"President Trump has put Columbus on a list of statues he wants included in his proposed National Garden of American Heroes. This week he said 'We’re back, Italians'..."

"... after he signed a proclamation for Columbus Day, a federal holiday he has called for celebrating after some cities and states have either replaced it or supplemented it with celebrations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. 'Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces,' the proclamation reads...."

From "Beheaded and Sent to Watery Graves, Columbus Statues Get New Life/More than 30 monuments to Christopher Columbus were toppled or taken down in 2020. Now some are being restored, and finding new, usually less-public homes" (NYT).

"It shall be the policy of the United States to establish a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes... All statues... should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations."

"The National Garden should be located on a site of natural beauty that enables visitors to enjoy nature, walk among the statues, and be inspired to learn about great figures of America’s history. The site should be proximate to at least one major population center, and the site should not cause significant disruption to the local community."

From Trump's "Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes."

These realistic statues must be of "historically significant Americans" and "Americans" is deemed to include those who "lived prior to or during the American Revolution and were not American citizens, but who made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States." In that category, he names Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and the Marquis de La Fayette.

There's a list of the kinds of people who are deemed to "have contributed positively to America." The list includes "opponents of national socialism or international socialism" — a phrase that must rankle the hell out of present-day American socialists — e.g., Bernie Sanders. It implies that no socialist can be among the heroes — only opponents of socialism. What about James Baldwin? Woody Guthrie? Noam Chomsky? W.E.B. Du Bois? Kurt Vonnegut? Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Gloria Steinem? Pete Seeger? Margaret Sanger? Paul Robeson? Dorothy Parker?

Who are your heroes? Who are mine? I tend to eschew idolatry, but if we're going to make a list of American heroes, I want the left wing represented.

And speaking of idolatry, is anyone talking about the impact of this sculpture garden on people who have a strong moral or religious opposition to statues? I'm thinking in particular of Muslims. From the Wikipedia article, "Aniconism in Islam":

Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. Islamic aniconism stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that creation of living forms is God's prerogative. Although the Quran does not explicitly prohibit visual representation of any living being, it uses the word musawwir (maker of forms, artist) as an epithet of God. The corpus of hadith (sayings attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad) contains more explicit prohibitions of images of living beings, challenging painters [who] "breathe life" into their images and threatening them with punishment on the Day of Judgment....

Note that Trump's requirement that the statues be "lifelike or realistic" mandates the very quality that is the problem for Muslims (who have traditionally sought ways to depict human beings without competing with God, the maker of forms).

I need to "live-blog" my reading of Trump's 4th of July speech.

Here's the transcript from what was called the “Salute to America” at the White House yesterday.

As I said in the previous post, I think Trump went big introducing a strong campaign theme this weekend, setting himself up in opposition to the protesters who've been ripping down statues, and I looked at Biden's 4th-of-July speech — speechlet — and judged it to be smack dab in the middle of a continuum that runs from Trump to the statue topplers.

Yesterday, I "live-blogged" my reading of Trump's July 3rd speech — the Mount Rushmore speech, so now I feel that I need to live-blog my reading of Trump's 4th-of-July speech. Blogging is a strange compulsion, where I don't really have to do a damned thing I don't want to do. That's what's so compelling about it, paradoxically.

I'm reading the full text as I write, but I'm not quoting every word of it. Unlike the Mount Rushmore speech, I did watch some of this one.

Thanks to the courage of those patriots on July 4th, 1776, the American Republic stands today as the greatest, most exceptional, and most virtuous nation in the history of the world. Our workers, our factories have revolutionized industries and lifted millions into prosperity. Our artists, architects, and engineers have inspired the globe with transcendent works of beauty. American heroes defeated the Nazis, dethroned the fascists, toppled the communists, saved American values, upheld American principles, and chased down the terrorists to the very ends of the earth.

American exceptionalism. America is great. A fantastic treasure that must be preserved. Noted.

We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing.

Oh, I thought he would say we are now being threatened by the radical left who want to take this all away. But he introduces this cast of characters — America's antagonists — as in the process of getting defeated. And he further minimizes them by saying that a lot of them don't even know what they're doing. They're clueless dummies, following along.

All Americans living today are the heirs of this magnificent legacy. We are the descendants of the most daring and courageous people ever to walk on the face of the Earth. We inherit their towering confidence, unwavering enthusiasm, their unbridled ambition, and their unrelenting optimism....

I suspect that's his opinion of himself too — towering confidence, unwavering enthusiasm... unbridled ambition... unrelenting optimism.

That is why we pay tribute to generations of American heroes whose names have etched on our monuments and memorials and in the pages of history and in the hearts of a very grateful people. We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms. We will safeguard our values, traditions, customs, and beliefs. We will teach our children to cherish and adore their country so that they can build its future. 

That's the theme, stated positively, but with the nugget of negativity: There's an "angry mob." We have so much good, and we must protect it from those bad people over there.

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.