It's time! Why is it time? Is there a "Time's Up" movement that's sweeping up all the manifestations of love for America? No more enjoyment of the comfortable attributes of everyday patriotism!
Here's an excerpt from the column, which is by WaPo's art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott.
The ironies and blind spots pile up. Liberty was depicted as a woman, at a time when women didn’t have the right to vote. In 1882, the United States passed the nakedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act; a year later, construction of the base of the statue began with Chinese laborers among the workforce. The idea of the statue was associated with the 100th anniversary of the revolution that brought American independence. But Bartholdi created a sedate, classicizing and mostly sexless figure, not the radical revolutionary icon of liberty known in France as Marianne (the bare-chested woman seen in Delacroix’s 1830 painting, “Liberty Leading the People).”
Like breasts slipping out of a bodice, that quotation mark has slipped outside of the parenthesis. Here's the Delacroix:
Lots of guns in that picture. Kennicott implies that this woman (Marianne) is not "mostly sexless," but it's a call to arms, not a call to sex. Does Kennicott think the pantsless man in the foreground is sexy?
Speaking of sex:
I remember yet another moment of dissonance, from the day in 1986 when Reagan celebrated the renovation of the statue with a bland speech about liberty, complete with bombastic music and a relighting spectacle. Only days before, the Supreme Court had issued its decision in a case called Bowers v. Hardwick, which held that states could criminalize same-sex activity without violating the constitution. The week’s newspapers contained both stories, beautiful, choreographed imagery of the president with liberty in the background, and excerpts of a legal opinion that held a law targeted at LGBT people was justifiable because it was based on “millennia of moral teaching.”
I remember thinking, at the time, that a statue that held little meaning to me was suddenly meaningful in a very particular way: I could reject it. “This is your symbol, not mine,” I said, repeating if not the exact words at least sentiments similar to those others had no doubt felt since the beginning of the republic. It may well be that there is more genuine liberty embodied in the rejection of a symbol than the acceptance of it.
The boldface is mine. I believe this has been a theme in the articles I've been seeing — what my post title calls "anti-4th-of-July" materials. I can imagine that the writers of this material would push me back and say, no, we're not anti-4th-of-July — you're anti-4th-of-July! — because we're for the deepest values of liberty and you're not.
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8 comments:
MikeR writes:
"Pretending to love the United States is a chore for these people, and they'll be glad to be rid of it.
One of the first half-full glasses in history, and the founders looked forward to filling it, and it's gotten a lot fuller in the interim. But sure, wish for a dream world, when what you'd actually get is one more slave society. You can pretend to yourselves that someone else will be the slaves."
Lloyd writes:
"The woke are defining ignorance downward. It's just not true that until they came along, "everyone" insisted on an edifying view of the past of Western civilization, so some kind of new enlightenment is required. Chinese "coolie" laborers came to the New World, despite discrimination, because they could make money here and send it home. To a certain extent they eventually went home themselves. Free people will have to accept majority rule on many matters. Were the parents of the boomers too accepting of laws that restricted private life, and forced people with minority views or practices to live as outcasts? I guess so. It is still sane and sensible to say there were big victories for human liberty before 1950.
"I used to like teaching a bit about Lady Liberty. (I taught for a few years in Minnesota). Full name: "Liberty Enlightening the World." Contrary to the Lazarus poem that was added later, this does not mean everybody should move to New Jersey. It doesn't even mean that until the Supreme Court protects gay rights, there is no liberty here. It means liberty has been established, like an island in a world full of very bad practices. The torch is held high, the light can shine for a great distance: here, the lady says to the world, help yourself, liberty can be shared without being divided, and without hurting anyone."
Michael P writes:
"It's the argument over the last chapter of "A Clockwork Orange" again, isn't it? Should Alex (played here by Philip Kennicott) exercise his freedom to rhetorically tear down statues and attack their literal foundations, or is there an adulthood on the other side that recognizes life is not only about destruction and the rejection of social norms?"
Tony writes:
"France didn’t allow women to vote until 1946, 26 years after the US. So Marianne showed her tits and she still had to wait, “Vice la France!”."
Bob Boyd writes:
"The Statue of Liberty was intended to recognize and celebrate progress, not perfection.
"Kennicott's article strikes me as fadish moral preening."
Joe Severs writes:
"So the Statue of Liberty was erected in a country that was failing to live up to the statue's stated ideals? OK. What ideals are expressed by the George Floyd statues and are we deficient in erecting such statues before such ideals are attained?"
Darryl writes:
"In my many orbits of the Sun, I have grown to cherish the Declaration of Independence as aspirational and the Constitution as both aspirational and a brilliant and durable (political) device for conflict resolution. Statutes and monuments to our history, the best of them, serve as reminders of our successes and our failures. A personal philosophy that says "I reject that symbol because what it represents is not my view of perfection" is one that, universally applied, gives a world of flawed people a barren wasteland with neither a single statute nor any work of art."
E. Neal Scroggs writes:
"And who are the people being led by Liberty in the Delacroix? Insurrectionists armed to the teeth and ready to kill, quite unlike the so-called insurrectionists held without bond in Joe Biden’s gulag.
"I’d wager everything against Philip Kennicott having had even a single kindly thought about those prisoners of conscience."
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