President Trump’s method in some of his madness is to restore and reinforce the core American values that have been eroded, corrupted and in some cases denied by the ethics and cultural rot wreaked by the Far Left’s capture of our national institutions. The motives deserve applause, but his execution in many cases, like his “National Garden of American Heroes” obsession, is often hopelessly flawed. I’m being too nice: the theory that it is possible to create a fair and historically valid list of “American heroes” is, as Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) so sagely remarks above, is stupid, and ultimately harmful.
The latest plans for the monstrosity include reflecting pools, dining facilities and an amphitheater alongside 250 life-size statues of notable Americans. It will require a significant redevelopment of West Potomac Park in D.C., and the statues alone could cost more than the $40 million approved for the project by Congress. But never mind all that: the fact is unavoidable that choosing just 250 Americans to be honored as “heroes” guarantees exorbitant praise for some prominent Americans and unjust exclusion for others. There are probably thousands of American lives that meet the Ethics Alarms criteria for the public to have a “duty to remember” them. Furthermore, perhaps reflecting President Trump’s limited public vocabulary, not all important and productive Americans qualify as heroes, and not all American heroes had much effect on the country and its history. Is the proposed “garden” intended to honor character, achievements, or both? Finally, the choices of who to honor in such a project will be distorted by bias and politics. In fact, that has already occurred.
The list of 250 that has been published confirms all of these fears; indeed, its even worse than I expected. Here are the current proposed “heroes” by category; the list is introduced as being categorized by their primary contributions to our national story, representing “the tapestry of American greatness, men and women who, through faith, courage, and hard work, built the United States into a beacon of hope and industry.”
Right.
I’ll comment after each section.
Ethics Alarms 
“Jeannette Rankin”
Seriously, aside from her being a historic first, her only accomplishments of note are casting no votes for the U.S. entry into both WWI and WWII. Both votes cost her her congressional seat.
With all due respect; how could “both” of those votes cost her her seat? It seems to me that the latter one would be the one that cost her her seat.
This will all boil down to what definition they choose to use for the word “hero”.
Personally I think our culture has been bastardizing the definition of hero for quite some time now and conflating it with other terms like role model. Yes a hero could be a role model, often they are; however, a role model isn’t necessarily a hero. This bastardization has thoroughly cheapened the value of the word hero because people now seem to apply it to whatever the hell they want.
Here is a simple definition…
HERO: someone who shows great bravery, often risking their life (or in the 21st century they knowingly risk massive social canceling, active and persistent persecution, that could destroy most or all aspects of their life) for the common good.
In my opinion; anything beyond that is a bastardization.
Here’s a few early 21st century prominent people that could be defined as heroes, as defined above; Charlie Kirk, Alan Dershowitz, Donald Trump, J.K. Rowling, and maybe even Ben Shapiro. Yes I know most of those are conservatives, feel free to specifically list some Liberals or progressives that you think might fit the definition. Remember, you don’t have to agree with their public position or their public action for them to fit the definition.
I definitely don’t trust President Trump to choose 250 heroes for this proposed memorial.
Wait until you see the second part of the list!
Steve makes good points. I would like to add that any list can be criticized by someone with a different set of beliefs regarding persons who added significant value.
Conceptually, the idea that we need a way to publicly acknowledge the accomplishments of our forebears is a good one. Perhaps the best way to make a selection is to put together an all inclusive list with biographies and let the public vote on the first tranche of statues. That number should be limited to say around fifty and should only include those from the early 17th century to the early 19th century. The next 50-100 could be those from the mid 19th to mid 20th followed by a third round of those more modern heroes.
In any event the term hero must be defined before any list could be compiled.
Many on the list are notable but I would hardly call them heroes.
From my experience any new idea will face opposition from those who want to find fault. I have had to put together initial lists for various initiatives and invariably that list will change with the input from others. The question of execution should not be based solely on the initial inclusions on a list. You have to start with something.
The question of execution should not be based solely on the initial inclusions on a list. You have to start with something.
But if what you start with is unserious, slipshod, biased,factually wrong and easily discredited, then it raises a rebuttable presumption that the project is ill-conceived. I cannot imagine a worse and more self-debasing list.
She was elected to Congress two separate times. During each term, a war vote came up. Each time, her pacifist views led her to vote no.
And, each time, she was voted out of office in the next election.
Sorry, this was a reply to Steve’s reply to me. I hate doing this on my phone.
A M Golden wrote, “She was elected to Congress two separate times. During each term, a war vote came up. Each time, her pacifist views led her to vote no. And, each time, she was voted out of office in the next election.”
WOW, her constituents vote her out of office because she’s a pacifist then they vote the same pacifist back into office? I didn’t know that!
Were her constituents morons?
Early 20th century Wyomingans. Not sure how to define them. My only guess is that the terms being @20 years apart had something to do with it. A strong isolationism may have played a factor in the latter term and she stuck to her principles after Pearl Harbor rather than read the room.
Thanks for educating me on this.
Chris,
Thank you for your input, it got me thinking further.
On this point…
I completely disagree with this and here’s why. The public cannot be trusted to make an unbiased and informed choice when a huge swath of the public is civically illiterate and primarily driven by the absurd propaganda they consume. This is not a place for true democracy to reign supreme.
This should be very transparent process and publicized on C-Span and it shouldn’t be a short process.
My suggestion would be to form a House Committee to choose an initial list of 350 individuals complete with a biography and what makes them a hero, make sure to include very prominent historical scholars as witnesses for input, pass that initial list on to a Senate Committee to reduce the size of the list to 250 select individuals also using prominent historical scholars as witnesses, and then have a combined House and Senate special session where the final 250 individuals is approves, this should be unanimously approved.
The entire original list developed by the House Committee should be posted at the memorial making it very clear to all visitors that there are far more than the 250 people honored with statues that have been American Heroes over the last 250 years and they all deserve to be honored. Let’s make sure that the public knows that the memorial is there to honor all of our American Heroes whether their names and statues are physically present at the memorial or not.
The public cannot be trusted to make an unbiased and informed choice when a huge swath of the public is civically illiterate and primarily driven by the absurd propaganda they consume. This is not a place for true democracy to reign supreme.
Horrifyingly, that is exactly what “democracy” results in when that common man is not severely constrained and directed.
The tenets of American “democracy” and “liberal rot” is actually destroying the Republic.
Invest in magenta and green hair dye while it is still on the shelves!
Regardless of the choice for statues to be included, it’s a dumb idea. If the goal is to honor and educate people on historic figures, one park in the DC area is silly. I’ll never go there. Most of the 333 million citizens will never go there. The answer is 5-10 minute informative clips on YouTube. Keep the statues in the wax museum and the Smithsonian. We all know they aren’t faring well outside in public, being defaced and torn town regularly as they are. Other than that, let the cities and states have the hero statues with a street or airport named after them, until some committee decides they shouldn’t have that name, of course…. I bet you can do 240 videos for less than 40 billion. With minimal constant maintenance and a bonus that there’s no statue to deface or knock down.
A few years ago, I tried to come up with a list of the hundred most influential Americans. I divided them into Founding Fathers, military men, writers, inventers/scientists, trailblazers, social reformers, the infamous…that sort of thing. I couldn’t narrow it down properly.
How do you make a statue park like this? Sure, you can include Thurgood Marshall, but should you include John Jay? He was a slaveholder, after all. So was John Marshall, a pivotal Chief Justice. Including Roger Taney would be beyond the pale.
Writers? Where do you begin? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Phyllis Wheatley? Washington Irving? Mark Twain? Do you include poets? Playwrights? Screenwriters?
I can imagine the outcry over entrepreneurs, such as the anti-Semitic Henry Ford, the hugely wealthy – but only philanthropic later in live – John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
A special category for minority civil rights advocates? How many statues of Martin Luther King do we need? Sure, we can include Medgar Evers and Harriet Tubman, but would we also include Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey?
It’s too subjective and rife with the potential for controversy.