Deconstruction Goes Mainstream | National Review

An excellent article, but one of the comments captured me, so here it is: ""the minds of the young protesters are virginal, without depth, without empathy for differences of point of view"

Exactly right. I have spent considerable time over the last several days in Lincoln Park in DC, where the vandals want to remove the Emancipation Memorial. That memorial was commissioned and paid for by the freedmen themselves. THEY had been in bondage. THEY had been whipped and chained. THEY had toiled in the fields, and THEY had fought and bled for their freedom. THEY revered Lincoln, and this is THEIR memorial.

The young protestors look at the memorial and see only themselves reflected back. They see a black man at Lincoln's feet and perceive him as kneeling. Knowing that he is RISING would require stopping long enough to understand what they wish to destroy. They say that he is in a subservient position, imploring Lincoln for their freedom. In fact, if you actually look at the statue, Archer Alexander (the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act, who was the model for the sculpture) is not "begging" for anything. He does not even see Lincoln, who is at right angles to him. His gaze is directed past Lincoln, eyes lifted up as he rises to freedom. Lincoln is standing to the side, as a background figure, one hand on the Emancipation Proclamation and the other extended in a benediction or blessing. Lincoln is not touching the rising figure. He is an allegorical Christ figure blessing him.

But apart from ignoring the very explicit intention of the artist and deliberately misrepresenting the composition, the vandals seek to remove the great monument to Lincoln and emancipation of those very freedmen who erected it. They deem the work and, by extension, the memory of those freedmen as unworthy to stand in the public square. The vandals are angry. They have grievances and demands. None of their grievances holds a candle to the suffering and sacrifices of the men and women whose memorial this is. NONE of the vandals have the moral standing to silence the voices and erase the monument of the freedmen. NONE of the vandals is fit to tie the shoelaces of the freedmen.

But none of the vandals have the breadth of vision, the historical perspective and moral imagination -- to even see the men and women who made this monument. The freedmen -- the actual flesh and blood people who sent their meager earnings as contributions to build it -- have become unpersons. The statue is to be repurposed as a prop in a 21st century morality play that is all about woke outrage.

The vandals see only themselves. To tear down -- in the name of "Black Lives Matter" -- the Emancipation Memorial erected by the freemen themselves is an obscenity. And to denounce as racist all of us who want to remember and honor those freedmen by keeping their monument in a prominent public place is a moral inversion as monstrous as anything Orwell ever imagined.

The vandals see only themselves. They are pathetic. But they are also dangerous and destructive."