After looking at your website I’ve concluded that the statue of Jefferson Davis should stay in the Kentucky capitol, but it should be adorned with a dress.
McConnell: Did the poll results come back?
Advisor: Yes.
McConnell: Is it safe?
Advisor: Yes.
McConnell (authoritative voice, to TV cameras): TAKE DOWN THAT STATUE!
So rather than trying to respond to everyone else here, I’m just dumping it here in Plucky’s comment. Because her perspective on this is, all things considered, entitled to more respect than mine. But here’s the thing.
First, the way Republicans seem to now be competing to disavow and oppose the monuments to the CSA they once fought tooth and nail to preserve is all too transparently an attempt to make symbolic gestures they can point to as evidence that racism is utterly and completely defeated. In their symbol-addled little minds, doing this will forever inoculate them from any charge of racism, or supporting fundamentally racist policies, ever again. I confidently predict we are very soon going to be sick unto death of the syrupy pieties that will issue from their pinholes as they pass ever more restrictive Voter ID laws and further resegregate schools and neighborhoods. “I can’t be racist. I took down CSA icons. You’re just playing The Race Card!” And don’t think for a minute the MSM won’t totally work with them on that. The whole thing is already making me more than a little nauseated.
Now, about that statute. The figure in the center of the statue hall is the semi-famous big ol’ bronze statute of Abraham Lincoln with the toe polished bright by uncounted thousands of hands rubbing it for luck. And the problem here is that there really isn’t anything you can say about Davis’s connection to Kentucky that you can’t say about Lincoln’s, and vice versa. Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky and left for Indiana with his family when he was 7. Davis was born a year or two earlier (he seems not to have been sure whether he was born in 1807 or 1808–such was life on the frontier), in another Kentucky log cabin less than a hundred miles away.
Both of them left as children when their parents moved. They left relatives in Kentucky but neither of them ever looked back or ever considered himself a Kentuckian.
And the thing is, having that eerie, ghostly white marble statute of Davis there in the rotunda, behind and to the right of of the big dark bronze of Lincoln, well, if you see it, it’s all just kind of right somehow. Davis stands there, tucked out of the way in that corner, the statue so light it seems to fade into the wall behind him. And there he stands for all time, looking at the back of the victor above him who dominates the rotunda floor. The Davis statue is wraith-like, haunting that corner, like a shrunken, ghostly defeated whisper of discord and the ghost of the man he was before his treason.
And it’s just fitting to tell people that both presidents were born in this state whose position during the war was so very ambiguous and that gave generals and soldiers to both sides. It’s even more worthwhile to lead people to contemplate that Lincoln’s family moved north when he was seven, and Davis’s moved south when he was three or four. Neither left the state by choice, but by the whim of their parents and by such random rolls of the cosmic dice are heroes and saviors of their nation distinguished from rebels and traitors. It’s a thing worth bearing in mind.
And it’s just so Kentucky–it so poignantly speaks to to the uniquely weird place Kentucky found itself during the Civil War. slave state that ostensibly stayed in the union yet had a Confederate shadow government and a star in its flag. Indeed, the Confederates took the capital and were in the process of swearing in a governor when the the Federals counterattacked and sent them, and their government, retreating to Bowling Green.
And here’s the other thing. If the Commonwealth of Kentucky is going to start decertifying memorials to Confederate officials, it’s going to have to figure out what to do with this place, the Jefferson Davis birthplace state historical park, and this thing, the big-ass Jefferson Davis Memorial obelisk on the grounds of that park.
I recognize a case could be made for a lot of dynamite, but that just seems so Taliban.
Finally enough room in the Rotunda for the fridge equipment to display the life-size casting of Mitch astride a rampant roll of quarters in pure yellow unsalted butter!
Because of course it was. You think that’s bad? Try walking Gettysburg or Petersburg or any of the other major battlefields, especially the ones where the South lots. They’re littered with one shrine after another dripping with glutinous Daughters of the Confederacy platitudes.
The Daughters of the Confederacy are the only women who can make the Daughters of the American Revolution look like flaming liberals in comparison.
Here’s an article for TPM…run a score board of GOP national officials and governors who have called out the Confederacy and those who STILL have skeletons in their closets! Should be great fun!!!
You could be right about Republicans continuing with their blatant voting rights abuses but it feels like there is a sea change happening across the country. People are FED up with all the hate and bigotry. This has not happened in a vacuum. The police murdering black people at will, the Republican party supporting these murders, the obnoxious and dangerous inciting going on at Fox and right wing talk radio, the religious rights refusal to accept gay marriage and the hate speech they spew towards gays, all of this has contributed to the situation the GOP finds itself in now. You lay down with scum you get smeared with it. We still have a long way to go, but we are definitely on the right road.
Misstyped
RollinNolan…From your lips to God’s ears!!!
Sadly, my cynicism is unchanged. The reality is that Republicans painted themselves into a racial box, starting with Nixon’s southern strategy and continuing through Reagan starting his 1980 campaign with a speech about states fucking rights that he travelled to Philadelphia fucking Mississippi to give. Republicans simply cannot get the votes of minorities without making changes to their positions that lose them more white votes than they gain minority votes. And the real danger to them is it is entirely possible that Democrats can offer policies that gain them white votes without losing minority votes.
And with demographic change, this means that in each successive election, Republicans must either gerrymander whiter districts out of browning states in Congressional and state elections and somehow get a larger share of the white vote than they got in the last election to win the presidency.
And when you’re committed to policies that are all about serving the interests of the 1%, there’s really just one hammer in the electoral toolkit that has chance of getting that done . . .
I bet they’re going ape-shit on Breitbart. They’re probably all talking each other off the ledge.
More likely, they’re just buying more guns and flags, and preparing for the lefty takeover.
They’re all running for the hills. What’s up with that?
“And Kentucky of course did not secede from the union.”
Yankee Mitch? …what a joke.
Sherman acknowledged that during the war, the slaveowning mothers of those daughters were the most vile and hateful of all southerners, and played a HUGE role in inspiring their husbands, lovers and brothers in their lost cause.
I’m not sure if Ben Butler or Django knew how to deal with them best.
you decide…
Call me a cynic, but I don’t trust these baggers at all, i’m beginning to smell a rat. To have them come forward and volunteer something like this, especially McConnell, just doesn’t mesh.
They wouldn’t be trying to paint themselves to be anti-racist after all these years just a year before an election would they?
Mandingo had certain talents though.
Well said, NCSteve. I agree with your analysis completely. I also believe the the GOP will continue to cheat in every way they can but that the public’s patience with their antics has reached an all time low.