A couple months ago I journeyed to Wyman Park to look at the “Lee-Jackson, Confederate War Memorial” that was supposedly a slight upon the oppressed people of Baltimore and found, instead, a working class war memorial to the Union Soldiers who gave their sweat, blood and lives to preserve the Union. At the back of this park-sized dedication to the common fighting men of Maryland, was a tragic denouement, in the form of the most heroic Confederate general and the most revered, riding off blindly into the past, one to his death the other to utter defeat. The substance of this counterpoint was such, that the recent calls to remove the subordinate monument to a vanquished foe, seemed to me [a boxing writer] to be as potentially damaging to the scope of the Union Monument as the erasure of “Smokin’” Joe Frazier from boxing history would be to the stature of Muhammad Ali. In the case of the remembrance of Confederate men great and small, the crude art of boxing does wax instructive. For every boxer knows in his heart that he is nothing more than the sum of his opponents’ quality. If those who wish to extinguish every trace of Confederate valor have their way, than future archaeologists must look at what remains of Union iconography as the hubris of rat-catchers who fancied themselves warriors.
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Earlier this month, on a sunny April day, the same young White Nationalist photographer that had acquired my services as a guide in search of the Lee-Jackson sculpture, falsely identified in the news media as a Confederate war memorial, returned, with a clue as to the location of an actual Confederate battle monument in the Union Slave State of Maryland.
All he knew was that it was near a college for the arts on Mount Royale between Howard Street and Druid Hill Park, which was ironically the epicenter of last year’s riots, which were falsely reported as beginning elsewhere. We were about to begin our search above the very pried up brick sidewalks [these jagged holes of removed bricks have not been repaired and I am wondering if they will be cast in gold and hallowed] where Baltimore blacks armed themselves to attack suburban whites attending a Baltimore Orioles game further down Howard Street to the south. To the west, along North Avenue [North and Mount Royale, where upscale Bolton Hill Meets the struggling gentrification outpost of Reservoir Hill, being our compass point] is the Freddie Gray Empowerment Center, near where the deified martyr of all crack dealers was fatally arrested, sparking the burning of the neighborhood CVS drugstore and the defeat of the Baltimore City Police Department in a pitched battle with the students of Frederick Douglas High School. A notice of an empowerment meeting at this secular mosque of what local thugs are now calling the “Black Spring Uprising,” was taped to a light pole next to the light rail tracks, which we examined as the CSX railroad beneath our feet rumbled with its heavy coal-bearing burden, something the men who fought in the war under question would fully understand, unlike most of what transpires around us on this distant day.
What follows is a catalogue of the blasphemous monuments we discovered, in the order that we found them.
Revolutionary War Monument
This civic monument is situated on a median and has plaques listing the battles in which Maryland men fought against the British and Royalist troops. There is also a list of civic associations with their foundation dates. The one which catches my eye is the December 20, 1769 Association of Freemen of Maryland, a support group [in modern parlance] for freed white indentured servants, many of whom had won their freedom through service in the recent French and Indian War, 1754-63, in which landowners were forced to arm servants in the face of Indian betrayal, and during which period the Maryland Gazette served largely as a classified advertisement for the recapture of increasing numbers of escaped white servants.
The Mexican War Memorial
On the northwest corner of North and Mount Royale is an extensive precinct, complete with Civil War era siege artillery and a sword-bearing American soldier in archaic uniform, dedicated to the Maryland men who fought in the Mexican War of 1848, a war which many historians rank as the most unjust American war, which netted this nation, California, Arizona and New Mexico. It was extremely difficult to read the tarnished plates in the noon sun. However, it appears that 15 Maryland men died in the Mexican conflict, and that this monument was erected by their fellows, who had formed a Mexican War Veteran’s Association, in 1903.
It is almost inconceivable that this highly visible monument will last the Age of Political Correctness. However, since Latinos seem to be content with actually taking back real estate, rather than pleading for their Federal White Daddy to symbolically redress ancient grievances on their behalf, perhaps it shall stand the test of these history-eating times. As we examine and photograph and notate, locale hipsters walking their dogs seem very nervous about our presence. However, a white street person walked up to us and asked us if there was anything he could do for us. When we informed him that we were recording monuments to Caucasians past that were possibly going to be removed to appease the liberal mob, he said, as he walked away, pointing at the stalwart figure of the conquering soldier from Maryland, “It ought to be the way it was! We should go back to that!”
An Untitled Civic Memorial
Under the trees of the slim park nestled between the struggling Reservoir Hill outpost of progressive moral decay and the hipster escape route out of the heart of this rotten city, Interstate-83, three blocks from a church that is so heavily barred, chained and padlocked against thieves that it seems a dungeon, is a bucolic grove, dominated by an unimposing civic goddess, seemingly modeled on Hera of the Shield.
As local whites tiptoed about us as if we were the harbingers of some new anti-dog-walking ordinance, we knew that we had either missed the Confederate monument, or were too late. After all, how could such a thing exist on the very doorstep of a liberal arts college in the heart of the Peoples Republic of Baltimore? On our way north we had searched the neighborhood, eschewing the heavily travelled Mount Royale, not imagining that such an edifice could exist along this boulevard of white guilt and minority empowerment.
Memorial to Marylanders Who Fought for the Confederacy
We returned by way of a wide brick walk that had been liberally pillaged for riot ammunition a year ago, under a low hanging canopy of leafy trees, just opposite the huge gothic church we had photographed on our walk north.
And there She was, the Angel of Glory cradling the limp, heart-clutching Confederate soldier, still clinging to his battle flag as he died—and the left-spinning world sped by, oblivious to their guilt and to his glory, even as the victims of their privilege sought shelter from the elements and the criminals under the leaves of the broad-spreading trees that sheltered Her from their witless advocates, who have entirely misidentified the carven and cast objects of their hatred.
If one considers the fact that Marylanders who fought for the Southern Cause were doubly traitors, it is astonishing that this monument has not been battered to rubble by a bevy of welfare queens wielding sledge hammers as a blonde female reporter exalts their heroism.
There are three legends etched into the brownish marble face of the supporting block, in Latin no less.
“Fatti Maschi Parole Femine," or “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words,” the Maryland state motto, the only one in Latin, which is too stoked with irony for me to suppress a belly laugh. We might also construe these words as meaning “Strong Deeds, Gentle Words.”
The next inscription reads—and must rankle the liberal-feminist heart to no end if it comes to light, for it declares there is glory in the wasteful act of unsuccessful combat, which is anathema to any witch-hunt society, such as postmodern America, that does not tolerate imperfection in an athletic record or ideological non-conformity:
"Gloria Victis," or "Glory to the Vanquished," inspired by a French statue that commemorated the loss to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
The third inscription is the very statement that those who are conspiring to remove the Lee-Jackson portion of the Union War Monument at Hyman Park wish to erase from the annals of Mankind:
"Deo Vindice," or "Under God, Our Vindicator," the motto on the Seal for the CSA.
In the end, once discovered for what it is, the witch-hunters of the New Moral Order will surely not recognize the significance of the angel taking the laurel wreath of victory from the head of the fallen Confederate flag-bearer and offering it to heaven. For sacrifice, here at the End of Moral Time, is eating a gluten-free snack rather than a cookie, an act that currently has more social sanction than being the vanquished aspect of a world-shaping clash of men.