Steve Bannon’s place in US history will be more interesting if for some, the iconoclasm of US history as defined by civic patronage becomes a major issue.
He remains important if only because he maintains near-daily contact with Lord Dampnut, despite his exit from the WH. More insidious is how calculating Bannonism’s defects can be when manipulating liberal discourse to foment ethnic discord.
For example, Robert Kuttner weighs in on the central casting idea that removing statues of the founders makes no sense, because of some vague fallacy and without respect to artistic merit or historical accuracy. Kuttner might even be persuaded that Trump’s second trip to Houston finally made him “presidential”.
Kuttner fails to acknowledge the parasitic nature of Bannonism remains a clear and present danger as long as we fail to recognize Trumpism motivated by its need for constant ethnic conflict and racial hatred. Bannon’s importance to the ideological motivations of Trump’s viscerally, self-admitted racism cannot be underestimated as the damage will last generations.
The structural danger of giving unthinking iconoclasm a pass remains because Charlottesville demonstrated that even symbolic violence can foster actual violence.
Toppling such monuments have their significance as civic spectacles and is no different than watching the demolition of multi-story towers. Quiet, official removal seems less controversial as no Confederate/Nazi has yet chained themselves to a statue of Robert E. Lee or Theodor Hertzl.
The importance for discourse is the consensus of the public sphere that monuments to outdated ideas simply should have less impact on public spaces. Historical objects at least in their siting should correspond to their current cultural environments whose diversity cannot be erased by quasi-apartheid, immigration fascism.
Anti-historical sculptures do need to go, especially when history eclipses myth, and yes, every statue honoring a genocidal criminal should be removed by definition, even as the artwork’s site-specificity is often the real reason for the conflict. As with modern abstract sculpture, the historicity of such objects is culturally contestable but never more absurd for historical monuments to the civil war Confederacy in places not even states during that conflict.
Or if the fetishist voices of reenacted “heritage” demand it, relocate the sculptures and give them a designated “free speech zone” much like any cemetery. It is the metric used in burying Usama Bin Laden at sea, eradicating any possibility of shrines.
More tragic is the waste of energy on correcting civic representation as if removing every public slaveholder representation would have an effect on human trafficking policy. OTOH, Harriet Tubman makes much more historical sense than Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
Historical revision might then logically move to eliminating those monuments most representative of inequality, or at least censure those more egregious indulgences, like the US Treasury Secretary rescheduling official travel to watch the solar eclipse from atop the Fort Knox gold repository with his wife, who seems incapable of self-reflection.
The History of Visual Culture has now plenty of scholarship that looks at the provenance of monumental sculpture. The more interesting histories are ones that have quasi-religious significance like the Tomb of the Unknowns or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The latter had its own bit of white privileging that made the selection of its Asian American designer more interesting in its iconographic politics, demanding representational statuary rather than the more poignant tabulation of each and every deceased’s name.
The victory of Bannonism as a revanchist, ethno-nationalist program might have its ultimate expression in goading a “political correctness” meme much like the anti-Confederate flag demonstrations after the Charleston Nine massacre.
Bannon’s greater goal is not about indigenous people as it is reinforcing a message about conservative Catholicism that Bannon has talked and written as key to his millennialist traditionalism.
Columbus Day’s celebration as some memorial to “discovery of the Americas” as a national memorial began officially in 1905, much like other post-civil war interest group patronage with the philanthropy accompanying industrialized wealth. Such statuary has the same context as the proliferate Jim Crow era erection of civil war statuary.
Various nationalities have re-appropriated such celebration, such as the Día de la Raza, and “In Italy, Columbus Day has been officially celebrated since 2004.[2]”
More importantly, Bannonism’s goal of creating more ethnic schisms will be achieved with more civil conflict over inanimate objects.
Imagine the outrage during the World Series between the Catholic League and the Arab League when the first Columbus statue goes down, officially or unofficially. Win for alternative facts!
The Trump tweet on Columbus Day should be amusing. SAD!
Last week in Baltimore, some far-lefties took a sledgehammer to a statue of Christopher Columbus. A video uploaded to YouTube declared:
Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation, and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas. That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-American, and brown people.
What kind of a culture clings to those monuments in 2017? Part of our evolution as humans requires tearing down monuments to destructive forces and tearing down systems that maintain them.
Now, this requires some careful thought. The speaker is not entirely wrong, but he manages to sound like central casting’s parody of a lefty. Unless we all want to “return” to Europe or wherever our ancestors came from, America is our home and Columbus was among the first European explorers.
[...]
The bitter truth is that half of America’s founding fathers held slaves. And the other half assented to the continuation of slavery under the Constitution. That’s why we had to fight a civil war almost a hundred years later.
We can’t undo that history. But we need to come to terms with it. And we need to rectify the shameful parts of the legacy that live on in the present. I can’t believe that taking sledgehammers to statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus will help.
Globalism is probably OK for Bannon when it’s religious ...
Originally serving as a mutual benefit society to working class and immigrant Catholics in the United States, Knights of Columbus developed into a fraternal benefit society dedicated to providing charitable services, promoting Catholic education and Catholic public policy positions, and actively defending Catholicism in various nations.[1][2][3]
There are 1,918,122 members[4] in nearly 15,000 councils,[5] with 302 councils on college campuses.[4] Membership is limited to "practical"[6] Catholic men aged 18 or older. Membership consists of four different degrees, each exemplifying a different principle of the Order. The Order is a member of the International Alliance of Catholic Knights.[7]