Posturing over statues
If Mayor de Blasio thinks appointing a decency commission, sorry, “symbols of hate” commission, will unmire him from the political poop he stepped into in haste to show solidarity with the righteous of Charlottesville, he’s kidding himself. Recall the groanworthy chapter from not-so-yesteryear: After the Brooklyn Museum staged an exhibit that included a painting depicting a black Madonna decorated with elephant dung, Mayor Giuliani howled in rage and ultimately slapped together a panel of loyalists to stop public institutions from displaying art that some might find offensive.
Frothing too hard to recognize he’d turned laughingstock, Giuliani demanded standards to be applied to all city-funded museums.
Eyes rolled. No report ever came. Mayor Bloomberg entered City Hall and unceremoniously ended the embarrassing exercise.
Now de Blasio — who said later of Giuliani’s commission, “I don’t think that’s the American way” — seeks to tap a single group to review all the thousands of monuments on city land and presumably measure the offensiveness of each.
De Blasio’s commission does not exist yet. Its members have yet to be named. Its mandate smells suspiciously like that of the Public Design Commission enshrined in the City Charter, which must approve all works of art on city grounds — as well as approve the removal or alteration of even a one.
We repeat: There is nothing wrong and plenty right with removing statues of Confederate generals installed to assert white supremacy, as many Southern monuments were. But de Blasio picked up the ball dropped in Charlottesville and ran wild, urging a wholesale scrubbing of public squares using criteria unmoored from history and context.
Giulianiesque, he rushed to judgment — first promising, in a tweet, to “conduct a 90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property” and declaring a moment later: “The commemoration for Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain in the Canyon of Heroes will be one of the first we remove.”
That “commemoration” happens to be a documentation of city history — but de Blasio couldn’t be bothered to care about that. He was too busy piggybacking on moralistic outrage.
Monday, as the backlash built, de Blasio expressed confusion that any New Yorker would think he’s readying to remove, say, the statue of Columbus perched atop the circle of the same name.
“I think there’s been a bit of a rush to judgment,” said the mayor who rushed to judgment.
Perhaps, he said, the commission will recommend explanatory plaques putting history of some monuments in context — not a bad idea, now that he mentions it.
But given the way de Blasio’s panel is coming into being, it’s probably better that it just goes the way of its older, indecent cousin.