"Last Saturday in a small foundry, a man in heat-resistant attire pulled down his gold-plated visor, turned on his plasma torch and sliced into the face of Robert E. Lee."

"The hollow bronze head glowed green and purple as the flame burned through layers of patina and wax. Drops of molten red metal cascaded to the ground."

I'm reading the New York Times version of the story of the melting down of the Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue.

The Washington Post had its piece up first, with similar ornate prose — "dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.... a flash of bluish white light and orange sparks... seven long gashes into Lee’s severed head" — and I blogged it yesterday here. 

I avoid re-blogging something I've already blogged, but that precept doesn't save me from blogging the NYT piece, "The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace."  The WaPo article was written by reporters who observed the cutting and melting. The NYT's writer, Erin L. Thompson, also a first-hand witness, is a professor of art crime who has written a relevant book — "Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments" (Amazon link/commission earned).

So, though I am loath to read any more prose featuring deep gashes and glowing globs, I'm interested in Thompson's take on the ethical problem of destroying a work of art. We're talking about a statue that was already removed from its original position of honor in a public space, that could be moved somewhere else, perhaps to private grounds, to a museum, or into storage. In this case, a choice was made to melt the statue — Robert E. Lee and his horse — with some idea of using the bronze to cast a new sculpture, conveying the anti-Robert E. Lee point of view.

[A]nthropological theorist Michael Taussig would call a public secret: something that is privately known but collectively denied. It does no good to simply reveal the secret — in this case, to tell people that most of the Confederate monuments were erected not at the end of the Civil War, to honor those who fought, but at the height of Jim Crow, to entrench a system of racial hierarchy. That’s already part of their appeal. Dr. Taussig has argued that public secrets don’t lose their power unless they are transformed in a manner that does justice to the scale of the secret. He compares the process to desecration. How can you expect people to stop believing in their gods without providing some other way of making sense of this world and our future?...

Desecrating religious monuments does not destroy the faith of the believers! It fires them up. It also fires up their antagonists, enhancing their faith. Think of the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. It doesn't stop anyone from believing anything. It increases the intensity of belief all around and drives people further apart.

How can you expect people to stop believing in their gods.... Either leave people to worship as they see fit or offer them something else to inspire belief. Your displays of destruction and hostility are not the best of America.

But that's Taussig. Let's proceed with Thompson:

Covering this story over the past few years, I’ve come to realize two things. First, when a monument disappears without a ceremony to mark why it is coming down, a community has no chance to recognize that it has itself changed. (Ideally the ceremony is public, but because of safety concerns, the melting I attended was not.) 

Second, if you are outraged that something’s happening to your community’s heroic statue of Lee, you’re not going to be any less outraged if the statue is moved to some hidden storeroom than if it’s thrown into a landfill. So if all changes, large or small, will be resisted, why not go for the ones with the most symbolic resonance?

Thompson missed all the people who care about art and history and bemoan destruction. The question that begins "So" is based on an "if" that isolates a segment of those who would not melt down the sculpture and proceeds as if there are no other opponents. If there are no people— or no fine people — who oppose the meltdown for any reason other than to worship Lee as a hero, then the side with all the fine people are entitled to do anything they want. This fallacious reasoning makes it easy for Thompson to give her stamp of approval:

That’s why the idea to melt Lee down, as violent as it might initially seem, struck me as so apt. Confederate monuments went up with rich, emotional ceremonies that created historical memory and solidified group identity. The way we remove them should be just as emotional, striking and memorable. Instead of quietly tucking statues away, we can use monuments one final time to bind ourselves together into new communities....

But there was no "rich, emotional ceremony." The melting was done in secret, conveying a message of shame and fear — fear of the others who were excluded. Do they even exist in this "community" that "we" are "to bind ourselves together into" or is the idea to coerce them into bondage? And how can this be "one final time"? You envision your statement as the last word, that your monument will be the permanent one, but where is the design for this monument? Is there much chance that it will please future Americans more than a statue of a man on horseback?

Lee’s face was the last piece to go into the crucible. Given how often the monument and its ideals were celebrated with flames — from Klansmen’s torches to the tiki torches of white nationalists in 2017 — it seemed fitting for flames to close over the monument....

Violence for violence.