Last summer saw academicians and even the once-staid Popular Mechanics(!) telling vandals how not to get killed while toppling statues. As James Lileks wrote, right around this time last year:
Historians, detached from history.
Cultural guardians, detached from their culture.
Nothing to defend but the need to defend nothing.
Like I said, I’ve no love for Columbus, but once Toppling Chic is a thing, as they say, the chains come for anyone on a plinth. It’s not so much who they are, as who put them up there. The Past People. The wrong ones.
Update: remember when magazines like Popular Mechanics were about making things?
And remember when academicians were about preserving history — even bad history — from destruction? Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.
Flashback: The Taliban: an apology. “But today’s conversation about statues is not an argument about slavery or colonialism or even minorities more generally. It is an argument about historical objects, and what you do with them as values change. Values always change, and have done so for generations. But over the years, we’ve learned that our commitment to liberalism and free speech was outmoded. We won the battle over ourselves, and learned to see that the Afghan dogmatism that we wrote off as medieval was, in fact, the future.”
As de Blasio surely knew would happen once the Columbus statues were replaced with George Floyd statues.