Posts Tagged → statue
A tale of two fallen icons
Two icons have fallen today, one human and one a statue of a human. One event is good, the other is bad, and both represent the radical and opposing political forces pulling America apart.
Let’s start with the human icon, that being Wayne LaPierre, the now former executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA). LaPierre became a human icon by his own hand, because for many years he placed pictures of himself everywhere he could in NRA literature, publications, TV programs etc. LaPierre did everything he could as the NRA’s senior executive to make his face and name synonymous with the NRA, and in many ways, superior to the NRA name and logo.
LaPierre did not rise to icon status by virtue of his own great skill and the resulting earned adulation by NRA membership and leaders. Rather, LaPierre artificially nurtured an almost Communist Party image of “Our Great Leader” by simply shoving his own face into everything he could that the NRA put out from 1991 until last month.
This high-visibility self-promotion activity picked up after LaPierre had ousted longtime NRA-ILA lobbyist Jim Baker in 1998, then brought him back in 2011, only to oust him again in 2012, and then it picked up more after LaPierre ousted longtime NRA-ILA lobbyist Chris Cox, and then the self promotion pretty much had maxed out when LaPierre ousted short-time NRA-ILA lobbyist Jason Ouimet, and installed a grandpa used car salesman-looking guy named Randy Kozuch in 2023. Kozuch looks like Father Time and has a fixed and perpetually unnerving entre nous wink. LaPierre’s truth is crazier than any fiction we could write; you can’t make this stuff up.
In other words, LaPierre has been in a constant power struggle and self-promotion mode since becoming executive vice president, with an iron fist that served his own personal power and not the NRA membership. Not only did LaPierre spend millions of NRA members dollars on himself, his family, his wardrobe, and other trappings of a self-indulgent communist party ranking official, he plastered his likeness everywhere he could to such laughably grotesque levels in recent years that no online hunting or gun-related chatboard was free of ridicule for LaPierre.
That emperor may have been dressed in the most expensive suits, but to NRA members he had no clothes. LaPierre may have long ruled the NRA headquarters like a cruel and petty tyrant, but a lot of his own members hated his guts. LaPierre represented everything wrong in Washington DC politics. So when LaPierre announced that he was stepping down yesterday in the face of a lawsuit over his illegally spendy habit, it came as a great sense of relief to those who have the most riding on the NRA – its members and donors.
The crashing of this (false) icon to the floor and shattering into pieces is a good thing.
Pivot to the City of Brotherly Love, the cradle of American freedom, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the National Park Service is removing the statue of William Penn from a riverfront park (ironically called Welcome Park) owned by the citizens of America and managed by the NPS. The removal of this iconic statue of the most tolerant and accepting man of the 1600s-1700s, William Penn, is destructive.
William Penn was not just some European guy, he penned the Penn Charter, which outlined many of the open minded individual rights and government duties that we find a hundred years later in America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. William Penn was a broad minded, open minded, tolerant, kind, generous person. He sought to financially compensate the native Indians who lived and hunted in Pennsylvania, rather than use violent force to oust them and outright take their lands.
The reason why Pennsylvania had only one Indian reservation (which was eventually violently stolen from the Cornplanter Senecas by the US Army Corps of Engineers so the agency could make a new recreational impoundment lake for happy white people to drive their motorboats in the 1960s), was that most of Pennsylvania’s Indians were bought out and firmly moved westward as the frontier moved westward. Pacifist Quaker William Penn wanted to live in harmony with the Indians in his new colony, as much as he could, and his actions showed a humane approach that was unique in that period.
So removing the iconic William Penn statue from its position at Penn’s own home is a rejection of a tangible and meaningful symbol of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation. By people who claim to be all tolerant and peaceful. It is a bad thing.
(Thankfully, it was announced late today that the NPS had “prematurely” stated that it was going to remove the William Penn statue, which is going to stay in place for the foreseeable future. Apparently public resentment about this racist decision overwhelmed the NPS and the PA state government.)
As we can see, icons come in all shapes and sizes. Some are good, some are bad, some deserve a wrecking ball and others deserve flower garlands. One thing is certain about icons, as these two icons discussed here show, they bring out tremendous political and cultural passions because of what they represent. This is why they become such useful political tools, to the detriment of The People.
Josh and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA in 2016 at the Great American Outdoor Show. See? Wayne even showed up to argue about his tenure with me eight years ago.
Did GOP Senator Toomey Really Flush the First Amendment and Side with the Anti-Free Speech Movement?
We have all watched the Charlottesville debacle and its pathetic aftermath.
In sum, the city administration unilaterally decided to remove a neat old statue of some guy named Robert E. Lee, whom no one today can remember.
So a bunch of protestors decided to peaceably assemble and petition the government with their grievance, specifically that the statue no longer means today what it might have meant when it was erected a hundred years ago, and that it is a work of art, and that it is part of American history, and it should stay.
Then other protestors began to rally around this symbol, and these other protestors are a bunch of racist goofs holding up the most embarrassing signs (and hats, so let me ask you, what is worse, a stupid pointy white hood or a vagina hat…your opinion is as good as any, because they are all really embarrassingly stupid hats) America has seen since the Sore Losers March Against Democracy after Trump was sworn in as President.
In America, even racist goofs (including the racist goofs at Black Lives Matter) have a Constitutional right to free speech, and a right to peaceably assemble to protest, and so these racist goofs did that, along with the history buffs, the art buffs, the southern pride buffs, et al. to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue.
Naturally the media and its local affiliate, the mayor of Charlottesville, whipped up this small event into a frenzy, casting it as something it wasn’t, so they could make it into a national event and try to pin it on who else, but President Trump.
After the violent fracas, purposefully created by the mayor and implemented by racist goofs carrying African National Congress flags and using bats to attack Caucasians around them, Trump was repeatedly attacked for not having condemned just the white skinned racist goofs, but for having condemned ALL of the racist goofs at Charlottesville, including the violent leftists and their willing partners the violent white supremacists.
Nothing Trump said was good enough for the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the mainstream media. Everything Trump said was claimed to be insufficient, insincere, etc., though this was obviously just political grandstanding by his political opponents.
But guess who is a political opponent of President Trump, and who also jumped on the grandstanding bandwagon?
Why, Pennsylvania’s own US Senator Patrick Toomey.
In the recent past, Senator Toomey’s weak behavior begged for a primary opponent, and the only reason he did not get one was that he was facing someone even farther to the left than he, Katie McGinty in the 2016 election. And so we are stuck with this sniveling, whining, weak, spineless tepid little man Toomey for another six years.
Senator Toomey refused to condemn the violent leftists and racists who initiated the attacks on the goofball white supremacists, AS WELL AS ATTACKS ON OTHER PROTESTORS AND EVEN PASSERSBY.
Senator Toomey refused to condemn the Charlottesville mayor who manipulated the confrontation by changing the protest venue at the last minute, thereby ensuring physical contact between the opposing sides and also barring his city police officers from making arrests, except in the most egregious circumstances.
Senator Toomey refused to support the US president’s call for calm and a cessation of violence by everyone committing violence there.
Senator Toomey refused to support the US Constitution’s guarantee of peaceable assembly and petition of government, and in fact his own words spell out his hostility to free assembly and free speech.
Rather, Senator Toomey joined in on the leftist attack on Trump, equating equal condemnation of all racists, white and black, with supporting white racism.
Talk about moral equivalence, this sad excuse for an American Pat Toomey is full of moral equivalence himself, as well as full of political opportunism and spineless jellyfish wobbly-kneed “action.”
Earth to Spineless Weakling Pat Toomey: Bigotry is bigotry, and bigoted violence is bigoted violence, no matter who does it, and it all must be condemned. There are no sacred cows in America, so why are you helping create one?
America’s problems are not going to get resolved by weak, fake ‘leaders’ like Pat Toomey, who make common cause with violent rent-a-mob thugs bent on ending the free speech rights of people they disagree with. In fact, Toomey makes our problems worse.
Here is the email he sent out last week; you judge for yourself:
“This past week our nation was rocked by tragedy in Charlottesville, VA. The acts we saw were a horrifying reminder that there are still those who seek only to divide us.
The racism, hatred, and violence seen in Charlottesville were vile and unacceptable. I am disgusted by white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis and believe the racism and hate spewed by these groups have no place in our society.
Furthermore, there can be no moral equivalency between neo-Nazis, bigots, white supremacists, and those who oppose them. Our country has no room for corrupt ideology or violent acts.
I hope that what occurred in Charlottesville will be an isolated incident. Moving forward, I pray that members of Congress will put politics aside, unequivocally condemn hate and bigotry, and find ways to work together to protect our shared American values of equality and justice for all.”
Historic American Art vs. NAZI ISIS People
In the 1930s, the German NAZI party identified “degenerate” art that was supposedly representative of “degenerate” culture, officially unfit for Germans.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery, books, poetry, you name it, if it had any artistic value, the NAZIs scrutinized it carefully. And if that art did not match the NAZI’s new standards, then it was forbiddden, burned, destroyed, or looted and hidden away, to be ransomed and sold off to future buyers outside of the ‘culturally supreme’ Deutchland.
Entire museum collections and privately owned collections throughout NAZI-occupied Europe were looted, damaged, and or destroyed, because the art did not comport with the new standard these Ultra Germans had created. Priceless artifacts were lost forever, at best melted down for their precious metal value.
If you want to see the long-term impacts of this intolerant approach to art, use www.duckduckgo.com to search the phrase “nazi looted art,” and marvel at the sad results. Real Western culture took a huge hit from the neanderthal NAZIs, and the ill effects are still felt today.
Fast forward six decades to ISIS, the puritanical Muslim movement that uses extreme violence and sadistic cruelty to achieve political domination. A lot like the NAZIs, come to think of it.
ISIS has a thing against most art and even historic artifacts, if they do not fit neatly into the Sharia law that ISIS followers believe in.
Ancient Buddhist cliff carvings, imposing and inspiring…detonated into rubble, by ISIS.
Ancient Assyrian cities, buildings, from the beginning of recorded human history….bulldozed and detonated into shards of broken rock, by ISIS.
Important archaeological digs providing useful history, bulldozed by ISIS.
Entire churches looted of anything of immediate value, then burned down, by ISIS.
Entire museum collections either destroyed, or looted and re-sold on the international black market, by ISIS.
Fast forward just a few years to ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and now we have priceless American artifacts that belong to the public being outright destroyed by mobs from these groups.
Irreplaceable and beautiful bronze statues of long-dead generals and soldiers are being removed and destroyed either by street thugs enabled by big city mayors, or by the big city mayors themselves.
This is a war on history and art no different than the NAZIs or ISIS.
At the very best, this is simply the mistake of applying new understandings to old history.
Oh sure, the neanderthals claim that these statues are memorials to bad ideas, and sad times, and to some extent there may be some vague shred of truth in that. But to keep these cultural artifacts, these works of high art, is no endorsement of what they may have once captured long, long ago.
Rather, these statues are mute testimonials to our nation’s history, its struggles, and its triumphs. The fact that the Confederacy did not win, due to the intervention and huge sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of Caucasian men from the north, is the real story of these old monuments.
Today we have one American political party that is increasingly at open war with every basic value and idea that undergirds America, as it was founded. These public square symbols are caught up in that party’s war.
That political party has more and more officials doing cheap political stunts, like seizing old bronze statues in the public square, and declaring them “Cherem” (unfit, like ISIS does to the churches it burns), and culturally unfit, like the NAZIs did.
Frankly, there is zero difference between these mayors, and Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe, and the other totalitarian movements that preceded them, like the NAZIs, ISIS, and the Soviets (who tore down beautiful old Russian statues and replaced them with boring, utilitarian statues of Lenin and Stalin meant to project an intimidating political message).
Whether these mayors and governors act unilaterally and use publicly owned machines to take them down, or if they allow their allied street thugs from ANTIFA and BLM to tear them down, while the city police are ordered to make no arrests, it makes no difference.
In the end, these mayors and their violent street soldiers are no different than the worst people in history. But if they win, you can bet they will erect statues of themselves, glorifying their total transformation of America to…God knows what.
Now they are talking about destroying the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. No lie.
I say we make a stand like a stone wall to protect this historic American art, and stop this insanity, stop this assault on America, by these modern day NAZIs and ISIS thugs.
Coach Joe Paterno Vindicated
While there is a lot to learn from the Penn State – Jerry Sandusky debacle, such as adults should do common sense things, and adults should not rush to judgment, etc., there is one thing that has emerged from the recent trials involving former PSU president Graham Spanier and former assistant football coach Mike McQueary (who just hours ago won yet more millions of dollars from Penn State): Coach Joe Paterno was totally innocent.
Recall that legendary head football coach Joe Paterno was wrongly blamed for the actions and then results of past assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s mass child molesting ways. The whole thing was correctly a shock, but everyone who was around Sandusky was blamed. Hell, I think the board of trustees even tried to blame a janitor, no lie. The infamous Louis Freeh report was issued, one of the great works of bad fiction, and Joe Paterno was summarily fired.
The man had devoted himself to Penn State, to the improvement of college sports, to the improvement of college athaletics, to the novel idea that a gifted college athlete could also receive a quality education and go on to have a meaningful and successful career after college football, including (gasp) those athletes who did not make it into the NFL.
This is novel, because 99.8% of college football teams are like puppy mills, where young men are used up in a short term quest for wonderful ratings and glamour. It’s a pile of crap and it is wrong. Only Coach Joe Paterno and a couple others (Coach Lou from Notre Dame, of course) stood against that sick tide.
And that is why Coach Joe Paterno was pilloried in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.
Not because Paterno had done anything wrong, by act or by omission, but because he stood so far above everyone else around him. As college sports standards sank lower and lower, Joe stood for old fashioned values like hard work, earning your way, mentorship, patriotism, community, and all the other quaint values and ideas that are passe when so much money and fame are to be made.
So Paterno was fired early into the Sandusky scandal, by a spineless PSU board of trustees scared of its own shadow and lacking in the bravery and honesty that had marked Joe’s entire life, when he answered his front door on a weekend morning.
The results of this week’s trials are a kind of trial of Joe Paterno in absentia. Had Spanier been found guilty of certain charges, then one might have been able to ascribe the same guilt to Joe. And had PSU prevailed against Coach McQueary, and not lost for the umpteenth time, each time costing PSU millions of dollars, then one might have been able to say that PSU was right in firing Joe because he had failed to act when learning that Sandusky was a monster.
But none of that happened. Yes, this week Spanier was found guilty of the misdemeanor of child endangerment. Given that everyone on Planet Earth now knows the facts surrounding this, this makes sense.
What does not make sense is how Paterno’s great name has not been cleared.
Fact: Paterno called Spanier on a Sunday morning, having heard from McQueary the night before that Sandusky was seen raping a little boy in the football locker room.
Fact: Spanier then went on to hush it all up because of his fear of bad press. Fact: Spanier is a slime; hell, we could tell that just by his appearance and demeanor. But it is now official.
And it is also official that McQueary was a good guy and did what he was supposed to do.
What has not yet been made official is that Coach Joe Paterno remains one of the best human beings to have ever played a role in American sports, and he was wrongly accused, wrongly persecuted, wrongly terminated, and wrongly maligned even after his death.
This week’s court results vindicate Coach Joe Paterno’s good name and reputation.
Now put his damned statue back up and name Old Main after him.
409+
Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.
The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.
The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.
Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.
Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.
And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.
I want blood.
I want guts.
I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).
To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.
Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.
Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.
That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.
And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.
A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.
And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?
And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.