Is this business of trying to revise history by pulling down statues of people who wound up on the wrong side of it as confusing to you as it is to me? I don’t understand why we are so worked up about it. Our cities are littered with statues of former big shots, honored or dishonored by occasional demonstrations of fealty or scorn, but generally accepted as just a relatively harmless part of the civic scenery. We have been able to get along peacefully with them, only occasionally smearing one with paint or knocking another one off its pedestal. Nothing new about any of this. One day George III is proud on his plinth; the next day he is flat on his face (his poor horse, too). History doesn’t pay much attention unless we go overboard. Cheops’s pyramid. Constantine’s arch. Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. We just take a selfie, reroute the traffic and life goes on.
Celebratory statuary goes back at least as far as ancient Egypt. Narcissism predates both the Greek myths and The Donald’s troubled psyche. Pharaohs erected monuments to themselves for as long as there were pharaohs. The newly crowned (asped?) were usually as determined as the Donald to eliminate traces of their predecessors. Breaking up or tearing down one’s predecessor’s effigies was a popular sport.
Ancient Egypt’s monuments and statues were commonly identified by the ruler’s name in a cartouche — a few hieroglyphs enclosed in an oval frame. Ramses II, who reigned for almost all of the 13th century BC, had a less impressive signature than Trump (who must have a monetary interest in a broad-nibbed pen factory) but he was a master when it came to cartouches. He just erased the original names and substituted his own. This made it unnecessary to tear down the original artworks, thus presumably sparing the royal treasury substantial outlays for demolition and replacements. It also gave him access to a variety of “off the shelf”items. (It also left a nasty problem of matching dates and names and likenesses for future archeologists.)
A further word about temples. Egyptian temples, like the later Greek and Roman ones, were originally built not as royal tombs but as places for people to congregate to worship the gods. With the passage of time some gods tended to lose their luster. It didn’t rain after all. The grasshoppers showed up in even greater numbers. We lost the war. What to do about it? Tear down their temples and build new ones? If they later regained their powers and their popularity they might well have been vengeful. Let them co-exist, then?
There is evidence both ways, but the arrival of the monotheistic religions raised the problem in more acute form. If there was truly only one god, and if you insulted him the consequences could be uncorrectable. The problem may or may not have been exacerbated by the fact that some of the early temples were also used as secular as well as holy meeting places. Muhammad’s followers had the good sense, for example, to simply rededicate the Roman-built Hagia Sophia basilica in Constantinople. The church became a mosque and its valuable enclosed space continued to accommodate large crowds of worshippers. This favor was returned later when the mosque was rededicated as a church by the re-conquering Crusaders. Still later Kemal Atatürk converted it to a museum. Its history of conversions may in fact not yet be over. Mr. Erdoğan’s current reform efforts may see the building returned to Islam.
In all this there is a lesson that Mayor Di Blasio might well heed as he considers what to do about our Cristoforo on his 59th Street pedestal. Monuments and statues are fine civic decorations to be sure, but they expensive, and when the political power is splintered they can be divisive. They are for that reason difficult to “disappear”, even aside from the expense.
What do you do with heroes who turn out on second thought out to be not so heroic? The Russians are said to have established a graveyard for Stalin statues. It is today pretty full, and weedy, and not often visited except by the occasional nonagenarian hard-liner. Saddam’s images and palaces have mostly been broken up or taken over by the space-hungry U.S. occupying bureaucracy. Hitler’s images are legally verboten. The poor Confederate GI made of soft lead who was dragged off his pedestal in Durham recently crumpled when he hit the ground, and is probably good for nothing now but repairing the cracks in stained glass windows.
What about selling them? A competent merchandising effort could undoubtedly create a collectors’ market, like the one that converts old junker cars into antiques with multi-million dollar price tags. This could also bring in some modest municipal revenue. But disposing of a statue on a 70-foot pedestal or auctioning off an extravagant display involving gilt horses or a chariot and winged angels of victory, is undeniably more difficult than changing a cartouche.
Statues are specific to individuals. Not only are they possibly passable likenesses, they are often, like the statues of Catholic saints, further equipped with identifying attributes. For example, the Santa Maria’s tiller in Cristoforo’s right hand. Hard to re-label that as a tribute to a rebellious Taino slave. Size also makes private use awkward, as anyone can attest who visited the lofty living room temporarily enclosing Chris five years ago. Who has enough space for a mounted General Sherman in the den (even if it would undeniably be a hard-to-beat thumb in the eye of the neighbor who has only a Kossuth)?
So what to do about all this? I propose a simple solution — a local ordinance outlawing anything beyond simple life-sized figures. No more horses or chariots or angels. Existing violations would be auctioned to raise money for relief of the next hurricane disaster. This could be called “privatization”, which should get it a lot of support in the Age of Trump, where the government itself is being remodeled as a business franchise. In future all celebratory statuary would be in the form of life-sized sized figures equipped with interchangeable heads, like screw-on salt cellar tops. The bodies could remain in place from one political era to the next, with the heads changed according to prevalent priorities. Headless figures in various poses would be stockpiled in a national warehouse as a WPA-like make-work project; identifiable heads to be created later as needed. (This would resemble the strategy supposedly followed by early American itinerant portrait painters who were said to devote the winter months of impassable roads to staying snug at home and preparing canvases with generic bodies and backgrounds, leaving the faces for actual sittings in spring and summer.)
What would be the objections?
Probably no large-scale commotion would be aroused if the head changes were effected at midnight (like the insertion of loopholes in congressional bills) when normal citizens are either asleep or watching football. The KKKers would simply wake up in the morning to discover that Jefferson Davis had magically become Rosa Parks while they were busy stitching the eyeholes in their sheets. There would be some disappointment, for sure, at the lost opportunity for a torch-lit celebratory swastika-flagged picnic with truncheons and sidearms, but there would always be a hope for next time, especially now that unpredictability has been revived as the new law of the land.
No-longer-relevant commemorative plaques, like cartouches, would be a minor problem. They are as easily interchangeable as street signs when a politician needs one more constituent’s vote. Ninety-nine percent collectors would find them more affordable than gilt horses. A Wikipedia URL for the bio of the original dedicatee could be tacked on each statue’s vacated base for those truly interested.
Displaced heads would be stored, like singers’ wigs in the Metropolitan Opera’s basement, against the day when a former hero might need to be resurrected.
I would not expect this change to be adopted quickly — there is no such word as “quickly” in the Washington lexicon — but it could be added to the platforms of one or both parties before the upcoming mid-term elections.
Voilà! Problem solved. Next case…
Vance Weaver 