Symbolic Annihilation

After the killing of nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, many citizens of our country seem in a frenzy to ban “offensive” symbols, wherever they may be perceived. Because the alleged shooter was once photographed with a Confederate flag, that flag is now being taken down and/or banned from public and private property all over the USA.

Banning the Confederate flag has long been a goal of progressives and black activists. In fact, banning all things Confederate has been in vogue for quite some time.

Last March, the University of Georgia banned hoop skirts for women who take part in fraternity or sorority events. (Are the terms fraternity and sorority now microaggressions against the LGBTQII “community”, being evidence of binary cisgenderism?)

The mental image that a hoop skirt elicits is the apparent problem. Scarlet O’Hara, you know. Horrifying! One might suppose that burqas are okay, though.

RACIST! OFFENSIVE!

Confederate uniforms for men were also banned from “Greek” events on the campus.

More recently, statues and monuments that celebrate Confederate luminaries or events have been defaced or removed— some to be moved elsewhere, others to be destroyed.

Progressive activists have long gone after Judeo-Christian symbols. The movement to ban the display of the Ten Commandments or Christmas nativity scenes from public property is well reported.

Recently, student activists in St. Louis managed to have a “controversial” statue of a Christian missionary moved from a prominent outdoor location on campus to an art museum, all in the name of “cultural sensitivity.”

Sensitivity to whose culture?  Pandering to whose subjective perception of what the statue allegedly symbolizes? Art, as we all know, is by definition open to interpretation. Whose interpretation shall rule?

Apparently inspired by the success of the political censorship of the Confederate flag, as well as other symbols associated with the South, or with religion, activists now seek to ban or destroy other symbols that offend them, but not necessarily everyone else.

Some want to change the name of Negro Bill Canyon and trail, in Utah. Others point out that there are apparently as many as 700 place names in the U.S. containing the word negro. Let’s keep in mind, however, that the Spanish were (arguably) the first Europeans to explore (and probably name sites in) what is now the United States. In the Spanish language, negro simply means black. Is it likely that all 700 places were named to derogate African-Americans? Let’s get real, people!

In another example, the NAACP in Atlanta wants to do away with Stone Mountain. The chapter’s president suggests that Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson be “sand-blasted” right off the mountain! Others suggest adding politically correct figures to the mountain, much in the same way that Alexander Hamilton is due to be replaced on the 10-dollar bill by a woman–any woman, so long as she’s progressive and/or a person of color, going by the suggested candidates. She hasn’t yet been decided upon. Being chosen only for her symbolic value, it doesn’t much matter, so long as we get rid of one of those dead white men.

It’s only a matter of time before they demand to sand-blast Mount Rushmore, too, seeing as how two out of four of the men on the mountain owned slaves.

Surely another of the men, Teddy Roosevelt, is also offensive to many “persons of color” because of his Big-Stick ideology and the Roosevelt Corollary.

Imperialist! Just look at him!

Even the sculptor of both Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore is suspect. John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was a “nativist” and a patriot (how dare he?!) who espoused an ideology that is much hated by progressives and global citizens: [emphasis added to quotes]

[Borglum] looked to create art that was “American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement,” according to a 1908 interview article. His equation of being “American” with being born of American parents—”flesh of our flesh”—was characteristic of nativist beliefs in the early 20th century.

Why, he almost sounds like a birther! Lover of natural born citizens, indeed. Even worse, he was a member of the KKK!

Take note of Borglum’s frequent use of the word American. We’ve recently been schooled and scolded by the website of the University of New Hampshire that the term American is “problematic” because it “fails to recognize South America” and/or “assumes the U.S. is the only country inside these two continents,” meaning North and South America. So Borglum, with his nativist focus on “American” art, was guilty of microaggression and language bias against residents of the Western Hemisphere who don’t live in the USA, as well as non-native residents of this country. Expunge all his art from this country!

Near Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, begun by Korczak Ziółkowski, who worked with Borglum on Mount Rushmore, is being completed by his descendants. Crazy Horse was a famous warrior of the Oglala Sioux. Some “Native Americans”, however, object to the monument, citing a belief that Crazy Horse himself would object to having his likeness immortalized.

Others believe that carving up a “sacred” mountain is desecration. One can easily imagine that the Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, and Pawnee might themselves object to a monument to a Sioux war hero, given that the Lakota peoples “arrived from Minnesota in the 18th century and drove out the other tribes,” claiming the Black Hills for themselves. Just be happy they didn’t call them the Negro Hills. Were these people thieving settlers? Colonists? Or was this the Manifest Destiny of the Lakota Sioux?

It’s only a matter of time, surely, until the re-writers of history, the politically correct, the cleansers, get around to demanding the removal of monuments that may offend Muslims.

Consider this statue of St. Louis, which was the symbol of the City of St. Louis before the Gateway Arch was built. First of all, the guy’s a Catholic saint.  What about separation of church and state?

Second, Louis IX was a crusader! He waged war against Islam, and still they erected monuments to him and named at least five cities in the USA after him.

Look for that to be rectified in the near future.

We could go on all day with suggestions for sanitizing our culture of microaggressions against all and sundry. My particular nomination:

Rename everything that honors the founder of Planned Parenthood (idolized by Hillary Clinton), racist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the lovely lady at the top of the post.

 Government authorities and other institutions have memorialized Sanger by dedicating several landmarks in her name, including a residential building on the Stony Brook University campus, a room in Wellesley College’s library, and Margaret Sanger Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village. 

What could be bleaker?

In 1993, the Margaret Sanger Clinic—where she provided birth control services in New York in the mid twentieth century—was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. In 1966, Planned Parenthood began issuing its Margaret Sanger Awards annually to honor “individuals of distinction in recognition of excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

Sanger is a darling of the progressive left, despite that she was invited multiple times to speak to at KKK rallies. She apparently accepted. Some of what she might have said is summarized at the link, which ought to be of particular interest to black citizens. Here’s another choice quote:

Society is divided into three groups. Those intelligent and wealthy members of the upper classes who have obtained knowledge of Birth Control and exercise it in regulating the size of their families. They have already benefited by this knowledge, and are today considered the most respectable and moral members of the community. They have only children when they desire, and all society points to them as types that should perpetuate their kind.

The second group is equally intelligent and responsible. They desire to control the size of their families, but are unable to obtain knowledge or to put such available knowledge into practice.

The third are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequence of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped. For if they are not able to support and care for themselves, they should certainly not be allowed to bring offspring into this world for others to look after. We do not believe that filling the earth with misery, poverty and disease is moral. And it is our desire and intention to carry on our crusade until the perpetuation of such conditions has ceased.

Unfortunate choice of words: our crusade. She sounds more than a little prejudiced against the religious. Then there’s that problematic “should certainly not be allowed” to have children. Yikes! Here’s another:

In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets. According to one writer, the rapist has just enough brain development to raise him above the animal, but like the animal, when in heat knows no law except nature which impels him to procreate whatever the result. Every normal man and Woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and women who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells in thinking deeply, are never sensual.

What a gal! Pity her poor husband, if old Mags, in control and using those brain cells, was never sensual. Here’s yet another:

Seemingly every new approach to the great problem of the human race must manifest its vitality by running the gauntlet of prejudice, ridicule and misinterpretation. Eugenists may remember that not many years ago this program for race regeneration was subjected to the cruel ridicule of stupidity and ignorance. Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems. The most intransigent and daring teachers and scientists have lent their support to this great biological interpretation of the human race. …

The doctrine of Birth Control is now passing through the stage of ridicule, prejudice and misunderstanding. A few years ago this new weapon of civilization and freedom was condemned as immoral, destructive, obscene. Gradually the criticisms are lessening-–understanding is taking the place of misunderstanding. The eugenic and civilizational value of Birth Control is becoming apparent to the enlightened and the intelligent. …

As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit”, admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.

She hardly sounds like an American, yapping on and on about the “inferior classes” and the Social Darwinian concept of the more “fit”. Nor does she sound like your typical, anti-wealth progressive, talking about the superiority of the “upper classes” and the “educated,” so how is it that they lionize her so?

In conclusion, a touch of levity:

Is it time to rename Uranus, for obvious reasons?

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