American Idols

Someday they'll erect a statue in your honor.
And eventually, that statue will be taken down.
It happened to Saddam Hussein. And maybe, like Saddam, the same folks who took it down might want to put it back up again.
Statues have a funny way of not aging. Made out of things like bronze or marble, they tend to outlast whatever zeitgeist initially put them up. Statues are more of the fixture type of elements. This has a lot to do with weight. Not necessarily the historical version, but the physical. The monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia weighs twelve tons. It is sitting on a forty foot pedestal and stands an additional twenty-one feet above that. Taking down that bad boy would take some serious vandalism and more than a passing interest in the acceleration of gravity. Wouldn't it be easier just to let it be? Probably. Cheaper, too.
But it would be wrong. Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. If you're not up on your American history, that was the side that was trying to keep things the way they were down south. Slaves. That was the side that lost. And even though General Lee personally felt that slavery was evil, he still fought to defend those who would see that institution continue. The statue in question is located in what was the capital of the Confederacy. I guess that makes sense.
Until we get to the part where the statue was commissioned in 1917, and dedicated in 1890. For you history buffs, that's more than twenty-five years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. More than twenty-five years after Juneteenth. Why was the statue of a loser, and a mighty big one at that, erected in the center of the city that was the conquered capital of a failed uprising? I thought that history was written by the victors. Why isn't there a statue of Ulysses S. Grant riding high above the traffic circle in the middle of town?
Maybe because most of these monuments were thrown up long after they were tributes to the "heroes" of the Confederacy. They were placed in conspicuous places throughout the south, peaking during the early 1900's. Kind of like there were folks who didn't want us to forget the olden days. Or maybe they wanted to keep their thumbs on the racist button just in case anyone would want to forget that legacy. Care to guess what year Maryland decided to add statues of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to their capital?
2020.
More than two hundred years after that whole Robert E. Lee mess. Debacle. Atrocity. The statue of Ms. Tubman stands an "historically accurate four feet ten inches tall." And even with that relative height disparity, I'm betting Harriett could topple General Lee any day.