Thread by @ThyConsigliori

11 July 2021 #MAGAanalysis

Charlottesville’s Missing Monuments

I am the son of a sculptor. The statue you see of my grandfather, he gave me his name, was created by my mother. In a lifetime of extraordinary art, my mother's greatest work is the one you see here.

2) Those are the only images I'll include in today's analysis. I won't tell the story of our missing monuments here in Charlottesville, either. At least not their actual history from installation to removal, their brief 100 years.

3) I will, right now, share my own story with our missing monuments. When we moved to Charlottesville, I knew nothing of these glorious works of art. We moved here for other reasons. My relationship to them only began upon the threat of their removal.

4) Learning of this threat, I instantly feared I would never see them. Happily, that threat did not materialize back in 2017. So, I rapidly drove downtown and made my first introduction. As you might imagine, a statue is, for me, a type of living thing. It has a soul.

5) A soul? Well, it's complicated. In her youth, along with my grandmother, my mother converted to a rigid, bible-based protestant religion. In her adult life, the question of a statue's soul plagued my mother. Our religion forbade idolatry. A statue with a soul is an idol.

6) In our adult lives, my mother and I suffered - still suffer - a broken relationship. In her eyes, I became an idolator. In my eyes, she lost her own soul. She became a statue breaker. I am not exaggerating. She destroyed her own statues. This was an act I could not forgive.

7) I do not judge the people of Charlottesville. I do not even judge our City Council. They are mere tools of the same force that destroyed my mother's career as a sculptor. That a human expresses his soul in his art is under attack. It has been for a very long time.

8) Did you know that the Declaration of Independence allows for atheists? It does. It calls for God's laws, OR, nature's laws. This was quite purposeful. One may or may not believe in a loving God. No one can disbelieve in nature.

9) My religion? I believe in souls. Not merely the human soul. I believe in the souls of all things. Animate and inanimate, plant, animal, and matter. How do you argue that water has no soul, the sky and atmosphere have no soul? I cannot make that case.

10) I break from most religions in this manner. For me, there are NO immortal souls. All souls die. I will die, and when I do, I will be gone. Gone, gone, gone, forever gone. My soul will die. Not just me, my soul too. And there will be no resurrection of my soul.

11) Something about the soul of Charlottesville died yesterday. Our monuments are gone. We reduced ourselves to the current panoply of political correctness. Let's talk about Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. Today, she bows to them, and the statue is removed.

12) More rightly, more historically, she is their leader. It is she who sniffs and smells and assesses the path to be taken. She is their scout. She is their translator and diplomat. She bends low to the ground. She finds the path forward. She is their leader.

13) The Left, today, worships on the altar of modern ego. Those standing upright have ego power. She, poor she, who bends low, has NO ego power. Ego is all. The statue is removed. Political correctness wins again. Evil wins again. She is disrespected and removed.

14) But why? That is the challenge we must face. Forget religion. Forget mortal vs immortal souls. The Left would have no souls at all, mortal, immortal, or otherwise. And it would have no statues. It would allow no idols. And here's me, idolator that I am. I love idols.

15) Consider Ephesians 6:12

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

16) Who have we removed from Charlottesville? We have removed heroes. Bob Lee and Stonewall, Lou and Bill, and our girl Sacagawea. They're gone now. Their souls as captured in their monuments have died. It is their second death. And I grieve. I mourn.

17) But why? Bob Lee and Stonewall were racists, we're told. Their monuments are monuments to racism. Racism is obviously bad - and I agree on that point 100% - so therefore Charlottesville's monuments were bad - to which I 100% disagree.

18) Lou, Bill, and Saca. Now there's a threesome. What had they to do with racism, with slavery? Nothing. Not one thing. So, our City Council must call an emergency session. Lou, Bill, and Saca must be removed right now. Show up in 20 minutes or less.

19) I say there is such a thing as the human spirit. I say that it is precisely the human spirit that the evil forces must destroy. Of course they'll fail. The human spirit cannot and will not be destroyed. Their objective will NOT be achieved.

20) Unalienable. Unalienable rights. What does that mean? It means that society does not, government does not GIVE these rights. They inhere to the human soul, even the human body if you will, while it lives and no force can remove them.

21) A human soul, a human being with unalienable rights cannot be controlled by its government. Its government gets all its powers from the consent of the governed, of the human souls, the free human souls who transfer SOME of their powers to it.

22) We have to talk about Bob and Stonewall. Why are they heroes? They rebelled against the United States and were therefore traitors, weren't they? How could they be heroes? How could they deserve monuments?

23) The term the Left does NOT want you to contemplate is this: Honorable Surrender. The South might have continued fighting until the North had slain every last rebel. There was no force demanding their surrender. None.

24) Well, none but honor. The Civil War was NOT started over slavery. It commenced over State's Rights and the severability of our Nation's founding, of our Constitution. Of course, the South intended to protect its right of slavery. I'm not guessing here.

25) Article IV, Sec 3 (3): The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates;

26) "...and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy.

27) "In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government;

28) "and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States."

29) Please read that. Please know that the Confederate States were evil. That is, as defined by their very Constitution. It enshrined Negro Slavery as one of its most fundamental principles. The document damns the Confederacy in its own terms, its own self-proclaimed language.

30) So how, again, are Bob and Stonewall heroes? They surrendered. This is to say that they, in the end, DISAVOWWED their very own Constitution's Right of Negro Enslavement. They laid down their swords and left the field of fight. They walked away.

31) In our Declaration of Independence, Jefferson blames King George III for many things. Among them...Negro Slavery. How do we square this circle? How do we retain our heroes, even when they owned slaves? This is the challenge of Charlottesville's missing monuments.

32) Before Donald Trump's campaign, I was a self-professed idealist. I was a Radical Libertarian. No taxes was my screed. Taxation is theft was my ideal. Yet I found myself supporting Trump who is NO idealist and not even slightly a Libertarian. How so?

33) I've since come to believe that government is both necessary and must extract a protection fee. Ideally, this fee never surpasses 15%, and hovers nearer 10% of one's income. Our rights must be protected, and that costs cash. We must pay our protection fee.

34) After 15% or so, taxes become evil. Pure, destructive evil. Yet, here we all pay them to the tune of 50% or so, maybe more. Why do we do that? Because we're pragmatists, not idealists. Pay taxes or suffer worse? We pay. Evil or no, we pay. We're pragmatists.

35) Pragmatism poisoned our Constitution. There was no way to create a strong Federal Government by demanding that Slave States give up their slaves in 1787. We did NOT have the pragmatic strength to wipe out slavery at that time.

36) Along comes Lincoln. He tells us, flat out, he'd allow slavery to continue if only to bring the Southern States back into the union. Flat out. But in the first years of the war he learned. It was Yankee soldiers who decided the war's purpose was to free the slaves.

37) Them, the letter-writing Union soldiers, and Julia Ward Howe. "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. His truth is marching on."

Glory, glory halleluhja. Glory...

That was composed in 1861.

38) As much as Bob and Stonewall surrendered to Grant, they surrendered to Julia Ward Howe also. Slavery's evil institution could not justify a rebellion against the Union. They surrendered. They affirmed the Declaration's statement that All Men Are Created Equal.

39) Should they have been tried as traitors, convicted, and shot at dawn? Many will argue they should have been, just like Benedict Arnold. Yet history went the other way. They were pardoned. They were set free to rebuild a new America without Negro Slavery.

40) Did this new America without Negro Slavery succeed? Not at first, not for 100 years at least. We HAD TO HAVE the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, still. And even then, it wasn't until 2008 that we elected our first, and so far only black President.

41) What kind of idiot am I? In 2008 when Obama won his election, I sincerely thought we'd progress. I thought we'd put racism behind us, into the long view of history past. I didn't support a single thing he stood for, nor believe in him. Yet I was thrilled no matter.

42) Silly, foolish me. I had no idea that Obama was, in fact, a race warrior, hell bent on stoking the fires of racial division and conflict. Many of my best influences knew how wrong I was and told me so. I didn't listen. I embraced our new President. For a minute or two...

43) It didn't take me long to realize that my friends were right, I was wrong. Obama is the greatest race divider in modern history. He takes his joy there, his power, his vast wealth. He is a race baiter, race baiter in extreme.

44) The loss of our monuments is certainly, assuredly, Obama's legacy. He cannot, no modern, politically correct liberal can accept that Bob and Stonewall surrendered honorably. Honor is not one of their politically correct terms.

45) Do you stand tall? Or do you bend low? If you bend low to the earth, searching for signs and signals, whiffing the odors of soil and humans passing over it, are you lower than your superiors who stand tall, yet have NONE of your capabilities?

46) A shameful culture that has no honor cannot imagine that Sacagawea is the real hero of the now-taken monument. She led Lou and Bill. She did so with her senses. Her nose and eyes, her touch and feel. She was a tracker. Try to feel that.

47) I am not in denial. I wish I were. I am not bargaining. I wish I were. I am angry, but my rage is abated. Why? I knew this was coming. Am I in despair? Yes, I am. But only temporarily. I too, like Bob and Stonewall, surrender. I despair for the moment.

48) We have defeated Negro Slavery. We have defeated it 100%. There are evil forces who need to deny this victory. I am ashamed of them. Obama is their leader. Their power relies upon the false belief that America fails to heed its Declaration.

49) Not just our Declaration. Our Constitution too. And its Amendments. Lincoln died to make men free. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are Lincoln's Legacy.

The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1869.

50) Charlottesville's missing monuments? They're just the Left's pretense that we did not make our Union more perfect when we did. Let's us proclaim this growing perfcection, and never accept their race baiting.

51) Well, they're more than that. They are the very denial of freedom itself. Freedom is a concept. It exists within history. When you oppose freedom, you must wipe out the path of freedom's rise.

52) Not all who support the removal of the monuments are evil. They see the monuments as monuments to slavery. They simply do not see the truth of freedom's long rise. I forgive them.

53) Bob and Stonewall certainly chose the wrong side of the fight. They did. No question or doubt. They should have freed the slaves. Jefferson Davis? There is no world in which he is my hero. He did not surrender. But Bob and Stonewall did. Imagine that.

54) Appomattox. It really did occur. And rather than prosecute all our traitors as traitors, we let them wind their way back into society. Yet each of us were able to see that Bob and Stonewall were heroes, worthy of their monuments.

55) Idolator that I am, I grieve the lost souls of the monuments. Patriot that I am, I grieve the wound to our 1st Amendment. Statues are free speech.

Statues have souls.

So say I.

Thread ends at #55.

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