This is going to be a long hot summer. The coronavirus is not going away and there is no plan to deal with it until Joe Biden, should he be elected, puts one in place, the current President having no plan other than denial. The public protests that started with the death of George Floyd seem not to be abating, though they eventually and inevitably will, with nothing to show for it, because the Republicans think that they can wait the protesters out, which is the way they handled protests against mass shootings, and so no legislation will get passed to decrease police brutality until Joe Biden gets elected with a Congress that will support him. The economy may rebound a bit, as is indicated by all the traffic on the roads in New York City, people commuting to their jobs and probably avoiding mass transit as a way to do that. But those who are running out of money, which means workers and restaurants and those who own the office buildings where the businesses have switched over to telecommuting, suggests that the road to economic recovery is very rocky and likely to be long, at least until Joe Biden comes up with a plan on how to develop a new economy for post epidemic times, including how to revamp research and forecasting so that we are not caught so badly when the next pandemic rolls around. Meanwhile, what do we do until the election rolls around and we get to see if that is conducted fairly so that the winner can seem legitimate? That is a problem we have never had before, given that elections were conducted fairly in the midst of a Civil War and during the Second World War.
What protesters and their advocates do to express their anger and to pass the time is to pull down or call for the pulling down of monuments and statues. That makes sense when it comes to Confederate generals who we as a nation may finally be willing to admit were traitors to their country even though they construed themselves as patriots supporting their states. To get rid of those statues is only to slightly misread history and to recognize, after all, that the struggle of black people has been going on for a very long time and that they and we think it about time to come to terms with our heritage. But what about Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt? Columbus did discover America for Europe and that had an immense impact on world history. Sure, the Indians did not need to be discovered because they were already here, but they did not know about Europe and so their place in global geography. Moreover, Columbus was not a slave trader nor an exploiter of Indians. That came later. He was a symbol of the white man and I am not about to throw European history, on which American ideas of political freedom and individualism are based, out the window, anymore than would most African Americans or Latinos.
And as for Roosevelt. I read the statue in front of the Museum of American History as showing Roosevelt leading two dependent people, African Americans and Indians, out of their oppression. He was an advocate for both of them. He invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner just after Jim Crow had taken control of the South and he was thrashed for that by his critics. As far as Indians were concerned, Roosevelt was an assimilationist. He wanted the Indians to become Christians and to be required to go to schools so as to learn an American way of life. Immigrants to the United States from Europe were also required to go to school, though not to change their religion, very few of them being pagan.
This policy of assimilation is very foreign to our contemporary sense of how to deal with cultural differences, which wants to protect ethnic cultures, which is possible because cultures are remarkably adaptive in that Jews and Italians preserve what of their heritage they care to and dispense, over the generations, with what no longer serves. That is more difficult for Indians whose culture is invested in the places from which they came, and so is less portable. But it seems a better course than the present reservation system, what with its very poor health and educational services, partly the result of the fact that able practitioners of those two professions are not willing to move to such remote places that have few of the amenities that other places in the country do have. So we have a real policy issue here, rather than an occasion for moral outrage.
Yes, Roosevelt was an imperialist. But what that meant for him was that he was going to wrest Spanish territories away from Spain before the Spanish Empire collapsed and so keep those territories out of the hands of, among others, the Japanese, who would have taken over the Philippines if we hadn’t. And, after all, the Spanish themselves had been a conquering power before us and had exploited their Carribean and other holdings, and there had been colonial uprisings in those territories. American administration of those territories was far more progressive, and the Philippines were granted their independence after the Second World War and Puerto Rico has voted again and again to remain in its present relationship with the United States, not wanting to give up the monies that flow its way as a result of that relationship, not to speak of the unimpeded travel to the mainland. Here too, as with Columbus, what is being proposed is a rejection of all of history as it has beforehand played out, white people anointed as the devils and capitalism (which is just the name radicals give to whatever has happened in the past five hundred years) their instrument.
Mayor Bill De Blasio’s office released a statement supporting the removal of the Roosevelt statue from in front of the Museum of Natural History. The statement said the statue “explicitly depicts Black and indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior”. I suggest that the statue suggests no such thing. It suggests, instead, that they continued to be subjugated, which noone can deny, and that Roosevelt was leading them out of their supposed inferiority. The Mayor’s statement goes on to say that removing the statue “can create a foundation for honest, respectful, open dialogue”. That is just political blather. Calling for dialogue is just a euphemism for giving whites a chance to confess their guilt. The news media, for example, have not brought up the considerations I have just mentioned about Columbus or Roosevelt. So it is to be hoped that this cultural Know-Nothingism will just pass away, a result of the summer heatwave that will not break until the election in November.
I am suggesting that the anti-monument people are in over their heads when they express their anger in this way, as are the politicians who should not make themselves into cultural commissars, people who are arbiters of what culture should be. They are not trained or equipped for it. I guess I don’t mind that the City Council does pass on which citizens to honor with street signs in their name, and that rarely gets them into trouble because they choose neighborhood heroes for this award and rarely pick controversial figures. Choosing which statues to put up or take down is usually equally innocuous, but not at the present moment when getting rid of “bad” statues is considered a revolutionary act, politicians would have to apply an eye for art criticism-- is the Roosevelt statue what its critics claim it to be?-- as well as a knowledge of history to make their determinations. Precedent suggests they are not up to the job. Rudolph Guiliani, when he was Mayor, got all hot and bothered because of two installations at the Brooklyn Museum: a representation of the Virgin Mary that had dung on it, even though that was a way Africans honored the subjects of their statues, and the notorious “Christ in Piss”, which could be read not as a disparagement of Christ but a way of showing for a contemporary audience just how much suffering and humiliation He, who was, after all, the Son of God, had to undergo to carry out his earthly mission. Guiliani wanted to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum, but he was prevailed upon not to do so.
So the Mayor’s Office is called upon, at this moment, to engage in aesthetic judgments, even if it doesn’t want to make them. Rather than blame the Mayor’s Office for being cowardly in the face of political pressure, and perhaps deceptive about where it's real tastes lie, I would suggest an explanation for its decision that is in accord with what I suggested in a post on this blog a month or so ago about the talking pineapple. I suggested that even expert readers lost their ability to be discerning readers when confronted with a politically unpopular text. In that case, it concerned a reading passage where the meaning was very clear but where professional educators could not find a meaning because they were opposed to standardized testing. In the present case, officials cannot see what is before their eyes in the Roosevelt statue-- that it shows Roosevelt bringing along the fortunes of Blacks and Indians-- because the political agenda allows for the reports of atrocities against Blacks and Indians but not much about their progress or the fact that the history of the nation is not just about them, however much slavery was indeed the Original Sin in America and that the Indians were subject to intermittent genocide when they were not being wiped out by disease and internecine warfare.
That would be a step too far for politicians to take in the present cultural war: the recognition of complexity. Rather, they fall into the trap of thinking that any opinion about culture is as good as any other because it is so easy to offer one, rather than notice that among all of those opinions, some of them will be wrong rather than just different. There is no way to turn “Hamlet” into a happy story, and there is no way to turn the Roosevelt statue into a story of the inherent inferiority of Blacks and Indians.
Thankfully, culture is very resilient. The accumulated judgments about the artistic and literary works of the past are not so easily set aside, the ever expanding repository of the great books and art works that make up the “canon” remarkably sturdy and self-policing in that new authors do get added and old ones drop away. Nobody thinks “Orlando Furioso”, the Sixteenth Century epic, is required reading anymore, and maybe Edith Wharton should be added. “the Odyssey” remains in the canon for many reasons, one of which is the figure of Circe. She was the one who turned men into swine, a comment that can be made of any femme fatale, and even of any respectable woman, and so worthy of residence in any human imagination, then or now. That is so even if people nowadays, including the Black intellectual Michael Eric Dyson, want to cast Joseph Conrad out of the canon because he gives a bad portrait of native Africans when what he was doing was trying to imagine absolute evil. Conrad did not think particularly well of white people either and so should be retained for his shattering portraits of human nature that I, for one, found very unnerving when I first read them. We should not deprive ourselves of those insights in the service of what has been properly condemned as “political correctness”, nor deprive ourselves of the Roosevelt statute, one that inspires hope rather than despair, just because people get it wrong. We should follow W. E. B. DuBois who thought that a truly free man was limiting himself if he considered only the literature that was relevant to or favored his own race.