Sunday, June 21, 2020

My Sunday Feeling

I had to see it for myself.  There used to be a statue of a Confederate soldier out in front of the Arkansas Museum of Military History downtown in MacArthur Park.  You know. Defensive position with bayonet and equally steely gaze pointed north.  Somebody had defaced it with varnish or something last Wednesday.  So on Thursday, the City of Little Rock took the damn thing down.

No hoopla.  No press conference.  No demonstration.  No nothing.

They just went over there and pulled Johnny off his pedestal.  Then they surrounded the pedestal with a wooden box.  I first learned about it from Friday morning’s paper.  I suspect that’s the way that most folks found out about it. And sure enough it was true.  I saw it with my own two eyes.

My thoughts?  I really don’t have any.  Other than it’s kinda surreal for a big honking piece of public art to not be there after being there all my life.  I vividly remember it greeting us elementary school kids when we went over there for field trips.  And a couple of years ago I went to see Johnny around dusk to try my hand at arty farty photography.  I failed.

I have always been ambivalent at best about “Lost Cause” iconography.  At worst I found it all overwrought and silly.  I remember the first time I ever saw Robert E. Lee way up in the air on Lee Circle.  I pulled the car over.  I got out and stood at the base and gawked.  I used to run from my hovel on Napoleon to Lee Circle most days.  And most days I would catch my breath beneath old Bobby and marvel at how “out there” Lee Circle was. 

And I suppose that, being a middle class white kid, I was just not attuned to the wider implications of the glorification of guys who pretty much under any other normal definitions that might govern armed conflict and/or political science committed treason against the United States of America.  I just thought “this is how they do down here.” Down here being Mississippi and Louisiana.  

Sure.  Back home we had rednecks waving the Rebel flag at Central High.  And Rebel flag bumper stickers were once abundant in nature around here.  But to consider Arkansas part of the antebellum south is ludicrous.  

Still.  I didn’t think much about it one way or another.  Background noise. That’s just the way they do down there.

I eventually was required to confront the issue.  And what forced the confrontation was, as is often the case, kids.

I was teaching high school history for juniors about the time Trump was running for the Republican nomination.  I think the Robert E. Lee thing had just cranked up down in New Orleans.  Anyway, about a third of the boys in each of my classes were incensed by the notion of taking down statues, pulling down flags etc.  About a third were all for it.  The rest could give a shit.

“You can’t change history Mr. B,” was the most persistent argument of the preservationists in front of me.   My response that so long as the Army War College exists so will Lee was deemed a little too facile.  Or would have been so deemed had any of them ever heard of that word.

Huey Long said that sometimes you got to put the hay down where the goats can get at it.  So I sat on my porch swing after school one day and cooked up some goat feed.  The final product went something like this.

“Let’s say I’m a black guy in Memphis.  I have a wife and a family.  I have a good job.  I pay my taxes just like anybody else.  And every day when I go to work I have to drive past a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Nathan Bedford Forrest who was as ruthless a slave owner as ever was.  Who made a fortune off the slave trade.  And finally I get to thinking I’m sick of driving past a monument to a man like this.  And I really don’t want to have to explain to my children why they got to look at it either.

I know you can’t change history.  I’m not trying to.  I can’t bring back the lynched.  I can’t unseparate the families.  But what I can do is make damn sure that my children don’t have to look at Nathan Bedford Forrest every day.  I can damn sure try to make sure not another nickel of my tax dollars goes to the upkeep of that thing.  

And your only response is that you can’t change history?”

You may well ask ,Gentle Reader, “Did it work?”

And the answer would be “Of course not.”  I wasn’t exactly running the local chapter of the  “Dead Poets Society” in there.

I run into some of those guys from time to time. Or they look me up on Facebook.  They typically share with me a favorite memory of those days.  And it’s different with each former student. Some things I emphasized went in one ear and out the other.  Somethings I didn’t think all that important is remembered with crystalline clarity. I bet if you talk to any teacher they will tell you that this is pretty much par for the course. The fact that a kid remembers something-anything- is a win.

 But maybe some of my former students will remember the lunch Huey Long and I fed them 5 years ago as our country currently confronts the systemic racism embedded in much of our public art and iconography.  Racism that I didn’t ever really catch as a young man who looked up in the sky in wonderment at Marse Robert 3-4 times a week while I ran the streetcar lines.  Maybe my history boys will recognize that there is another side.  If they can do that, then I did my job.

“I pay my goddamn taxes just like anybody else.  And I am sick of looking at this.“

There are worst arguments.  











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