Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck

OH NO! Trump Is Toppling A Work Of Art Outside The Kennedy Center! Democrats Would NEVER Take Down…Oh. Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Well, I’ll say this for my Trump Deranged Facebook Friends: they are useful for keeping up on that group’s rapidly progressing mental illness, which exhibits symptoms manifesting constant fury over trivia, obsessive behavior, presumptions of certitude, and loss of all perspective. Oh, and hypocrisy! Mustn’t forget hypocrisy.

My friend the Trump Deranged professor posted this today with favor:

“Today, a permanent artistic gift—Joel Shapiro’s “Blue”—was taken from the nation because Donald Trump didn’t like it.

“September 18, join Hands Off the Arts to raise your voice and make sure Trump pays the political price for his vandalism of John F. Kennedy’s memorial and our nation’s cultural center.”

I’m marking my calendar right now!

The alleged vandalism was Trump’s ordered removal of the ugly thing above, which, since I started personally boycotting the monument to one of our most unethical Presidents and his corrupt family dynasty that included a U.S. Senator who left a young woman to die in a submerged car, I had never seen before. Huh. Is the outrage over Trump getting rid of that piece of blue crap more contrived than the fury over the 250th Commemorative coin, or less?

In a risible report, the New York Times informs us that “Blue” is a “towering artwork.” And it fit so well with the neo-Classical style of the Edward Durrell Stone white marble box-shaped Center, too!

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts removed a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.”

On Wednesday morning, the limbs and torso of the figure were wrapped in protective material; an arm was the first to be removed.

The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.

A news release from around the debut of “Blue” describes it as a permanent sculpture for the grounds.

“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”

Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, who is president of his foundation, said in an interview that she thought her father would have been “alarmed” that the sculpture was being taken down from its intended location.

“In Joel’s mind, it was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” she said.

Hear! Hear! I know I’ve always seen giant metal stick figures as celebrations of joy, freedom and creativity. Not as much as those inflated wiggly-men, of course, but still.

If there is one thing I do not care to hear knee-jerk progressives bleat about in their ravings, it is President Trump removing a single ugly artwork from the grounds of a public building because “he didn’t like it.” In this case the President showed exquisite taste (for a change) but even if the thing weren’t a big blue metal stick figure, the reason “It stinks!” is still a brilliantly-reasoned critique compared to the Axis and Friends removing over 160 statues from public grounds …

…because a black lifetime petty thug died after an accidental use of excessive force by a Minnesota police officer while he was resisting arrest and over-dosing on drugs.

The hypocrisy—and willful blindness to it—exhibited in this latest episode of “Everything Trump Does Is Terrible And Justifies Impeachment If Not Death!” is…I need a new adjective for “beyond belief.” Let’s see…it looks like I use all of them, and the Thesaurus list doesn’t even include “gobsmacking,” “head-exploding” or the phase that keeps jumping into my mind right now, “so fucking stupid it makes my pancreas whimper.” I guess I’ll go with the Cambridge Dictionary’s more dignified and restrained “impossible to comprehend.”

A Note On The Latest Axis Freak-Out Over Trump Trivia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.

While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.

It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.

As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!

Fascinating.

Asshole.

Virginia’s Democrats Push More Viewpoint Censorship From The Left (Psst: That’s Unethical. Also Illegal.)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia has signed into law a bill that ends tax exemptions for Confederacy-honoring organizations in the state.

Huh. Funny, I thought the Democratic Party was the one that was running on a platform of protecting civil right, like freedom of thought, association and speech from that eeeevil, fascist Republican king, Donald Trump. Did I get that mixed up somehow? I guess I did.

“The signing by Ms. Spanberger on Monday is the culmination of a years long Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s,” sayeth the New York Times in a sympathetic news story [Gift Link]that again proves there is no Democratic Party initiative so indefensible that the Times won’t try to spin it into virtue.

Awww, is Virginia all sad because of its history, and trying to erase it so nobody remembers? Tough. History is history and facts are facts. It is totalitarians and the followers of Orwell’s Big Brother who try to alter the past to confuse the public. Virginia was at the very center of the Civil War. Its citizens and soldiers were courageously trying to defend their “country” as they understood it. Those alive today who see those patriots as worthy of praise, study and honor have a fully defensible position, and even if it weren’t defensible, it is as worthy of non-profit status as any other position.

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Man Bites Dog: Harvard Actually Makes An Ethical Decision!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It’s about time…

In October 2022, a group of woke Harvard students—aren’t they all?— submitted a 23-page “denaming” proposal for various university buildings. One on the hit list was the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, one of the three art museums on the college campus. The students argued that Arthur Sackler, the progenitor of the family that created Purdue Pharma, was complicit in the opioid addiction disaster because he developed the Machiavellian marketing techniques that were later used by his family to spread death and addiction across the land.

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Ethics Dunce: Mississippi

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, following a 31-year-old tradition that began in 1993. Beauvoir, the museum established in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, announced the proclamation in a Facebook post on Friday, April 12. Governor Tate’s proclamation read,

“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”

I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.

Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.

But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.

Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.

Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.

Catchy tune, though.

Ethics Quiz: Slapping Down the Daughters of the Confederacy

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

On the heels of the previous post about intolerant progressives came my awareness of the news that both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly, dominated by Democrats, passed bills that would eliminate long-standing tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that was founded in 1894 for female descendants of Confederate soldiers. The group’s mission was and is to honor Confederate ancestors through memorial preservation—an increasingly difficult job—and charity work. It is currently exempt from paying property taxes and recordation taxes, which are charged when property sales are registered.

This week the State House of Delegates passed a bill revoking the group’s exemptions as well as the property tax exemptions for two other Confederate heritage groups, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Inc. and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.

To state the obvious, the three non-profit groups have been targeted because many legislators don’t like their beliefs and activities. Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, said it was important to revoke the exemptions from “organizations that continue to promote the myth of the romantic version of the Confederacy.”

How dare they?

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So Apparently It Isn’t Just Slaveholding: Being A White Male Is Sufficient Offense To Justify Tearing Down Your Statue…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The insanely woke National Park Service wants to renovate Philadelphia’s Welcome Park by removing its statue of William Penn as well as Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House. The proposed redesign will highlight Native American history at the expense of the memorial to Penn, who founded the colony, now state, of Pennsylvania.

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Ethics Quiz: Section 16

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Here is a controversy that I was completely ignorant of, and I am embarrassed to admit it.

One more bi-product of the George Floyd Freakout, ‘The Great Stupid’ that has washed over the land like the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, and the Stalin-esque attempt to airbrush American history, including the toppling of statues honoring certain distinguished Americans who were not sufficiently psychic to absorb the lessons and accumulated ethics wisdom of those with the advantage of a century or more additional history and human experience, was the Naming Commission, established by the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act in the throes of all of the above malign influences. It’s official mission is to recommend removal of “all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America.” The Commission extended its reach to the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, which is located in the special section known as Section 16. The monument, which you see above, is scheduled to come down.

Of all the many times I have visited Arlington—my father and mother are buried there, also my grandfather, and Dad loved to take me on tours of the place as he checked out his future residence, especially when he was taking part in the annual Battle of the Bulge veterans ceremonies—I never saw this section. It has a fascinating history.

Arlington was established as a burial ground for the Union military dead. Indeed, Montgomery Meigs, the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army who was responsible for the burial of soldiers, ordered Robert E. Lee’s Arlington estate to be turned into a cemetery so Lee could never return there. Meigs had his son, an early casualty of the war, buried literally on the Confederate leader’s doorstep as a statement of contempt and defiance. No Rebel combatants were permitted on the sacred grounds.

However President William McKinley, himself a Medal of Honor recipient for his heroism at the Battle of Antietam, announced that the U.S. government would commit to honoring the Confederate dead, saying in a speech in Atlanta that “sectional feelings no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag waves over us in peace with new glories.” Congress authorized Confederate remains to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1900, and in 1906, the construction of a monument was commissioned to represent the nation’s acceptance of the Confederacy back into the nation, healing of the deep wounds of civil war. 1903 saw President Theodore Roosevelt send a floral arrangement to the Section 16 to commemorate Confederate Memorial Day, and began a tradition that has been regularly observed since, with President Obama expanding the practice to laying two floral wreaths, one at the Confederate Memorial, the other at Washington, D.C.’s African American Civil War Memorial.

This week the Republican Congress has sent a letter of protest to the Defense Department, demanding that preparations to remove the monument cease, and pointing out that the purpose of the memorial is not to honor the Confederacy, but to stand for national unity, reconciliation, and peace.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should the Reconciliation Memorial be removed along with the remains of the Confederate soldiers buried in Section 16?

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Comment Of The Day: “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: …Destroying [Lee’s] Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here is Chris Marschner’s macro-analysis of the forces leading to Robert E. Lee’s head being melted down. Read it: his Comment of the Day connects dots you may not have considered, as he reacts to the post, “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish”:

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I believe this mentality is why so many want to do away with the electoral college and rely on majoritarian rule.

These people have no understanding that the United States is comprised of 50 sovereign states that have joined together as a group for the benefit of all members in that group.

Had majoritarian rule been the case from the country’s inception there might have been no civil war and blacks would still be treated as 2nd class citizens. The whole concept of America as a melting pot might be reserved only to the degree that Europeans would be allowed entrance Our republic preserves minority rights that majoritarian rule will not.

Majoritarian rule creates the impetus for factionalized insurgencies to emerge against the rule makers. Which is why the Middle East is always fighting among themselves for centuries. Every faction wants autonomy to set rules for themselves and others.

Far too many of our citizens have such limited understanding of our history because they are taught to analyze events by hearing talking points and sound bites.

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The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The New York Times turned to a biased art historian to discuss the melting down of the Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee that was the focal point of the infamous 2017 riot. Ethics Alarms has spilled too much metaphorical ink over statue-toppling and historical airbrushing already—you can find most of them under this tag or this one. I can summarize them all easily: tearing down statues betrays a totalitarian-mentality and undemocratic values, an intolerance of unpopular beliefs and ideas, and a favorable attitude toward thought-control and censoring history. I hate it, it’s unethical, and I’m not even a fan of Robert E. Lee.

Rigging the commentary (what were the chances that an African-American art historian would object to destroying a Lee statue?), the Times got what it evidently wanted: an almost obscenely gleeful account of Lee’s symbolic melting down. “Acrid fumes penetrated the respirators we had been issued,” Erin Thompson writes. “When the foundryman finally turned off his torch and tapped at the head with a mallet, Lee’s face fell clattering to the floor.” She quotes a founder of the statue-toppling group that helped accomplish the destruction as saying, “It feels like witnessing a public execution.” Clearly, it was a good feeling. You know, like the “reform Communists” felt when they tore down Stalin’s statue and threw his mummified corpse in a hole. “Stalin? Who’s Stalin?” Now the same people who helped the dictator murder millions could pretend it all never happened. It is traditions like this that ensure that Russians never learn from its history, because they don’t like to acknowledge history.

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