Speaking of Statues

  Relax, I said about all I had to say on this subject in my year-end rant where I suggested that there should be a statute of limitations on the elimination of statues. Perhaps I should also have suggested that we should no longer construct any at all. I say this now because I had forgotten about the controversy over the memorial to the Vietnam War, but was reminded of it because of a new book on this subject. I will put down a few words which may serve to help me not forget again.

     The new book is James Reston Jr.’s “A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial”, in which he “recounts the bitter debate over Lin’s design and the contest between Lin and Frederick Hart, who was commissioned to make the memorial more appealing to traditionalists with the addition of a bronze statue known as “Three Soldiers.”
Apparently I am not the only one who forgot about all this since one reviewer notes;  “Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been so successful that one almost forgets the ugly storms of racism and misogyny with which opponents of the design fought the young architect more than 35 years ago.” (One opponent said it “was designed by a gook.”)

     Perhaps future statues should be virtual rather than concrete so they can be more easily deleted.

Post Script:
For a couple of reviews of the book see: “Fighting a War Over a War Memorial,” Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2017 and “The Right Way to Memorialize an Unpopular War,” by Michael J. Lewis, New York Times, Sept. 11, 2017.

There are at least two more books on the subject: To Heal a Nation, by Jan Scruggs and Joel Swerdlow and Robert Doubek’s, Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

In my year-end jeremiad relating to political correctness and STATUES I also considered WORDS, particularly those which should no longer be used. One of them is MASTER. You will be pleased to learn that that odious word has now received Canadian censure: “York University Scraps 'College Master' Academic Title to Cut Association to Discrimination and Racism”, National Post, Dec. 18, 2017.
Although Canadians were slightly slower than Americans in banning “Master”, it looks like we may be taking the lead in banning words that are not offensive, but sound like they might be:

“A Simon Fraser University (SFU) professor has launched a petition urging officials to change the school’s team name from The Clan, suggesting it could offend U.S.-based opponents and potentially put student athletes at risk.The university’s teams are known as The Clan, formerly the Clansmen, in honour of the Scottish heritage of the man the school is named after.”
No doubt as this is being written hundreds of bowdlerizers are scouring lengthy lists of homonyms, homographs and heterographs looking for new words to ban. I do suppose, however, that the rather dramatic loss of words from our vocabulary may be more than offset by the addition of new gender pronouns.

My rant was cleverly concealed, but if you wish to know what I said see here since I have made the early resolution to abandon things controversial and contemporary in the coming year.