A little of my own racism... I would've said, 'The Indian girl" as that's her most conspicuous feature to me. He never said, "No! The dark girl (or the Indian girl)" but kept insisting I should remember her because she always wore a DoRaeMon sweater.
 
Foolmewunz said:
This was a proposal long ago upthread. Put them in a Museum of The Sociology of the Post War Era. Right next to copies of the literacy exam blacks were given and Colored and White rest rooms and water fountains. Not just a wing for Misguided Monuments, but juxtaposition.

Maybe some black corpses swinging in trees. Buckets of tar and feathers. (There's a good chance for and interactive display here. Maybe give museum-goers the opportunity to experience "Jus' Clete and some good old boys having theyself some fun...." and let them see how it is to be dragged on a tow rope behind a Dodge pickup.)
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Sounds good to me, except maybe the interactive tar and feather section. So many of those things have been effectively whitewashed* away from history that I'd guess there are those alive today who don't even know they ever existed at all.

*What a perfect expression in this case.
 
Foolmewunz said:
This was a proposal long ago upthread. Put them in a Museum of The Sociology of the Post War Era. Right next to copies of the literacy exam blacks were given and Colored and White rest rooms and water fountains. Not just a wing for Misguided Monuments, but juxtaposition.

Maybe some black corpses swinging in trees. Buckets of tar and feathers. (There's a good chance for and interactive display here. Maybe give museum-goers the opportunity to experience "Jus' Clete and some good old boys having theyself some fun...." and let them see how it is to be dragged on a tow rope behind a Dodge pickup.)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/asia/taiwan-statues-chiang-kai-shek-park.html

To some, he is a hero despite losing a civil war. To others, he is a symbol of oppression. Some of the statues built in his honor have since been removed, but others remain because the cause he represented still has support.

No, he is not Robert E. Lee. He is Chiang Kai-shek, and how his memory has been handled in Taiwan
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Short version - about 200 of the statues have been removed to a park - There was another article, which I can't find (possibly not NYT) which described them as being put in a context within the park.
 
I just checked my son's eighth-grade US History text, and there is still a large section concerning the Civil War. I guess it won't be erased until next year?
 
BobTheCoward said:
Craig B said:
I think because it was held to be self evident that liberty was a preferable state.
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Nothing is self evident.
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True, but pointless.

You of all people must realise that you can prove nothing but your own existence to yourself; I suppose you can also prove things concerning your inability to prove nothing but your own existence to yourself, but that really is going down a rabbit hole.

All other "facts" are based on some assumptions.

Any assertion of value is ultimately based on assumptions based on personal preference (although with ethics, I prefer to think of them as the personal values).

​


Taking the above for a given, most people certainly don't want themselves or their loved ones to be slaves. Nowadays, most people have extended this to think that slavery itself is abhorrent, and that freedom is better than repression.

Which means that Craig B's comment was perfectly acceptable with out a pedantic, and sterile side discussion.
 
jimbob said:
True, but pointless.

You of all people must realise that you can prove nothing but your own existence to yourself; I suppose you can also prove things concerning your inability to prove nothing but your own existence to yourself, but that really is going down a rabbit hole.

All other "facts" are based on some assumptions.

Any assertion of value is ultimately based on assumptions based on personal preference (although with ethics, I prefer to think of them as the personal values).

​


Taking the above for a given, most people certainly don't want themselves or their loved ones to be slaves. Nowadays, most people have extended this to think that slavery itself is abhorrent, and that freedom is better than repression.

Which means that Craig B's comment was perfectly acceptable with out a pedantic, and sterile side discussion.
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No fair! Without those we'd hardly have a thread at all.
 
Just curious, are there many statues and monuments to Lord Cornwallis and his army on US government land?
 
BobTheCoward said:
Nothing is self evident.
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May be so. Note that I said "held to be self evident". And the person who held that to be so was himself a slave owner, as has often been pointed out, so perhaps he was wrong.

But it is evident, if not self evident, that liberty is preferable, since when people are offered the choice between freedom and slavery, they tend to choose the former.

The slaveowning states were repeatedly irked by the tendency of their enslaved workers to flee north, but northern employers were never plagued by their employees fleeing south to embrace slavery. By definition, therefore, the advantages of freedom are evident. And have long been recognised as such.
 
Upchurch said:
I've been wondering about the ratio of Union to Confederate memorial. Not sure how to figure that out.
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Not sure if there are any complete counts, but I did read it was literally in the thousands, as opposed to 900 some-odd known for the confederates.

I thought about that one a bit after watching a livestream of the city taking the ones in Bmore away.
 
Upchurch said:
I've been wondering about the ratio of Union to Confederate memorial. Not sure how to figure that out.
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Mumbles said:
Not sure if there are any complete counts, but I did read it was literally in the thousands, as opposed to 900 some-odd known for the confederates.
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In southern New England virtually every single city, town, and village has at least one Union Memorial and many, like my tiny town of <9000 residents, have two. So as a rough calculation I'd say there are 400 to 600 memorials in Massachusetts alone.
 
paulhutch said:
In southern New England virtually every single city, town, and village has at least one Union Memorial and many, like my tiny town of <9000 residents, have two. So as a rough calculation I'd say there are 400 to 600 memorials in Massachusetts alone.
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One would hope so, since so many towns in New England sent soldiers, and often officers, to fight for the union, and they are the ones memorialized. A Confederate memorial in a town which sent a significant percentage of its men to battle for the Union would be pretty far out of place around here.

Where I grew up, there was a very fine Union memorial to General Sedgwick. He died for the Union and was famous (if a wee bit apocryphally) for standing up in battle and saying, more or less, "Nonsense. They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist....." When I was a kid it was decorated with piles of real cannon balls, which diminished ball by ball over the years, until a renovation replaced them with cement ones.
 
Mumbles said:
Not sure if there are any complete counts, but I did read it was literally in the thousands, as opposed to 900 some-odd known for the confederates.

I thought about that one a bit after watching a livestream of the city taking the ones in Bmore away.
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paulhutch said:
In southern New England virtually every single city, town, and village has at least one Union Memorial and many, like my tiny town of <9000 residents, have two. So as a rough calculation I'd say there are 400 to 600 memorials in Massachusetts alone.
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There is one in Forest Park down the road from the former location of the Confederate memorial. I believe it is specifically dedicated to local German immigrants who fought in the war. You know, real history and noble deeds.
 
If you want to replace Confederate statutes, be careful what you wish for:

http://www.electricferret.com/bozo/archive/14820-put-it-right-here-next-to-lady-gaga/

We have all been aware of the controversy in recent days over the statues of Confederate heroes that are scattered across the country. Some folks in Louisiana have come up with a solution to the problem that could be the bozo answer to the problem, depending on your taste in music, of course. A petition being circulated in New Orleans with 1300 signatures on it suggests replacing the various Confederate statues with new ones…of Britney Spears.
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bytewizard said:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has declared 3 of America's largest Army bases Confederate monuments "with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed" if activists don't "take down" the Army Bases. Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and Fort Benning are the 3 bases. "It's time to take them down."
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Can we at least put up monuments to all of the enemies we have fought wars with?
 
Babbylonian said:
To be clear, I loved the Duke boys when I was a little kid (it premiered when I was 6). But driving around in a heroic vehicle with a Confederate flag on it called the General Lee? It's *********** gross, and I found it intolerable as I learned about history.
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They just needed a episode where they lynched a black kid for supposedly whistling at Daisy Duke. Good old boys.
 
Foolmewunz said:
Ditto for my son but with the opposite sampling; he has a mix of Thai, European Caucs, Korean and South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) schoolmates. He can't tell them apart. In a conversation a couple of years ago, he was getting flustered because he was sure I knew which girl Amy was because he'd seen me talking to her and her mom once. A little of my own racism... I would've said, 'The Indian girl" as that's her most conspicuous feature to me. He never said, "No! The dark girl (or the Indian girl)" but kept insisting I should remember her because she always wore a DoRaeMon sweater.
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:D Growing up as a kid on a military base, a fellow child asked me why me and my sister were different colors. I answered quite honestly that it was because we had different fathers. She thought that was a perfectly acceptable answer. Never occurred to either of us that me having a black step-father was odd in any way at all. She literally just thought that siblings should look alike.
 
Mike! said:
And frankly, without putting them in any historical context of just what and who they represent, many are well crafted visual works of art, with the unquestionable exception of that statue Mumbles uses as an avatar. Blowing that thing up would be doing the world a favor.
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That one should be relocated to the National Museum of Unintentional Parody.
 
Two more coming down...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ned-glass-windows-honoring-confederate-leader
ab567ab8e12c8c00a0d366e1009d77b2.jpg
 
d4m10n said:
That one should be relocated to the National Museum of Unintentional Parody.
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I'm still torn between agreeing that it's hideous and should go, and doing one of those silent laughs where your shoulders bob up and down every time I see it.
 
Mumbles said:
I'm still torn between agreeing that it's hideous and should go, and doing one of those silent laughs where your shoulders bob up and down every time I see it.
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I am with the article quoted. It shows what the statues are about.
 
d4m10n said:
Two more coming down...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ned-glass-windows-honoring-confederate-leader[qimg]https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20170908/ab567ab8e12c8c00a0d366e1009d77b2.jpg[/qimg]
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I love that the windows will be deconsecrated. Seriously? I'm always astonished the crap people believe. Some other fatuous ass blessed the windows a while back and now they've got to do a reverse mumbo jumbo? Why not just excommunicate the original asshate who agreed to put the windows up and blessed them and have anything he ever said or did declared anathema to the holy doctrines of Episcopalia. They really do think of themselves as Guido Sarducci said, "We call it Catholic Lite".
 
Foolmewunz said:
I love that the windows will be deconsecrated. Seriously? I'm always astonished the crap people believe. Some other fatuous ass blessed the windows a while back and now they've got to do a reverse mumbo jumbo? Why not just excommunicate the original asshate who agreed to put the windows up and blessed them and have anything he ever said or did declared anathema to the holy doctrines of Episcopalia. They really do think of themselves as Guido Sarducci said, "We call it Catholic Lite".
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Was that Farther Guido Sarducci or was it Robin Williams?
 
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