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Is this statue of a Pilgrim, lost in Central Park,
another monumental mistake? Keep reading.
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Leave it to the United States of America to sweat the small stuff.
Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un are rattling nuclear sabers at each other.
Affordable healthcare is in danger of failing thanks to the spitefulness of Donald Trump and right wing Republicans.
Houston and now Lafayette, Louisiana, just nearly drowned. Meanwhile, a hanging judge named Mother Nature is busy sending out for more rope.
We’re back in Afghanistan up to our necks, or maybe over our heads. It’s hard to tell which, since the Trump administration isn’t saying how many troops it plans to commit there.
And what are we all worrying about?
Statues.
Statues!
It all started as a reasonable enough movement. Statues of Confederate Generals, erected decades after the Civil War, essentially to stick a finger in the eye of Reconstruction, are now sticking their stony and brassy fingers into the eyes of Afro-Americans — who rightfully object to the celebration-by-monument of treasonable behavior, in defense of the enslavement of their ancestors.
The white supremacist accusations of erasing a “heritage” arouse no feelings of sympathy in me. You want to remember your ancestors and your family’s heritage of enslaving other people? Go where the rest of us go to remember departed relatives — to the cemetery. Stick your monuments there, and stop littering public spaces with them.
Guardians of monumental virtue then raised what ought to have been a non-issue. Where would it all stop? If we could tear down Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, who fought for slavery, why not Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who kept slaves? Is our civilization teetering on the edge of committing mass "statuary rape?"
That argument was prima facie silly-assed. Washington and Jefferson may have kept slaves, but they also fought to found a republic that would eventually eliminate slavery. Lee and Davis committed treason and fought against that same republic primarily to preserve slavery. End of argument.
Or at least it might have ended there, had not some nincompoops of political correctness —nincompoops who I am ashamed to confess are on my own end of the political spectrum and in my own city — jumped in with both left feet.
Case-in-point: suddenly there’s a movement afoot in New York to take down the statue-atop-a-tall-pillar of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle, because Columbus helped to abuse and enslave the native Americans he found in the Western Hemisphere. (As did virtually every American, one way or another, up to the late 20th Century. Fortunately, now only some of us do that.)
My city’s idiot mayor, Bill De Blasio, is forming a commission on politically correct statuary. Among the statues under review is that one of Columbus at Columbus Circle. (De Blasio seems to have forgotten another, inside Central Park.) If the statue at Columbus Circle goes, can the name of the circle be far behind?
The Italian-American community, which never took an official position on statues, and had precious little to do with slavery or the Civil War, and also had little if anything to do with persecuting native Americans, is now seething.There’s some question as to whether De Blasio, who is half Italian, will permitted to march in the annual Columbus Day parade, the next biggest deal in New York to the St.Patrick’s Day parade.
Frankly, I hope they won’t let him march. A contentious issue was about to get put to bed when Dummy De Blasio, for no discernibly sensible reason, opened a bottomless can of worms.
Okay, Mayor Stupid. I’ve been walking through Central Park recently and I notice that this vast, once-glorious acreage, created by a pair of landscape artists to reflect and give us visual space to appreciate the glory of pastoral plains, lovely lakes and bosky glens — in other words untrammeled nature in the heart of a great city — is now cluttered with statues that are trammeling the place from end to end.
You go to Central Park looking for trees. Instead you get statues littering the landscape like candy wrappers after a rock concert. Most of the statues range from mildly inappropriate to totally unsuitable. Just a few examples:
There’s a great big statue of a Pilgrim, complete with buckled hat, floppy boots and blunderbuss, inside the park on a grassy hillock just a little past the East 72nd Street entrance. What’s he doing there?
The base of his statue says he’s celebrating the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620. So what the hell is he doing cluttering up Central Park? Did he dive off the Mayflower too soon and get lost?
He was probably sent there because he was messing up the view at Plymouth Rock, and the good citizens of Massachusetts were able to fob off this inappropriate hunk of junk on my fair city. Besides, weren’t the Pilgrims intolerant of other religions? Didn’t they once whip a Quaker just because he was a Quaker and then cut off the poor fellow’s ears when he showed up in Massachusetts Bay Colony? Get rid of the statue.
Next there’s the statue of the late Fred Lebow. I found Fred to be an annoying guy with a loud, grating voice. True, he helped found the New York Marathon. Does he deserve a statue for that? He also helped start a running club that on weekend mornings often makes much of the park inhospitable to anyone who isn’t there to run with Fred’s club.
Lebow’s runners often blocked the bikeways and crowded up the roadways while Lebow’s sandpaper voice destroyed the peace of nature and drowned out the chirping of birds by shouting out amplified distances, lap numbers, and running times from his one-time perch near the East 90th Street entrance. He was a royal pain not only in the butt, but also in everybody’s ear. Melt him down!
How about Balto the Dog? Remember him? No, I didn’t think you did. He was part of a dog sled team that helped deliver medicine to Nome, Alaska, to save children from diptheria a century or so ago. He and his unsung canine pals deserve a statue —in Nome, not New York. Meanwhile, God help you if you let your own dog off your leash in Central Park so he can enjoy a bit of a run. We only celebrate dead dogs here.
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Bronze cougar preparing to attack steel bicycle. Does
nature need this? Melt the cat down!
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Speakling of animals, there’s also a statue of a cougar on a cliff, looking like he’s ready to pounce on the joggers and cyclists below. If he were a real cougar I’d vote to keep him. Maybe he’d eat the mayor. Or some of Fred Lebow’s runners. But alas, he’s just another lump of bronze where bronze doesn’t belong.
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Only in New York would somebody erect a
statue to the worst poet in American history.
Send Fitz-Greene Halleck to the scrap yard!
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Did I mention Fitz-Greene Halleck? Fitz-Who Who? He may have been the worst poet who ever held American citizenship, a scribbler of hifalutin’ third-rate trash.
For example, here’s the final stanza of one of his truly atrocious poems called “Fanny.” The poem rambles on, and on, stanza after stanza, in iffy meter with rhymes so strained they could induce a hernia, until the effort reaches its derision-inducing end by trying to rhyme “dress’d in” with “interesting.”
But a full dress is for a winter’s night.
The most genteel is made of "woven air;"
That kind of classic cobweb, soft and light,
Which Lady Morgan’s Ida used to wear.
And ladies, this aërial manner dress'd in, one
Look Eve-like, angel-like, and interesting.
Other samples of his trash are even worse, but you get the idea.
Fitz-Greene (nickname him “Hack”) Halleck stands amid a cluster of statues along what might have been a perfectly pleasant tree-shaded path in Central Park, now called “Poet’s Walk.” Halleck is the only American whose statue appears there. There’s no Edgar Allen Poe. He wasn’t considered worthy enough by the politicians who stuck Halleck where they could have planted a perfectly good tree back in the 19th Century. No Longfellow, either. No Emily Dickinson. No Walt Whitman. Instead, there’s Sir Walter Scott, the Englishman who was primarily a novelist rather than a poet, and the Scotsman Robert Burns.
Elsewhere in Central Park you’ll find William Shakespeare, Daniel Webster, and such forgotten figures, perhaps deservedly, as Richard Morris Hunt, and Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen. (Sorry, no links. Look them up yourself.) The only useful part of Thorvaldsen’s statue is the base, because lots of dogs get to lift their legs to it, thus sparing nearby bushes and flower beds.
Tear all the statues down. Replace them with trees and grass and flowers that were meant by the park's great architects, Olmstead and Vaux, to be there. Then if you want, you can honor somebody by naming a tree after her. Or him.
Come to think of it, maybe not. Some future idiot resembling Mayor De Blasio might come along and demand we form a commission chop down all the politically incorrect trees.
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