I’m pulling down a Modelo Especial from the twelve pack remaining on the wall, my favorite beer from Mexico, a country I love….10 days until the Reckoning…

We have survived the last debate…and we Dems are trying to deal with our neurotic fear that SOMETHING, like Jim Comey’s re-opening the Hillary email investigation (lie the guy, read his book but, no, can’t forgive him for that), will pop up to give us another horror night as we experienced four years ago…at least Michael Moore is not the screaming Cassandra of the last election at this point…three days ago he urged the Bernie crowd to get out and vote for Biden, so that they can move a Biden presidency toward Medicare for All…four years ago a lot of those pissed-off Bernie folks withheld their votes from the “certain” victory by Hillary Clinton or voted for Jill Stein, to send a “message.” They sent a message all right…in the Presidency of one Donald Trump.

Last week the Supreme Court, in a very revealing ruling, upheld a lower court ruling that Pennsylvania’s mail-in votes can be counted for up to three days after Election Day. The Republican Party, of course, had sued to throw out these votes. It was a 4-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals, to rule for democracy in a crucial swing state…

Why did Justice Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, side with the liberal wing? Well, maybe, as many Republican appointees before him, like David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor, has “evolved.” But I suspect it has more to do with his determination to preserve whatever non-partisan legitimacy this Supreme Court has left…Roberts is, above all, an institutionalist, presiding over a Supreme Court in the most partisan of times with a President who is the most partisan man ever to hold that hallowed office.

What if Amy Coney Barrett had been rushed even faster on the court? Do we have any doubt that the decision would have gone the other way…and that potentially thousands of (probably Democratic) PA ballots would have been uncounted?

Twenty years ago Al Gore and George W. Bush were basically tied in the Electoral vote and it all came down to the state of Florida….the initial count in Florida went to Bush by 1700 votes…after an initial recount it turned out to be only 537 votes…both parties lawyered up and the Republicans played hardball in the court of public opinion. Gore and the Democrats took a higher road….there was a fixed Electoral College deadline, and there was no way the entire state could be recounted, so the Democrats pushed for a recount in 4 counties….

The Supreme Court, in a classic 5-4 decision, overruled the Florida Supreme Court ruling, and installed George W. Bush as President. Gore, in the Dem Party tradition, played by the rules and conceded.

We will never know who would have won that election in Florida (probably Gore, if the recount in Palm Beach and Dade County had been allowed)…We do know that Gore received about 500,000 more popular votes nationally than Bush. That sanctimonious “crusader” Ralph Nader siphoned off more than 97,000 votes, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of these were taken from otherwise Gore voters.

Since then we have lived with the reality of minority rule in the United States of America…Barack Obama managed to break that electoral stranglehold but politically was largely stymied for 6 of his 8 years in office.. Mitch McConnell declared from day one of the Obama Presidency, “Our priority will be to do everything we can to make him a one-term President.” And, after the first two years, when Obama was miraculously able to pass the Affordable Care Act, McConnell largely succeeded. McConnell blocked Obama’s court nominees, most egregiously, Merrick Garland, on bogus grounds which the Republicans have now tossed away…it is a classic case of raw politics, when the means justify the end, principle and consistency be damned.

These elections matter…of course, I agree with Joe Biden that this election is about the “soul of America.” But I think that was also true in 2000, even though it didn’t look like it at the time. Many voters saw Gore and Bush as middle-of-the-road, not very apart candidates. .

The Supreme Court installed George Bush…a decent guy, to be sure…love him for his Trump inauguration quote, “That was some weird shit.” Michelle obviously has a soft spot for his charms and, yes, decency.

But George W. Bush was a disastrous President of the United States, leading us into a senseless war in Iraq that needlessly killed thousands of brave US soldiers and maimed many thousands more for the rest of their lives.

Al Gore would never have prosecuted that war and would have set us up 20 years ahead on the most salient issue in our lifetime…climate change.

The cliche is that elections have consequences…this one certainly does…but history will show us that we as an electorate have failed disastrously before.

I am praying for a landslide and a solidly Democratic Senate…Joe Biden wants to be the President of all of America, red and blue…but only the raw power of the majority will be able to set that course.

I have no idea how many beers remain on the wall…but I do know that there are 23 days until our general election…23 days of sleep interrupted nights and anxiety over what happened on election night four years ago…

But I will pull down a Lone Star (go Blue, Texas!) and try to ignore our Covid-Spreader-In-Chief for a moment to follow up on the monuments conversation that my dear brother and I have been having of late.

I was so impressed, Jim, with your erudite and scholarly essay on said topic recently….it was missing only footnotes and an index…and I can’t top that!

This morning a philosopher more my speed than Ortega, Mo Rocca, had a piece on that beloved show for us AARP set, CBS Sunday Morning, on the taking down of monuments. Tomorrow is Columbus Day, and, of course, statues of that intrepid explorer are among the current targets for the statue-toppling brigades. The point of Rocca’s piece was that, well, this issue of tearing down monuments is, well, complicated. Christopher Columbus, like many of these figures, is a Myth (“In 1492, he sailed the ocean blue)…the fact is Christopher Columbus was an ambitious Italian who wanted to get rich and talked Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to bankroll his crazy expedition to find the “Northwest Passage.” He ended up in the West Indies and is credited with discovering “America,” although he probably didn’t have a real clue about what he had actually “discovered.” He was a brave and gifted mariner and also a cruel conqueror of native peoples that he encountered. So surely the young native American in the piece has a real beef against this guy….but then, there was the Italian-American who said this was BS…The “myth” of Columbus is what Italian immigrants, who were so despised for decades and decades, took as their talisman for their positive contribution to the USA…it’s hard to blame them.

Mo Rocca’s report also took note of the other statues that have been toppled in the months since George Floyd’s horrible murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police…George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant (!)….even a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was defaced, as was the famous monument to the ” colored” troops of the Massachusetts 54th, whose bravery and sacrifice in battle was immortalized in that terrific film, “Glory,” starring Denzel Washington in one of his first film roles. All this, I’m afraid, says more about our failure to teach history in our schools than any kind of considered outrage.

As writer Richard Brookhiser said, “Every statue depicts a flawed human being…if we remove them all, we will be left only with statues of Jesus Christ.” I admit to some sympathy with this view.

But, as I said, it’s complicated…the statue of Robert E. Lee, which was the focal point of the awful confrontation in Charlottesville in 2017, still stands, as far as I know…it went up in the early 1900’s clearly as a symbol of “The Lost Cause” and the white power structure. Lee himself declared he wanted no statues erected to him, but the Reconstruction South co-opted him anyway. I would advocate that it be moved to a museum.

After the Civil War there were tons of statues erected to Generals on both sides…in DC we have Sheridan Square and Thomas Square, both centered on equestrian statues of Union Generals (they were almost always “equestrian” statutes, as are the ones of Lee…poor horses!)

Very few of these monuments are what we would consider “art”…maybe Daniel French’s seated sculpture of Lincoln, maybe the Washington Monument (although it’s a crib of an Egyptian obelisk). Architect Frank Gehry came up against this problem when designing our latest national monument, the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington. He conceived of the boy Dwight, seated, dreaming of his future accomplishments. The Eisenhower family said, “No way” and insisted on a routine, realistic statue of General Eisenhower…at the end, the boy and man co-exist, which may not be a bad solution.

Now, back to Lee, and the issue of removing his image and name from the University that I attended and hold so dear. In 1864 Union troops arrived in this little town, primarily to destroy the Virginia Military Institute, which shared the ridge with little Washington College. They torched the buildings of VMI, where Stonewall Jackson had been a faculty member, and proceed to move on to the brick collonade of the college next door. Someone prevailed upon the Union commander to spare the college because its benefactor’s statue, George Washington, stood on the cupola of the main campus building. And thus we were spared.

A year later Robert E. Lee arrived, having accepted the invitation to become president of the struggling little college…it was a way for him to truly retreat from post-war politics and live a quiet, constructive life…and he did many good things in the five years of his tenure before his death. Near the president’s home on campus stood an Episcopal Church, where Lee worshiped. After Lee’s death they added his name to the college, built a chapel on campus as a memorial (with the famous recumbent statue and the entire Lee family, including Revolutionary War hero, “Light-Horse Harry Lee” buried with him there). The Episcopal church was named “R. E. Lee Memorial Church” in his honor.

A few years ago they restored the original name, “Grace Episcopal,” an act I imagine Lee himself would have approved.

The chapel became the central gathering point for lectures, important inductions and honors, and graduation ceremonies. Lee’s office was in it’s basement (something he and Joe Biden ironically have in common), and it remains furnished as Lee left it upon his death. I will never forget the day in 1972 when I was instrumental in bringing to our institution the greatest poet in the English language , W. H. Auden…the amusing image is seared in my brain of him sitting on the edge of the stage of a packedLee Chapel, his feet dangling nonchalantly before a reading, directly in front of Lee’s recumbent statue.

So, proposed by nearly all faculty, as far as I can ascertain, and by many of the current students, is to remove Lee’s name from the university and to turn the chapel into a museum, take it off the schedule of campus tours and deem it as inappropriate for any university events.

I could possibly contemplate the removal of Lee’s name from the college…if it is truly an impediment to attracting a racially and ethnically student body of excellence. I acknowledge that, as an undergraduate, I accepted a certain hagiography about Lee and was ignorant that slaves helped to erect the buildings in which I attended class (there are now markers to tell that shameful story). I don’t remember ever seeing “Traveller” embalmed, although I do remember seeing Jackson’s horse “Little Sorrel” on display at VMI. The Russians (Lenin) and the Chinese (Mao) are more fond of fashioning their monuments of dead bodies preserved in formalehyde than are we, Thank God.

But I go back to John Lewis’ comments on the Edmund Pettis Bridge:

Renaming the Bridge will never erase its history. Instead of hiding our history behind a new name we must embrace it —the good and the bad.  The historical context of the Edmund Pettus Bridge makes the events of 1965 even more profound.  The irony is that a bridge named after a man who inflamed racial hatred is now known worldwide as a symbol of equality and justice.  It is biblical—what was meant for evil, God uses for good.

He was a wise man…we must, yes, re-examine our history, reevaluate it, and learn from it…but to erase it is a stumble into willing blindness.

Seventy-five bottles of Beer and the Wall and seventy-one days to Armageddon (er, I mean, the election). I’m pulling down a Lagunitas IPA from the shelf (I’m loyal to my California breweries)…I may even pocket a couple of more to get me through the first night of the Republican Convention…

Yes, Jim, it is difficult to fathom how Trump’s supporters can see the world entirely differently from some of us on the other side of the divide. After watching Biden’s speech about reaching for the light rather than the darkness, a speech about reconciliation and optimism for a more unified nation, just for snickers, I switched over to Fox News…of course, Laura Ingraham was trashing the speech and the banner under her read: “Dems Wrap Up Misery-Filled Convention”…Trump and his team have continued the theme…this from the man whose Darker than Dark Inaugural Address spoke of “American Carnage.” We obviously live on different planets…

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder we as a nation are reckoning as never before with our history and our nation’s original sin of slavery. Some of the righteous anger toward police injustice has led to excess…with protesters toppling statues to the likes of President Grant, for example.

But our nation’s monuments do tell important stories…and sometimes very shameful ones. Trump envies himself as worthy of memorialization on Mt. Rushmore, which, on the face of it, to most of us, seems risible. But perhaps in a second Trump term it will replace the border wall as the essential infrastructure project.

Jim remarked on the sculptor John Gutzon de le Mothe Borglum, a man who evidently had Klan sympathies and took on the project to carve Confederate heroes on Stone Mountain in Georgia…and later went on to carve our Presidents on Mt. Rushmore. I had never heard of him and was motivated to do a little research…turns out he had a falling out with the Daughters of the Confederacy and others behind the project and he was discharged before he had gotten very far…he had only started work on the figure of Robert E. Lee, and after he was fired, he had it destroyed. The actual figures of Lee, Jackson, and Davis that stand today were not completed and dedicated until the 1960’s…when they also opened a theme park glorifying “The Lost Cause.” Wonder what that was trying to say to Black Americans who were fighting for their voting rights and equality???

When our family settled in Atlanta after I graduated from high school, I visited often but never had the urge to go see Stone Mountain…and I never have. I wasn’t really aware then how pernicious it was as a monument…but I truly see it now as a despicable monument to White Supremacy.

We were truly blinded in those days by the received social structure…which kept black people “in their place” as second-class citizens. Our parents bought into it, even though they were from Canada and Ohio. Our favorite special occasion restaurant was “Aunt Fanny’s Cabin,” in Symrna, where African-American women, dressed as mammys belted out choruses of “Dixie” after serving patrons copious amounts of family-style Southern food …and young black boys amused everyone by reciting the evening’s menu while sticking their heads through a blackboard placard. I loved the story of “Aunt Fanny,” a kindly former slave who used to (supposedly) sit on the front porch of this slave cabin and regale folks with nostalgic tales of the plantation days.

Of course, now the image and remembrance of this “dinner show” is pretty horrifying …but the restaurant was famous and always packed, often with visiting conventioneers. Even Saint jimmy Carter was a regular.

By the 90’s, of course, this cultural touchstone had to close in an era of changing values and standards…it was decided that this historic slave cabin should be preserved and moved to a Smyrna park as an historical monument. Trouble is, they found out that the structure wasn’t built until the 1890’s and that, even though “Aunt Fanny” had existed, she was not a former slave.

The restaurant owner, one George Poole, had evidently made it all up….

They moved the cabin to the park anyway…and that’s how many of the “monuments” of our history, and flags like the Stars and Bars, perpetuate a myth rather than reality…and I ain’t just whistling “Dixie.”

I am ashamed that it has taken me more than two weeks to live up to my promise to my brother Jim that I would write something in this space on the subject of “monuments…”

But here I go, grabbing a Sierra Nevada from the shelf (I live in California, after all…)

My views from the Back-Back of the family station wagon have altered considerably since our childhood days…especially politically. It is true, as my brother has accused me, that I was obsessed with the Civil War when I was coming of age during the Centennial Commemorations…as a keen lover of history I was enthralled with the conflict of 100 years before…after all, the last Confederate veteran died the very year I was born, 1951, and the last Union veteran three years later. In terms of a lifetime the story didn’t seem like ancient history at all.

But let’s not get too carried away…I did not attend Washington and Lee University in Virginia because Robert E. Lee had been its President and Stonewall Jackson a famous locale resident. I was not as smart as my little brother, so I didn’t get into my first two choices…Dartmouth and Williams…I was given to choose between W&L and the University of Virginia (founded by Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder and consort to his slave Sally Hemmings)…so, you see, I didn’t have Yankee or very politically correct options…I chose the smaller school.

Even before the death of George Floyd and the reckoning of our history that has rightfully been accelerated by Black Lives Matter, my alma mater was struggling with the legacy of Robert E. Lee. Three years ago on that ugly day in Charlottesville when white supremacists carried their torches and chanted hateful racist and anti-semetic slogans, ostensibly to defend an equestrian statue of Lee marked for removal, calls were accelerated by students and faculty to remove Lee’s name from the campus chapel, to close the museum with his office inside, and ultimately, to remove Lee from the university’s name.

But history is full of nuance, and movements derive their force from painting everything with a very broad brush.

In his final inaugural address Lincoln declared that there should be “malice toward none, charity for all…” against the vanquished South. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomatox he put away his uniform and stated publicly that he wished for no statues to be raised in his image to celebrate the “Lost Cause.” He accepted the invitation of a small college in a little town in Southwestern Virginia, where he had never been, to become its president. He spent the last five years of his life, working to improve the school’s financial and academic standards, and to solidify the student code of honor, which is an extremely valued legacy of W&L to this day.

It is true that Lee inherited a small number of slaves from his father-in-law, and there is some hearsay history that says he whipped one or more of them…in his reluctant testimony on Reconstruction issues before Congress in 1866, he admitted to the belief that “the black man does not have the same capacity of learning that the white man does” and did not believe he should be enfranchised. Bigoted attitudes from our standpoint today, to be sure, but at the time…commonly held beliefs throughout the North and the South.

Does Lee’s legacy belong in the same trash heap as Jefferson Davis or KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest? I would argue perhaps not. Should those statues of him erected years after his death to help enforce the Jim Crow laws and romanticize “The Lost Cause” be removed ? Yes, because the people who built them hijacked Lee’s reputation (he was widely admired in both the North and the South) for their own nefarious and racist political and social agenda.

Was he a flawed figure? Of course. Should the best part of his legacy, as an educator and champion of reconciliation, be erased? I am uncomfortable with historical “presentism.”

Should his name be removed from my alma mater? Perhaps…I am of two minds (I can expand on that in another post) but not in the name of “correcting” history.