Trump's Mount Rushmore speech came on too late for me, but...

... I've got the transcript, and I'm going to live-blog my reading of it. I'm fixing punctuation as I go and adding boldface:

There could be no better place to celebrate America’s independence than beneath this magnificent, incredible, majestic mountain and monument to the greatest Americans who have ever lived.

Somebody went heavy on the alliteration, but "incredible" sneaked in there. He's on the side of the monuments, not the destroyers of monuments.

The superlative — "the greatest Americans who have ever lived" — is a provocation. Not only is he defending these 4 men against the recent attacks, he's saying they are greater than every other American in history — greater than Frederick Douglass, greater than Harriet Tubman, greater than all of them. He didn't have to say the greatest. He could have said "among the greatest."

It would mean something just to call them "great" at all and not to qualify it with something like, though they did not escape the moral failings characteristic of their time. But he went big. He put the 4 above everyone else, which is the message of the mountain.

Today we pay tribute to the exceptional lives and extraordinary legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

He's got the great men on his side, not like those people who want to tear down statues of all of them.

I am here as your president to proclaim before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defamed, their legacy will never ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.

That's big! Very grand. Very much a stand against the protesters and rioters... without mentioning them.  This is hyperbole, because Trump cannot protect the monument forever, and indeed, an understanding of geology would tell you that it's impossible for the monument to stand forever as an eternal tribute.

But he's not promising. He's proclaiming. I think of the proclamation on the plinth of Ozymandias. You can proclaim it is eternal, but that doesn't make it eternal. I'm going to live forever! I'm going to learn how to fly! Sing it joyously, but you're still going to die some day.

Taking flight.

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Scott Adams — wearing his Pope hat to make a moral ruling — says that the Confederate statues should come down.

The brand is "America" and it's working against your brand — even if only 20% of the people are feeling offended and excluded. It doesn't matter that you think it doesn't.

Scott Adams tells talks about racist statues https://t.co/3bpiyhxZdQ

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 15, 2017

He didn't really need his Pope hat for that, because he's not talking about his own moral vision. He's taking a businesslike, corporate view, discussing a branded product called America and noticing the moral opinions of the consumers of the product.

There's also some interesting discussion in there about the internment of persons of Japanese descent during WWII and whether statues of FDR should come down. If I understand Adams's standard correctly, if 20% of Americans are offended — based on serious reasons — then Americans as a group should want to update the American brand and remove the monument, which is just decoration.

ALSO: Pope-hatted Adams makes the moral ruling that the mob's pulling down of a statue of a Confederate soldier is "a moral gray area." There was no violence against persons, only property, and it "comes very close to free speech." It's destructive, but only of "a racist symbol." I'll give this post the "civil disobedience" tag. Adams doesn't use that term, but he briefly acknowledges that the destruction is against the law and that the protesters probably need to be arrested and prosecuted and given a light sentence. In standard civil disobedience thought, the disobeyers accept the legal consequences.

AND: Adams is very funny talking about the notion of gathering America's Confederate statues in a museum: "It would be the world's worst museum." You'd be saying "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee" and then "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee," etc. I'd just note that the sculpture was designed to fit in a park, so how about something outdoors, something like Grūtas Park (AKA "Stalin's World)(discussed in this post of mine from last May (about the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in New Orleans)).

AND: Let me repeat something from that May post, this image "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":

"Crews, wearing masks to cover their faces, worked under a heavy police presence starting at 3 a.m. to dismantle the statue..."

... of Jefferson Davis, in New Orleans.

[The city spokesperson] said the law enforcement officials took extra precautions because of “consistent threats, harassment and intimidation tactics” surrounding the removal.

Some protesters carrying Confederate flags shouted “cowards” and “totalitarianism” as it was removed....

Other works expected to be removed are a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood in a traffic circle, named Lee Circle, in the city’s central business district since 1884, and an equestrian statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general. Because of the threat of violence, the city would not release details on the timeline for when the remaining two statues would be removed.

ADDED: The statues are not getting destroyed. They're being warehoused, potentially to be displayed at some point in a museum setting, buffered by contextualizing historical materials. So this is not like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas. Nor is it a case of a court dictating that a monument must come down. (My thoughts drifted back to Justice Breyer's decision against requiring the removal of the 10 Commandments monument on the Texas statehouse grounds.)

In New Orleans, we have the political branch of government making a decision about the design of shared public space. The people, acting through government, have the power to redesign their spaces to express their current values. Those who object to the new decisions have a right to protest (but not to commit or threaten acts of violence). They lost elections. Let them try to win in the future by arguing that the statues should be moved out of the warehouse and back to the public square (or simply that a dignified and accurate historical museum should be built).

We've talked before on this blog about removing statues from public places. We've seen it done for aesthetic reasons (where the honored person looked ugly), and we've seen it for political reasons:

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grūtas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.

New Orleans needs its Grūtas Park.

"A copy of Lithuania’s lost declaration of independence, drawn up in 1918, has been discovered languishing in a German archive...."

"Lithuania had lost track of all copies of the independence declaration, signed on 16 February 1918, in the turmoil that engulfed the region after the end of the first world war. The Lithuanian state was announced with the approval of Germany, whose army controlled the territory at the time, following a successful offensive against the Russian empire in 1915." 

Lithuania was already planning to mark its 100th anniversary, keen to assert its independence in the face of what it sees as renewed aggression from Russia. Memories are still fresh of Lithuania’s emergence from Soviet occupation in the 1990s.

Goodbye to Irene.

Irene Katele, 1958-2016. From this blog, you know her as Irene (the commenter).

Here's her blog, Amber Reunion, which begins here, on September 16, 2011:

Atlantic Ocean, June 1949. This is where everything began. These happy folks are my parents, as immigrants, aboard the "General W.M. Black," the vessel that transported them to the United States. They were Displaced Persons from Lithuania, and they had lived since the end of World War II in the American-occupied zone of Germany.

The ship sailed from Bremerhaven. My Mom was shocked by how small it was. Men and women slept in separate quarters, and everyone ate oatmeal. Most of the passengers got sick during the trip. My parents had never felt better.

It's full of "family photos dating back to the 1860s": "Tambov, Russia, 1912. This is my paternal Grandmother, Tatjana. Tatjana was about sixteen when she posed for this photo. I love the shoes!"/"Soviet Union, 1940. The is my paternal Grandmother's mother, Nina. After the Russian Revolution and the execution of her husband, Pavel, Nina continued to live in the Soviet Union. Nina's expression, the way she holds the wildflowers, her hat, and her ill-fitting stockings speak to me."/"In the 1930s, my Mom's maternal aunt, Dora, adopted the glamorous look that came into fashion on the eve of World War II. Think Marlene Dietrich with auburn hair. The first stories I heard about Dora pivot on her forward-looking viewpoint. More provincially wired people found her views and behaviors scandalous. Others recognized that Dora simply was born about sixty years too early."

There are many stories and photographs of growing up in Chicago in the 1960s — like: "When I was growing up, I learned about holiday customs. Lithuanians, for example, celebrate Christmas on the night of Christmas Eve ("Kūčios")":

The Kūčios meal consists of twelve meatless dishes, one to represent each of the Apostles. All of the foods are cold dishes so that the hostess does not have to cook on such a solemn day. On Christmas Eve, we primarily eat vegetable salads, gefilte fish, and marinated herrings. Lots of herring: herring is served at least four ways.

Enforcement of these traditions is inflexible. During one memorable Christmas Eve, we had a guest who did not eat fish. Cold fish therefore was out of the question. My Mom roasted and served a duck. My Dad spit bullets about the breach of Kūčios protocol. Even now, over thirty years later, my Mom usually says on Kūčios, "Do you remember when I roasted a duck on Kūčios?!!" as if that were a really screwball, Lucille Ball-like, thing to do.

There's mindbogglingly intricate knitting. (Sometimes that knitting came to me and you saw it on this blog —  like here.)

And there were many vignettes involving poodles. (Sometimes those poodles made it onto my blog, like here and here.)

What a great life she lived! How lucky we were to have known her!

"A lot of people refer to it as 'moonshine on steroids.' A lot of people call it 'Dewshine.'"

People are drinking Mountain Dew mixed with racing fuel... and some of them, it seems, are dying.

"I think they were trying to substitute the methanol that's in racing fuel for alcohol... Methanol is metabolized to very, very strong acid. The pH of the blood goes so low, it's incompatible with life."

While the immediate effect of drinking methanol is similar to getting drunk from alcohol, ingesting it "causes the cellular machinery to break down".... "One of the unique things is it's metabolized in the eyes, so you get blindness"....

 ADDED: Irene sends a link to her blog post, "A Tragedy at the Žirgynas":

A group of Displaced Persons—single men from the Seligenstadt Žirgynas—were working for the U.S. Army at either a defunct air base or munitions plant. They found a barrel. It was marked, "alcohol." Woot! The men decided to have a party....

Everyone whooped it up and drank the alcohol. Over the next few days, groups of men from the Žirgynas reported to the Seligenstadt infirmary. The men complained of double vision and dizziness. They also began to exhibit other neurological abnormalities.

The alcohol turned out to be nonpotable methyl alcohol—the kind used to clean airplane engines and the like. My Mom was working at the time as a nurse in the infirmary. She remembers that the doctor on duty shrugged and said there was nothing to do but wait for the men to pass away....

Terribly sad.

Using a drone to take photographs of snow-covered Lithuania.

Nice work by Karolis Janulis.

Ukraine sculptor transforms a statue of Lenin into Darth Vader.

"I wish to save the monuments of history. I’m trying to clean up the operating system and keep them on the hard drive of memory."

Said Alexander Milov, who shouldn't be considered a vandal, since his transformation preserves the statute, which was slated to be removed after the Ukrainian parliament passed a "de-Communisation" law.

"We are gathering all these statues – like Lenin – and we would like to make a park of forlorn heroes of the epoch,” says Milov. “I want to take the statues out of the central squares of cities and put them in a different place like Disneyland, where they can be visited. It seems to me that if these statues are destroyed, people coming after us will have no possibility to make conclusions for themselves as to whether people needed them or not."

That would be like Grutas Park in Lithuania, which we talked about here and here last winter. But Milov prefers to keep the statues where they are and to "turn them into characters from Soviet cartoons."

As for the Darth Vader Lenin: "I wanted to make a symbol of American pop culture which appears to be more durable than the Soviet ideal." Interestingly, aptly, he put a Wi-Fi router in its head.

By the way, in the second of the 2 linked posts from last winter, we talked about the controversy about whether some aesthetically pleasing statues on The Green Bridge (in Vilnius, Lithuania) should be relocated to Grutas Park. I expressed concern about moving high-quality sculpture that "was designed for a particular site" because it "is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved," and I asked: "If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do?"

The bridge sculptures were removed this past July, to be replaced by flowers.

"While the propaganda monuments that remained in prime locations continued to stir regular controversy, this controversy was never massive enough to actually lead to their demolition."

"That's how the supporters of the 'bridges symbols' even managed to list them as heritage, making the demolition harder. Opponents, unable to remove the sculptures, then attempted to 'put them into context' through 'additional features.' Some of them were temporary (e.g. a NATO flag overshadowing the Soviet army sculpture), others permanent (e.g. a plaque with information on the Soviet occupation), yet others never completed (e.g. a suggestion to put the statues in cages)."

From an article about the relocation of the Žaliasis Bridge statues to Grutas Park — a place of exile for Soviet-era sculpture in Lithuania —which we were talking about last week, after the NYT did a story about living in Airbnb places in Europe that included photos of Americans enjoying themselves in the company of gigantic statues of Lenin and Stalin. That second link has a video about Grutas Park that shows the Žaliasis Bridge statues and discusses the now-overruled decision to leave them in their prominent place on the 4 corners of the bridge.

I could understand the decision to leave them there, but I'm a stranger to the context. Sculpture that was designed for a particular site is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved. If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do? The middle position is to move the sculpture out of its place of honor but otherwise to preserve it. Keep in mind the subject of Islamist extremists who have been sledgehammering ancient statues, which is what got me started talking about this subject.

What would you do with artistically good statues that you deeply disapprove of?

Completely destroy them.

Put them in a museum setting with labeling that explains the reason for disapproval.

Leave them on the site where they were designed to appear.

Make case by case decisions based on the site, the statue, and the reason for disapproval.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: There's also the question whether the site was designed for the sculpture. Are the 4 corners of Žaliasis Bridge plinths or did the sculpture-supporting function arise in the mind of the invader?

Stalin World.

Here's a documentary about the Lithuanian theme park Grutas Park — AKA "Stalin World" — which we were talking about this morning in connection with the ISIS destruction of ancient sculptures. Here we see Soviet era sculptures preserved in a tourist-attraction garden setting that many Lithuanians find quite offensive.



Thanks to Irene for pointing me there. And no thanks to the NYT for picturing 2 of the Grutas Park sculptures in a slide show about how aging Americans can absorb Euro-culture through the wonders of Airbnb.

ISIS endeavors to destroy the art of ancient Nineveh (AKA Mosul).

The efforts at destruction that you see at the beginning of this video are not as horrible as they look, for reasons that are explained half way through.

Watch out for the British expert who appears at 1:47. She thinks it's "pretty rotten for the people who actually live" in northern Iraq that so many of the original works of art have been transferred to Western museums — even as it's apparent that if those sculptures had been left in northern Iraq, they would now be sledgehammered to bits. Or does she — do we — think that if the artworks had been left in place, the history of Iraq would have played out on a different path, and the people who live there would have treasured and protected the world's artistic heritage? From the article at the link (to the British Channel 4 site):

The demolition squad of the Islamic State are following in the tradition of the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamyan, in Afghanistan, and the Malian jihadi group Ansar al Dine which destroyed mud tombs and ancient Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu. They quote suras from the Koran that they say demand the destruction of idols and icons.

But iconoclasm isn't just a Salafi Islamic idea. In the 17th Century, puritans, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, destroyed Catholic holy objects and art in Britain.

"We pulled down two mighty great angells, with wings, and divers other angells . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angells," wrote William Dowsing, Cromwell's chief wrecker, after leading his henchmen into Peterhouse college chapel in Cambridge in December 1643.

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grūtas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.

Is it okay to photograph sleeping sunbathers...

... in Lithuania?

Interesting pics. One can't resist staring, but we're staring also into the soul of the photographer — Tadao Cern — who fancies himself a explorer into other people's "Comfort Zone."

"Throughout their existence as a separate culture, Ruthenians formed in most cases rural population, with the power held by local szlachta and boyars..."

"... often of Lithuanian, Polish or Russian descent. As in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the trade and commerce was mostly monopolized by Jews, who formed a significant part of the urban population."

Since the Union of Horodlo of 1413, local nobility was assimilated into the traditional clan system by means of the formal procedure of adoption by the szlacht... Initially mostly Ruthenian and Orthodox, with time most of them became polonized. This was especially true for major magnate families... whose personal fortunes and properties often surpassed those of the royal families and were huge enough to be called a state within a state. Many of them founded their own cities... with settlers from other parts of Europe. Indeed there were Scots, Germans and Dutch people inhabitating major towns of the area, as well as several Italian artists who had been "imported" to the lands of modern Belarus by the magnates.

Have you thought about Belarus, today's "History of" country?

Algirdas Brazauskas — "He was an honest man, a charismatic leader and outstanding politician."

"The memory of the first president of independent Lithuania will remain in the hearts of the people."



IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 begins with some decent-enough generic snark:

No matter who the subject, I find it hard to consider "outstanding politician" to be anything but an insult. I'm a bigot about politicians.

But it is not right for this occasion. Irene brings the gravitas:

Brazauskas was no ordinary, career politician. He became a politician as a result of extraordinary times. He was a courageous man who inspired the citizens to stand up to an awesome power.

Lithuania was under the Soviet yoke between 1944 and 1991. A documentary, Red Terror on the Amber Coast exposes these times. There now is a museum in the capital, Vilnius, dedicated to preserving the history of the Soviet genocide.

Many members of my family fled Lithuania in June 1944. Those who did not get out were deported to reeducation camps in the Gulag.