Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

Put simply: the point of a physical representation of a person is to remember that person.  When did it come to pass that only people we are fond of should be remembered?

Let a statue of Lee have this effect: those who despise him can ponder why they despise him.  Those who love him can ponder why they love him.  The rest of us can simply look and say, "Oh I know that name.  So that's what he looked like. . . "

At what point did anyone suggest that Lee and the other members of the Confederacy be forgotten? Not memorializing them =/= trying to make society forget them

Really, my big problem with the gung-ho anti-statue movement (for lack of a better name for the debate) is its encouragement of a Manichean view of history that simply doesn't do anyone any favours. I don't see it as much different from the old Lost Cause of the South mentality, except, of course, that the sides being demonized are swapped. It's like in A People's History of the United States; a good enough place to search for the skeletons in the closet of American History, but as a proper, complete take on the history of America, it's really poor. 

Case in point, he writes about Andrew Jackson: "If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history, you will find Andrew Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people — not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians." He then proceeds to talk about the latter category, and uses it as an excuse to dismiss the former category out of hand, insisting it's merely a con job masking a more sinister agenda. And, because people want to split the world into heroes and villains, history is done a disservice.

It's really telling that Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson, an off-Broadway musical that's short enough it can't be bothered to split into acts, and casts him as an Emo, still remains a more honest and nuanced view of history than even most history books.

I personally think that, if kept up, they should go beyond mere commemoration of generals fighting valiantly for a vile cause, and confront the unsavory reality as much as the myth.