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Gene Lyons - 'Unite The Right' Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues
Full article posted with permission of the author -- DonAugust 16, 2017 2:10 pm
Watching the Charlottesville spectacle from halfway across the country, I confess that my first instinct was to raillery. Vanilla ISIS, somebody called this mob of would-be Nazis. A parade of love-deprived nerds marching bravely out of their parents basements carrying TIKI torches from Home Depot.
The odor of citronella must have been overpowering. Was this an attack on the campus left or on mosquitoes?
Blood and soil! they chanted. Jews will not replace us!
Jews?
Had Jews somehow prevented these dorks from getting laid?
Deeply offensive, but also deeply ridiculous. The iconography of the torch-lit parade was straight out of Triumph of the Will, Leni Reifenstahls epic film glorifying Hitler. Deliberately so. These Stormfront geeks get off on trying to frighten normal people with Nazi imagery.
Hogans Heroes is more like it. I mean Confederate flags are one thing, but swastikas? Politically, nothing could be dumber. Why not just have Besiegte tattooed on your forehead? Thats German for loser.
Speaking for the overwhelming majority of Americans, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah tweeted: My brother didnt give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.
Then things went from laughable to tragic overnight.
The University of Virginia has always been hallowed ground to me. When I first arrived, the sheer, serene beauty of Thomas Jeffersons architecture affected me almost viscerally. Was the orderly life it implied even possible in this world? Well, certainly not in Jeffersons own life, but art is art.
I was first introduced to my wife in a serpentine-walled garden maybe 50 yards from where the would-be Nazis assembled around Jeffersons statue. If I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there in her little shirtwaist dressan Arkansas girl more exotic to me than anybody Id known. A coachs daughter, shed applied to study history at UVa entirely unaware that there were no women undergraduates back then.
The dean asked if Id ever heard of Hendrix College, her Arkansas alma matera potentially embarrassing question.
No Sir, I said. They must not play football.
She laughed because I was right; also because it was a cheeky way to talk to the graduate school dean. Ive done my best to keep her laughing ever since.
For that matter, I played several seasons worth of rugby games on Nameless Field, where the would-be SS-men lit their little torches. We got married in Charlottesville two years later. Indeed, weve sometimes regretted ever leaving. So, yes, its doubly distressing to see the university and city turned into a stage set for fascist street theater.
Charlottesville, wrote UVa professor Siva Vaidhyanathan is an ideal stage for them to perform acts of terrorism. This was the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who codified religious tolerance in colonial Virginia and who declared all men are created equal. Its also the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who owned, sold, raped and had whipped people he considered racially inferior to him. Its the site of the University of Virginia, an institution steeped in conservative traditions that echo the Old South. And its the site of the University of Virginia, an elite, global research university with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.
Its definitely all that. Old South or not, Charlottesville is also a liberal college town that voted to remove an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from its courthouse square and relocate it to a park on its outskirts. Like many of the thousand or so Confederate monuments across the South, it was erected long after the Civil War, in 1924hence more an expression of white supremacy than Virginian ancestor worship, precisely as Stormfront wants to use it today.
Lee himself steadfastly refused to be so memorialized in his lifetime. He would not contribute to the building of Confederate monuments and steadfastly advised white Southerners to leave it all behind. To an embittered Confederate widow, Lee once wrote Madam, do not train up your children in hostility to the government of the United States. Remember, we are all one country now. Bring them up to be Americans.
Prof. Vaidhyanathan regrets that he and his wife stayed away on Saturday for fear of precisely what happened: a mad act of violence by a deranged young man. He vows to bear peaceful witness when the would-be Storm Troopers march again. Maybe he can help to calm campus hotheads as well. The last thing Americans need is anybody romanticizing violence.
Meanwhile, if Virginians need monuments, and they do, the states covered with Civil War battlefields. The Lawn at UVa remains; also Jeffersons Monticello. For all the terrible ambiguity of his life, the man was the great genius of his age. The Washington and Lee campus in Lexington memorializes Robert E. Lee as hed have preferred to be remembered.
For that matter, Appomattox Courthouse isnt far away.
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Gene Lyons - 'Unite The Right' Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues (Original Post)
DonViejo
Aug 2017
OP
longship
(40,416 posts)1. It's been a while since I've read Gene Lyons.
Maybe I have not been paying attention, but It's good to see him still active.
dalton99a
(81,598 posts)2. Great piece.