False idols

Americans are famously, and often proudly, ahistoric; we prefer nostalgia, myth and legends. We want stories of heroes overcoming enormous odds or of martyrs dying valiantly unbowed. We prefer the Davy Crockett who didn’t surrender at the Alamo but died clubbing Mexicans with Ol’ Betsy. We sort our soldiers into bins, the good guys who look like us, the bad guys who don’t, and cherish whatever lies help us to sleep.

It is a problem, because human experience is an ocean, while any attempt at recording human experience can only be a crude map, paper and ink as opposed to blood and cordite and steel. No recollection can do justice to experience, not even the recollections of those who were there, who felt the heat and whistle of battle. Nor can the rationalizations of those who planned and ordered battles.

History is unfathomable and dark, and we are small, with torches that burn weak and brief. And there is something in our nature that demands meaning, a narrative that forces sense and even virtue into our chaotic struggles. We need to believe our progress isn’t random, so we tell ourselves stories. So we put up statues and monuments, concrete representations of the stories that give us comfort.

I used to think statues were harmless.

I grew up around them, part of the civic landscape and thus largely invisible. Men in wigs and on horses, mostly, decorated by pigeons. Names to learn — Lafayette, Columbus, Beauregard, Jefferson — but unmistakably inhuman, cast of bronze or carved from marble. Cold, insensate, usually hollow, scaled larger than their model. They are the opposite of history and heritage.

As presented, they simply intrude on the teeming world of daily enterprise, little islands in the middle of a roundabout, emissaries from some imaginary ideal plane, their smooth dead eyes judging the actual. Maybe feeling their reproach does us some minor good; maybe it makes us stand a little straighter, to hold our eyes level, to try on the attitude of nobility expressed in their unchanging aspect.

Old battlefields sometimes stir me; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington completely hollowed me out, but statues in parks present as markers of hubris — another way men shout their names into an unloving vacuum of time and space. We crave and bestow such honor because we despise the idea of the world moving on, of plowing under our great works and our follies. We are desperate for a foothold in the imaginations of future generations. “Forget, hell” is as much prayer of hopefulness as obstinate declaration.

I have no truck with the cult of the Lost Cause; my Southernness is not one that insists Lincoln was a syphilitic war criminal and that the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with the servitude of dark-skinned people. You can make up what you want, cherry-pick the Bible for your comfort, but while there are many Lincolns and some of them are not exemplary, he shaped this country.

He was no abolitionist, and though he privately abhorred slavery it might be more to the point to say he recognized the world was changing and the practice would soon become untenable. Lincoln was right to seek to hold the secessionist states to the Union by force, but the right by which he enforced his will was extraconstitutional. He fathered a new America, he saved us — an “almost chosen people” — and positioned us as the world’s last best hope.

Still, it is difficult to reconcile one’s faith in the rule of law, in strict attention to principle, with the ruthless pragmatism of the not always so Honest Abe. Lincoln made a principle of pragmatism; he developed it into a strain of Americanism.

As artful as the Georgia marble giant carved by Daniel Chester French that sits in the Lincoln Memorial is — a subtle masterpiece, understated and fraught — the Memorial itself is a bit stuffy. (“In the Lincoln Memorial … one feels not the living beauty of our American past, but the mortuary air of archaeology,” Lewis Mumford wrote. “Depravity sees a Greek temple as a fitting memorial to Abraham Lincoln,” Frank Lloyd Wright, who didn’t win the commission, said. “Nothing is Greek about his life or work or thought.”)

Context always erodes statues, for flesh and blood people can never achieve immovable consistency. None of us can stand for anything forever, however well-intentioned and generous we might be. You read enough about anyone deemed notable enough to be written about and you might find them monstrous (Lincoln not only suspended habeas corpus but refused to let his sons bring their dog Fido to Washington when he was elected president; Jefferson explicitly acknowledged the moral horror of slavery yet enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life; Michael Jordan was a toxic co-worker) or merely irredeemably human.

Most of us like to believe we are good people who strive to do the right thing. Most of us would like to, but we know the world is rotten, that few of us are brave, and people are often greedy and cruel and indifferent to the pain of others. What’s really most important is our own safety and comfort, and there are those who will dismiss altruism as just another way of making ourselves feel good. Even the extraordinary are most of the time ordinary. Scratch a hero and she will bleed.

All public statues are problematic to some extent because they represent an official endorsement of a particular view of history, which cannot be the whole story. And some icons are nothing more than wishful tributes to pretty lies like the Lost Cause. You might think them harmless or even stirring, as they recall the misapplied bravery and sacrifice of people caught up in the tumult of their times who lacked the imagination to escape the prevailing attitudes of their times.

Or you might identify with them at some more tribal level; you might project upon them some sort of poetry. As Miniver Cheevy preferred chain mail to khaki, some of us dress up in butternut wool and re-enact the worst moments of our experiment.

I don’t think any of us are immune to this sort of romance; given the dissatisfying complexity of our own times, we might look back to what we imagine were simpler days when choices were clearer, when men were men and authority naturally vested in kings and masters.

I am for tearing down all false idols, and for not erecting any more. No plinth can bear the weight of history.