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Richardson Statue Coming Down

Black

By Black,
in Carolina Panthers

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Gesualdo Newbie

Gesualdo

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, electro's horse said:

as the last male descendent of john c calhoun, former VP, SC senator, and founder of clemson university, tear his fuging statues down

i give all protestors and law enforcement officials my blessing

[Drunkenly interpreted this as a serious post...disregard]

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Gesualdo Newbie

Gesualdo

Posted
Posted
On 6/12/2020 at 1:30 AM, PhillyB said:

This is such an astoundingly bullshit take I had to hop out of my bed and turn on the computer so I could type out a response.

Historic battlefields have NEVER been left untouched. You're fetishizing some fantastic, airtight, unadulterated version of public memory that DOESN'T EXIST and never has. Public spaces of representation and memory have ALWAYS been subject to power and politics. I will explain why this is a profoundly stupid take with three examples across 150 years and a variety of dynamics:

(1) Antietam Battlefield, site of a critical civil war battle in 1862. People erected memorials a decade or so after the battle's end - mostly locals memorializing the dead - and then it cascaded on after that. Pretty soon you had cavalry groups having reunions, putting up monuments, the works. When the country started getting money dumped into parks and historical preservation became a priority, different societies started putting together plans to turn the battlefield into a walkable park. And there was fuging OUTRAGE. Who are YOU, mister commissioner so-and-so, to disrupt a memorial put there by the ILLINOIS 63rd fuging CAVALRY YOU PIECE OF poo? Movements to "freeze" the battlefield in time became popular, so there were huge fights over whether there should be even be an interpretive center. "Y'all just wanna control the narrative," shitheads bawled, usually from NASCAR states, and insisted people walk into the park with their own interpretations. (Of course they lost, again)

Takeaway: there is no such thing as an "untouched battlefield."

 

(2) The War Remnants Museum in HCMC, Vietnam. This museum and memorial to the American War in Vietnam popped up in 1975 by the name "Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes," a real kick in the ol' ballsack for Americans. The narrative more or less painted us as horrible, imperial invaders without shred of nuance. It remained that way for a couple decades. The Doi Moi reformations gave the West a toehold there for manufacturing and in '95 diplomatic relations with the USA were normalized. As part of the package though we told them they had to do something about that pesky museum, so they changed the name. Over the decades anthropologists have tracked changes in how the museum has curated public memory. The narrative has largely shifted to a reconciliatory tone - while there's still floors of horrifying violence (American war crimes, walls of Agent Orange victims, etc.) there's a new multinational narrative that's intruded very noticeably. Hell, in 2015 they literally had an exhibition space for victims of Agent Orange that had "overcome their difficulties to live beautiful, transcendent lives" and was basically a real pretty room with pastel thatching and tasteful frames, a stark contrast to the neon orange permeating the walls full of bulging eyes and cleft palates and "fug you America" a floor above.

The museum utilizes impression books, a uniquely western feature of museum "democratization" and allows visitors to pen their thoughts on the museum, making opinion an exhibit unto itself. Here visitors interact with the exhibitions, offering synchronic commentaries and meta-analyses of representation. They are often combative. In the battlefield monuments at the Khe Sanh perimeter a few miles from the DMZ, the impression books have become battlefields of their own: they're chock full of U.S. veterans disparaging the official accounts. "I was here and WE WON," one said. "This is bullshit," was another eloquent response, possibly to the low-budget diorama of screaming American soldiers running through a plaster-of-paris jungle behind him.

One-legged old men sold spent shell casings to veterans walking around these locations. "I fought for the South," they'd whisper, conspiratorially. Total bullshit, of course, just selling themselves to an audience eager to hear the "real" side of a contested history and pay for it.

Takeaway: history is contested in public spaces and battlefields present specific narratives based on political dynamics and power structures.

 

(3) The Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum. This one's fun because some dumb shits on this forum were probably around for this. In the late 80s the Smithsonian decided they should do an exhibit on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a gigantic B29 that they couldn't possibly fit in that space, so they took the front end of the fuselage and put it in a display room. A couple of historians were tasked with drawing up some interpretive material surrounding it. They came up with a thoughtful presentation of perspectives: the airmen in the plane, information about the bomb itself, and then on the walls surrounding the plane were Japanese citizens and commentary by survivors who'd been bombed. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

NOPE. Focus groups poo their collective pants. Reagan had just gotten the nation pumped about about getting rid of the Vietnam malaise from the 60s and reinstilling a sense of patriotism in America, and now Dick Cheney and Nancy Bush were grabbing the reigns. Absolutely no way this fugin country was gonna have a buncha goddamn yellow bastards getting SYMPATHY on OUR SOIL GODDAMMIT. The guy that headed it up almost got fired. A committee came in and made them retool the entire thing. The graphics with the Japanese were yanked entirely and the display was sanitized, with reference to moral ambiguity made only through the perspective of the good-hearted bombers.

(There's an interesting corollary here to the Vietnam memorial erected around the same time. A Chinese-American student at some university in Ohio won a contest to design the memorial and made it this really low profile, reflective wall. Americans saw it lost their absolute fuging minds. They wanted a giant towering memorial, not this "gash of shame," and they had insane meetings screaming about the nerve of some Chinese gal trying to make America look shameful. The design did win out, unlike the Enola Gay, but only if they also added statues of soldiers to appease everyone's fee-fees. Boomers are the real snowflakes.)

Takeaway: you won't "learn the lessons of history" because institutions of public memory and historical representation are reflections of the institution's constituent values.

 

CONCLUSION: there is no such thing as objectivity in museums, on memorials, across battlefields, or in city squares. Institutions produce displays of public memory that reflect their values. The public grapples with them and contests their veracity, as we are seeing now, and with enough pressure, leverages the institutions into changing how history is represented. By ripping the head off of Robert E. Lee's statue we aren't performing some ignoble desecration of virgin history, we're moving as actors on a stage and reshaping the way we view, remember, and memorialize our past, as we always have for thousands of years and how we will continue to do.

Drag Robert E. Lee's bitch ass into a harbor, no one with a brain gives a poo.

Definition of fire vs. pie; great post.

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cookinwithgas Veteran

cookinwithgas

Posted
Posted
18 hours ago, electro's horse said:

as the last male descendent of john c calhoun, former VP, SC senator, and founder of clemson university, tear his fuging statues down

i give all protestors and law enforcement officials my blessing

My cousin served on the USS John C Calhoun SSBN 630, and I am on their FB group after taking him to their reunion before he passed away. These guys are so triggered, they think they are going to get killed for wearing the hat, making all these manly statements about the statues and history...

 

  • Wonder when this page will be pulled by FB?
     
  • So, will it be just SSBN 630 from now on.... Or do we deny we ever served?
     
  •  
     
    Where can I get a new ball cap. I feel the need to represent.
     
    Yes!! Let some "offended" moron try to snatch the JCC ball cap off the head of a former Calhoun sailor, and see where that leads
     

     I would consider it assault and theft.

    John Gordon

  • Sorry, but I haven't seen any news on this. What's happening?
     
    •  
      Clemson is removing the name from one of their school buildings.
    •  
       Unbelievable!
    •  
       
       
       they are trying to remove his statue here in Charleston,rename CALHOUN Ave,and one radical group wants his body removed and reburied outside of Charleston.
       
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       I find it funny that Clemson is removing Calhouns name when Clemson was a confederate officer,slave owner,and married to the daughter of J.C.CALHOUN.
       
    •  
       Is there no one in authority with the backbone to declare “enough is enough?” Guess we’ll see! I’d like to hear Senator Tim Scott’s response to all of this.
       
    •  
       
       I will check,I have not seen anything about Senator Scott's position.
      I do know I will never be ashamed of my time on the CALHOUN and will not just call her SSBN 630.
       
  •  
    I will always speak of JCC! Those years we served her and our nation with pride. I will let no one take that from me and will speak of it proudly. 1988 - 1992.
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