What I’m about to present is not so much an essay in a usual sense but more as the literary equivalent of a prelude with a fugue--a path of reading by way of a river of citations. Think of it as a literally prosaic variation on a methodology of quotation used in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”.
This is a survey of some reading I was doing in 2020 on the topic of statue toppling, statue vandalism, and the reactions of leftist, progressive, liberal, conservative and maybe even some reactionary responses. I saw a fair bit of coverage that tacitly discussed the toppling of the statues of slave traders and slave owners in terms of political history but less often in terms of civic religion. The conservative bromides about how toppling statues was a bid to erase history seemed to me in egregiously bad faith because, well, that may give me the opportunity to quote extravagantly from Jaques Ellul’s book The New Demons on the concept of the sacred as it relates to political life. So ...
