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- The Woodlands Could Be Home to a Museum of Removed Confederate Statues [Houston Chronicle]
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Photo: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Re: The Woodlands Could Be Home to a Museum of Removed Confederate Statues
What a stupid idea! It would soon become a place for KKK rallies and counter demonstrations and possibly riots … just what the homeowners of The Woodlands want in their Stepfordian environment. As stated by Gordy Bunch: ” “We don’t have a lot of history here in The Woodlands because we’re only 42, 43 years old.” …. well at least THAT will be changed soon enough if your plan goes through. Where do all these stupid wanna-a-be ‘politicians’ , who obviously have a hard time tying their own shoes, come from and why do they keep getting elected?
The Woodlands holding true to its “Whitelands” moniker. Deplorable.
@WR: While I agree, it is better for 500 (random number) Confederate monuments to be housed in one place rather than to be spread out across the state of Texas. Who wants these statues in every city and town in our state? Just put them in one place! However, that’s wishful thinking. To remove every single confederate statue in Texas will be extremely hard.
“But muh heritage. It’s not linked to hatred and racism! Damn liberals!!”
This is how Lithuania deals with an awkward Stalinist past, at Grutas Park:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/08/not-set-stone
Europeans have a lot more experience with this sort of thing (a few millennia), and maybe we could take some advice.
When did everyone start getting upset over statues that have been there for 100s of years?
I’m upset too! Where can I express my faux outrage! Can someone give me some good hashtags too so I can further promote the cause. This is very important.
Yeah, this sudden ‘outrage’ reeks of virtue signaling. A way for liberals to show how sensitive and caring they are unlike those mean must-be-racist-bigot-homophob-etc-etc conservatives. In the “I care more than you do” race, I’m curious what we’ll see next.
Good to see we’re back to arguing about something that matters.
Also Bocepus the majority of those statues have not been there for 100s of years. Ignoring the mathematical impossibility of that, most of the ones people are talking about were put up in Jim Crow era specifically as an antagonistic measure against the local african american population.
The Woodlands Museum idea with the statues is a good one because it will also serve to display the early 21st century social programming that caused the statues’ removal.
Or….they can be shipped off to California where they can be ritually pulverized at a Starbucks or something.
I almost missed the article saying that Pappy’s is moving.
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They have some amazing comfort food. The place is always packed. Hopefully the new location will let them keep their fan base. They will prob get some kitchen upgrades and the fried pickles will be even better!
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One suggestion, leave the flat screen tv’s behind or turn them to a diff channel!
@Cody: I wonder what platform wants to take medical care away from children with disabilities. Gotta support the rich, right? If the oil money isn’t coming in..
Talking about social issues and war is always important!
These statues should be in a sculpture park (see previous article on Lithuania) where they are in context of our continuing human history…
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It’s true that they started to pop up like mushrooms 90 years after the Civil War!
Q: Why was there such sudden interest at that time? A: Civil Rights legislation.
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A a kid in the 1960’s I was confused by Civil War plaques and statues. Like ‘Why is anybody celebrating that dumb bunch?’
That was in New England far from the ‘losing South’ where people were less that invested in any of it – on the whole. I am Caucasian and know it felt different for my black neighbors.
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But the whole era of North vs. South wasn’t talked about and that isn’t good. My father is from Germany and for a long time WWII, Nazism and the partitioning was never talked about either.
The reason why there is opposition to celebrations of the Civil War now is that a more diverse population has the power and freedom to talk about it and act on it.
Society changes very slowly and what looks like sudden, and suspicious, outrage to some is real cultural blossoming.
Yeah, it seems that Confederate statue museum would be better in a place like Vidor.
“The reason why there is opposition to celebrations of the Civil War now is that a more diverse population has the power and freedom to talk about it and act on it.”
This is my exact point. We have a diverse enough population to elect the first black POTUS. He held office for 8 years, had beer Summits, changed healthcare, legalized gay marriage, ended wars, encouraged protesters, but didnt even try to address 100+ year old statues. If it is such a issue to some communities, then why did Obama not do anything about it? He had the freedom to talk about it then and the ultimate power to change things?
You know, there was a long while in the United States where Confederate graves and burial sites went unacknowledged. This was intentional, part of a reconstruction strategy not to provide nucleation sites for a sense of martyrdom or of foreign occupation. The victors attempted to write their own history, laying claim to all edifices of righteousness or glory and whitewashing the validity of any alternative accounts. This is not a historical aberration, of course…
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Houston is one of several large cities in the United States that hosts monuments to the losing side of a foreign civil war: and that is Vietnam’s. Houston’s local politics are likewise tainted by that particular foreign southerner, freshly aggrieved. Meanwhile, in Vietnam the suppression of such symbols and the construction of monuments honoring the victors is an ongoing project. Now that their nationhood is secure, Marxist communism is wholly abandoned, and their diplomatic/military posture is more closely aligned with the west…the red iconography with all the sickles and hammers has begun to seem absurd. That this is how it is isn’t necessarily illogical; it serves the entrenched interests over there to maintain a single-party system; but it sure as hell has pissed a lot of Vietnamese southerners off; and as a population, there is still very much an identity of ‘Southern-ness’ which is reinforced by the sense — if nothing else — that they are part of a socially constructed group (“us”) treated differently and somehow denigrated (by “them”). Vietnam is without a relevant legacy of slavery or any other such analog which can be simplified in the black/white terms of morality, yet there exist parallels in terms of how the victorious and the defeated coexist post-war and that will persist for a very long time and perhaps forever. It is the intersection of human nature and real politik.
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I think that that’s the source of a lot of American ‘Southern-ness”, too. We are we, in large part, because they’ve made us into us. There is also ‘Texan-ness’, a more independent and more western creature, which is also in large part an outgrowth of post-Civil-War identity-building. We can’t shirk it, but we should seek to understand it as a phenomenon. That means that we cannot simply cleanse public spaces, allow scholars to debate themselves in their precious and insular journals, and carry on. Remembrance and contemplation, if that is valued by our society, must be visceral and there must be context for it. Symbols are only stripped of their meaning when they are allowed to become plainly anachronistic and totally absurd, and especially when they are adopted only by those on the extreme fringes of society. If there is a movement, promoted heavily by outsiders, to bring about an internal change…that calcifies an identity about ‘us’ that doesn’t actually serve us, which is irrelevant in the course of our everyday lives.
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If, from a distance too great to make out the details of some statue or to read the accompanying plaque, one is inclined to say…”ah well that looks nice”…. If Chinese tourists and Mexican wedding photographers jostle together for the best angle from which to take a photo of some iconic statue (which I observed twice recently in both Louisiana and in Georgia), totally oblivious to controversy… If it is possible to honor society’s contemporary heroes in the same public spaces… Well then I challenge those with different perspectives to share them. Add to our heritage. Goodness knows that our cities can accommodate more public art. Make the new into a foil for the old, a continuation and evolution of ‘Southern-ness’ and ‘Texan-ness’.
Agree with Niche. The cleansing is a little hard to take especially because the northern elite has plenty enjoyed fetishizing Southern gothic, for fun and profit, and that during the period when the people expected to be hurt by these displays, were actually still alive.
Did the South buy into it a little too much? Probably. But it was better than that time everyone had pellagra.