Indeed, who is even the "victim" of a historic critique? I know you do not believe in an afterlife, so what is the harm of
asking whether Washington was right to order the genocide of the Iroquois, or to faithlessly promise the abolition of his human property even as he profited from their labor? To whom is harm done when one asks? He has been dead these eleven score years, as have been most of his victims for around the same time, and were he alive I think he would welcome the critique, unless I misjudge the man entirely. Lincoln's crimes were less severe, but I think both men were agreed on this: They never asked to be deified or reified. They never described themselves as perfect or above reproach. They were good Protestants. humble before God and polite to men. They would obviously not approve of the political cults that sprang up around their careers, or the massive temples that have since been built for them in the Capital city. But because they are dead, they cannot speak. So others make stone gods of them, and forget their true legacies.
Someone once asked Lincoln for a brief
biological sketch, for an upcoming news article. He replied: "“There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If anything be made out of it, I wish to be modest, and not go beyond the material.” He then proceeded to offer the briefest of resumes, focusing on points of fact as suits the mindset of a lawyer. Does that sound like a man whose ego demands that thousands of schools, prisons, shopping malls, and highway bypasses be named after him? I think not.
This is getting a bit off topic, but then, if the topic is how Democrats came to drift ever more sympathetic toward fascist policies like the Patriot Act, even as their politics seemed to grow more and more Progressive on a very superficial level of endless "signalling" and statements made on this and that "culture war", I don't think the new cult of Invictus Sol that venerates and "protects" the memory of dead presidents is on an entirely separate wavelength from the public's increasing tolerance for an fundamentally unsafe concentration of legal and administrative power in the White House.
You know, England and Spain and Norway, have actual Kings and Queens. Throughout most of their national history, their monarchs were held to be representatives of a Divine Will that ordered all human activity according to the principles of Nature and Faith that had guided Christendom since empire was converted by a miraculous act to the path of eternal salvation. Important people, those Kings and Queens!
Yet none of these ever required, nor permitted, posthumous veneration of their royal bodies in the way that Americans do for their past presidents. You'll find plenty of normal, human-sized royal statues around Europe, perhaps double-height here or there (looking at you, Weymouth...), but no megalithic constructions like Mt Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial (at which Lincoln is seated in the exact same posture as was Zeus in antiquity, with his hands placed over the arm of a throne engraved with the
fasces, or staff of Roman authority, the very symbol from which the word "fascism" is derived). Have you ever wondered why? Why, in a nation that is supposedly democratic, we honor our presidents very explicitly the way the Greeks and Egyptians and Romans honored their gods, right down to copying some of their ancient temples brick for brick? There is a danger in such hero worship. A very real and concrete, sometimes marble, often gilded, danger.
I wonder why Trump thought it reasonable to demand a
Triumph for himself at the Capitol?
