Fine. Let's keep the statue. But let's also help it do a better job of teaching history. As it is, it's really, really awful at doing that. I mean, even you have to admit that. It's Robert E. Lee in a uniform on a horse. With his name on the pedestal. Not even a tendentious, florid Daughters of the Confederacy inscription. The statue itself has no intrinsic historic value. It only dates from the 1920's. Nostalgia, I'll grant. Just don't call it history.
But I hear you. I love history. I believe in the value of history. I think the history of the Confederacy is readily, fully, and completely available to anyone in the world in America's libraries and museums -- not to mention on the manicured battlefields so lovingly maintained for both Union and Confederate by none other than Uncle Sam, including as many statues of General Lee as anyone with a sound mind could reasonably want.
All these books and exhibits and Little Round Tops and Missionary Ridges give you what the Lee statue in Charlottesville lacks completely, and which history requires: context. Without it the past cannot be revivified in any meaningful way. There is no history without it. No history can provide it all, but all history must provide some.
The Lee statue, as it is, is worthless as history. However, that does not mean it cannot be saved by being rendered into a more contextual, meaningful installation. Here are a couple of ideas:
1. Submerge the statue in an aquarium and surround it with a ring of shackled slaves. (Yes, this rips off another statue, just like a general on a horse rips off a thousand other statues since the days of ancient Rome.) Robert E. Lee betrayed his pledge to the nation he served as a soldier in order to establish a nation founded on African slavery, which was a centuries-long hecatomb for Africans and Americans of African descent--as was the war that Lee's rash betrayal abetted.
2. Surround the statue with diaphanous screens showing 1. the names of the slaves of the Custis estate whose enslavement was unnecessarily extended by Lee's execution of the Custis will and 2. a picture of recently freed slaves freed by the war and living on the grounds of Arlington, the Custis-Lee estate.
Something along these lines would help alleviate the currently abysmal showing of the Lee statue as a purveyor of anything historically meaningful.
Yes..
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