Let a thousand better monuments bloom

The matter of the destroyed confederate monuments that President Trump is bemoaning is an issue that is directly in my wheelhouse, so I wanted to weigh in on his misguided statement from the point of view of a monumental sculptor.

Some have equated the destruction of the monuments, to the destruction by the Taliban of some of Afghanistan's great ancient monuments. To make a simple analogy, that is like equating the destruction of your bedside alarm clock when it crashes to the floor with the destruction of Big Ben, which is a favorite apocalyptic movie visual gimmick . True, they are both clocks that tell time and ring, but the similarities on every scale stop there. None of the "Confederate" sculptures erected, mostly during Jim Crow, are actually Antebellum artifacts from a bygone era and markers of true, if ugly history. Instead they are an attempt to manufacture a counter-narrative of glory and self aggrandizing heroics that seeks to overlook the motivating cause as a sop to a defeated south looking to literally and figuratively whitewash it's history. All of these monuments were of bad to negligible artistic value, done by journeymen graveyard production monument makers, with all the feeling that a generic monument embodies. None will be missed by artists, art historians, art lovers or anyone really, other than those who cling to the idea that the there was a reason to celebrate the brutal feudalism of the Old South. A Similar destruction of monuments occurred at the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the same apologists for the confederacy who are wring their hands now over lost "monuments" clapped gleefully when those monuments to brutality were torn down.... I guess for them context is important.

Well here is a context for you. If you are worried about beautiful monuments, fear not. I can assure the President that the National Sculpture Society has hundreds of members ready and willing for the US government to reprise the kind of arts funding done by FDR in the WPA to create new and inherently better monuments for all of America, monuments that unite our people rather than divide them, even the empty pedestals of the south. All of these monuments will be vastly better than what went before them, and we can flip the script on this history and turn an ugly past and the unfeeling bandaid that was applied to cover its shame into something actually noble and wonderful for the country. Why not do something positive for the whole country? Instead of seeking to perpetuate a lie and a cover over a horror? So don't worry about lost monuments Mr. President. You want to build infrastructure? Here's a place to start, fund your American monumental sculptors to create something that will actually make America greater. Let a thousand sculptures bloom on those empty pedestals.