There's a moment in the movie Die Hard when Hans Gruber, after executing the hapless Harry Ellis whose life he had sought to trade for his stolen detonators, utters to McClane the neglected but immortal line: "Sooner or later, I might get to someone you do care about!"
The war over the Confederate Statues follows the same logic: a war in which - since the point is to provoke - the "Abolitionist" side will always move to the next target in line. Once the statues are gone, the next targets will be "Sweet Home Alabama" & "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". Warner Bros. will withdraw Gone With The Wind from sale. After that, Civil War reenactors will be prevented from commemorating any battle won by the Confederacy; then anyone wearing a grey uniform for such purposes will be egged or worse. If you don't care about any of these things, don't worry ... eventually they'll get to something you do care about.
Today's Guardian floats the idea that Nelson's column should be next: it comes complete with a cartoon showing not the statue being removed to a museum, but pulled down, evidently to smash on the ground below. Are you provoked yet? Don't worry, we'll get there.
The author of the article, Afua Hirsch, appeared in the newspaper in 2012 dressed in what Sordel supposes to be traditional Ghanaian clothing and announcing herself as part of the diaspora now returning to the country. During her time there she produced a number of articles of patient virtue including the important (with titles such as Ghana's cashew farmers struggle to share in the profit of their labours & Ghana accuses Environcom of illegal fridge imports) as well as the frothy (Ghana: the new Ibiza for international party set). Now, however, she lives in the UK and writes things designed to upset you and get picked up in social media. Sordel was previously irritated by her article about her experiences as a black student at Oxford but not quite enough to contribute the nutshell's broad readership to her circulation. But she'll get to someone I do care about one of these days.
We in the UK are very on-message about hate speech. It helps that it is prohibited by law of course (no such luck in the U.S.) but it also helps that we don't care about the American Civil War and that the people with the swastikas self-identify as the bad guys. So the Vandals are going to have to go after more central British cultural images: Colston Hall (mentioned of course in Hirsch's article); Admiral Lord Nelson; the Last Night of the Proms. Do you really care about these things, faithful Reader? No, me either.
How are you on the Pre-Raphaelites? All those ivory skins and red hair; an art market explicitly fostered by the profits of the Victorian Age. Alma-Tadema's white-washed vision of the Classical past. Or how about Plato & Aristotle themselves, those idle speculators in a culture propped up by the labour of slaves? Sooner or later ...
The thin end of the edge is already in. Perhaps the seeds of this age of idol-smashing was the fall of Saddam's statue. Sordel watched it live on TV: the all-too-ironic way that a U.S. vehicle tore down the statue because the protestors were unable to tear it down themselves. The symbolism was spot on. But then, last year, one of the Iraqis who was involved gave an interview in which he says that he regretted doing it: "now there are 1000 Saddams". If you don't have anything to put in its place, why destroy anything?
The age of great statuary is over. We can't afford to build new statues even if we could agree on who should be there. There is an empty plinth in
We are in the midst of a slow, relentless replaying of Mao's Cultural Revolution, and as with its precursor it is the young who will execute the policy. Civic pride is a vice of age; irreverence for institutions is a virtue of youth. But these young will be led by those like Hirsch "doing well by doing good". And the Vandals didn't stop at the gates of Rome.
