It is not enough. Symbols exist that contrast our national values. We understand the necessity of denying their association in our present, but it is not enough. An outcry from a deeply offended populace rumbles in dissatisfaction demanding their removal and politicians hasten to comply, but it is not enough. The Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations commissioned 96 sculptures across the south of our nation to leave their mark and ensure their fight, their secession, their rebellion, their Civil War, was never forgotten. We work to stamp out their ideals, their beliefs, and their goals, but it is not enough. Embedded in our history is a slave holder and adulterer so prolific with his sexual tastes that an entire genealogy is dedicated to tracing back their roots. Can a slave deny her master? Can a choice be made when the very idea of refusal brings forth uncertainty and dread? Can consent, or love itself, be said to live under such conditions? Nay. Every coupling of master and slave is in its lust-filled hearts, a rape. It matters not, what is accomplished in the tainted shadows of rape and slavery. This is a hard truth we accept, for similarly, who is tempted to revere a decorated soldier if he follows his beloved homeland into rebellion? No one. Even though he dedicated 30 years of his life beginning as an enlisted servicemen to fighting in the Native American wars working his way to Lieutenant Colonel and being honored as the Superintendent of the US Military Academy. We all know that his loyalty to family and state must be reviled, and our recollection of Robert E. Lee must be destroyed. It is still not enough. This other beloved slave owner and rapist must be dragged into the void beyond history’s favor as well. Let his edifices be destroyed and his monuments crumble! We must scrape the face of Thomas Jefferson from Rushmore and our currency! His memorial must be cast down as our first sips from our savior, the River Lethe. Still, it is not enough!
As humans our values change, but our monuments lead us astray. The crisis at the border, our jobs, our language, our very way of life is endangered by these labors of art that fail to uphold our beloved isolationist values. We must follow the hallowed footsteps of Pope Pius IX who acted without fear or hesitation when he castrated all the statues of the Vatican, for as surely all know, anatomical correctness is a blight of obscenity against the righteous so too must we lead the civilized world in a display of virtue!
How dare China suffer an abomination born of despotism and cruelty so vast that an estimated 400,000 slave workers are interred within the “World’s Longest Cemetery”, its Great Wall! How dare Mexico keep the Temple of Kukulkan, a clear monument to slavery and human sacrifice! How dare the French permit corruption, decadence, lust, and greed to retain the edifice of their manifestation in Versailles! How dare the United Kingdom allow stones, so soaked in the sacrifices of human and animal alike they should be confused for granite, to stand at the Pagan site Stonehenge! Yet, England twice mocks civilization! For, though wise Henry VIII demonstrated the kind of bold heart we who yearn to cast off our shameful memories must have, when he destroyed every Saint’s shrine across his island in 1538, so too did he leave intact a stone legacy so monstrous that its very name, The Tower of London, is synonymous with cruelty, torture, and execution! For shame! How dare Egypt leave intact and even embrace a symbol of the power of a despot, created from the loss of so many slaves the number is unknown that watered the stones of the Pyramids with their blood! Yet, even they, as well as all those who came before, pale in comparison of the last. No symbol of slavery and cruelty is more well-known and readily recognized; built by a despot; fed the blood of slaves innumerable; where humanity itself was shed at the door, for thousands to view the blood sport of human murder in slave versus slave combat. How dare Italy leave untouched the barbaric Colosseum of Rome!
Clearly, as the Meister of American values Senator Joe McCarthy did before us, we must again pave the road to the future by showing the world the strength of our virtue! Therefore: immigrants consume our foods; take back your hungry! They steal our wages and jobs; we return the poor you cannot support! Our borders are clogged; we reject the huddled masses of your people! It is not enough to take half measures like a border wall that sends mixed signals! We must remove the welcome mat! We must tear down, or as Pope Pius IX teaches us, at the very least update, the open invitation of hospitality in the arms of the Statue of Liberty! These symbols that conflict with our cherished values must be cast into the deepest oubliettes within our nation’s soul! Only then, will it be enough to provide equality. Only then, will it be enough to cleanse our hearts of racism. Only then, will it be enough to defeat the goals of a collection of women over a century dead and their descendants. Only then, will we finally, be allowed to forget.
“Those who forget history, are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana