Whew

I guess you can tell by the title, no ronnies. Guess just a regular cold or allergy with a dose of hypochondria. That of course is good news, but I must admit that part of me was hoping it was a mild case of Corona so I can stop thinking about it.

Well, you can't win them all

I know it is old news but I did want to say something about the desecration of monuments.

I get it. If I was in Italy and they had a statue of Mussolini because someone's ancestors fought for him, I would be upset as well.

I guess the question is what should the criteria be for taking down statues and monuments? Do they ever have any cultural or historic significance.

Part of me would say, if the guy was a bad dude, dump him. But who gets to decide that?

Titus was a bad man. There is a famous arch in Rome celebrating the defeat and enslavement of the Jews in 70 AD. Should it be destroyed or just removed from public view? In this case I would say the historic significance outweighs the reaction I might get by looking at this. Am I right?

This is the man who started our 2000 year exile. How about statues of Hadrian. He finished the job by building a pagan temple on the temple mount  and exiling whoever was left in Jerusalem after the Bar Kochba revolt

Bad Guy

Ok, so maybe 2000 years is too far back.

How about Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain. ? They were not too good to us either. Lots of stuff named after them.

Ok, 500 years is also a pretty long time ago.

I will focus on recent Americans.

Should we petition for Ford to change the name of their company. Their founder, Henry Ford was a notorious Anti-Semite who, at one point, favored an alliance with Nazi Germany. I think that the request ( demand) is fair but it will not happen.

I know that HBO has stopped showing Gone With the Wind due to its negative portrayal of slaves. There is talk of banning Huckleberry Finn from schools. Is this OK?  If it is, how about Roland Dahl, Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot. All Anti-Semites.

It is also clear that some people really aren't familiar with their own history or are so anti-american that no one is safe. George Washington owned slaves but he also led the USA to independence. In fact 12 of the first 18 presidents owned slaves, including Ulysses S. Grant, who tried very hard for equality for ex-slaves in the south. One of his many statues was defaced.

Then I found out Grant issued an expulsion order for the Jews of Kentucky during the Civil War, so we can take him down

All the explorers did horrible things to the indigenous peoples of the America's. So how about Columbus? Are we going to change the names of the 23 locations in the USA with his name?

I could go on but I am bored of reading Wikipedia today. I will leave this to people smarter than me. Hopefully the right balance can be found. The easy answer would be to tear everything down depicting any famous person  who did or said bad things.

Think of it, a monument free world.