We were curious as to the fate of the massive marble platform and block upon which the cast iron images of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson once stood.
The day was cool and overcast, the traffic passing in a respectable river unlike the desolate neighborhood on the northern fringes of this decaying city from whence we came. A handful of dog walkers and museum goers happened by, to all outer appearances unconcerned about what looked like a massive pagan altar and the two working class white pariahs examining the grounds.
The surrounding trees—two in particular—seemed all the more massive without the great iron horses under their branches.
Nowhere had the inch-deep engravings been defaced, covered with plates or chiseled into ruin. Rather, what appeared to have occurred after the removal of those abducted images of greatness, was a war of ghosts, coming like ghosts in the night, vying alternately to venerate and defile this once graceful and now stark place.
On the southern of the two marble viewing benches, was chalked in neat yellow block letters, outlined in blue: HONOR, followed by the blue outline of HISTORY—never colored in.
On the face of the six foot wide, six foot high and ten feet deep monument stone which supported—nothing—had been scrawled in sloppy black marker: NO White Supremacy. This had been just as crudely wiped out with what appears to have been a dirty sponge.
Before the block, beneath the flared marble base and the slight single step down to the wider platform, laid a broken wreath stand of the kind used to adorn graves in a cemetery.
We looked on tiptoe at the surface of the display block—appearing like an altar to some lost gods—and noticed that only a half inch deep depression for each iron hoof had held the cast riders in place, hopefully indicating that little damage to the figures was incurred taking them down.
An examination of the embankment behind the platform, where the cast iron images of the Christian soldiers riding into their last battle previously stood, were three Yule wreaths thrown on their faces in the mud. The large wreath had red and white flowers with a blue bow. The two lesser wreaths—handmade like the larger, from fresh evergreen boughs—each had a simple gray bow.
Mescaline dusted them off and laid them on the block, which seemed, from a distance, like an altar-top sarcophagus—somehow more massive in aspect uncrowned by its iron figures.
As I stood wondering at what the illiterate hordes that will one day squat on that marble platform—as a homeless man recently had, with his bottle of beer over his makeshift campfire—would make of this edifice, other than a dry surface beyond their ken to raise above the surrounding muck, I wondered at the feelings that moved me.
I have never loved this nation, being as it is the puppeteer collective that has owned me since birth and sought to erase my very spirit with its every deceitful breath.
I found myself standing at odds with the few wreath-placers who thought this nation uniquely good, but felt a kinship that these few souls could at least mark the passage of something greater than themselves.
But the shallow disgust I felt for the many grace erasers who see nothing but a unique evil in the most powerful among the thousands of evil nations of Man eased away, too vaporous to hold on to. For how can one make mental space for those parasites, for whose decadent pleasures this nation enslaved me for over 35 years that yet lack the good sense of a flea to know when the great beast they killed via their greedy feast has died?
Personally, I find the passing of something I hate brings a sadness, because it was also great—and that, I believe is why the subhumans among us, high and low, dark and glow, hated these men, because they were great and the marble slabs speak to that greatness.
The Romans would have built upon the conquered marble.
The Spanish would have used it to build a church.
The English would have sold it to the French for wine or gold.
The French would have made of it benches for whores to polish with their silk-covered asses.
The Soviets would have filled in the inscriptions.
The Chinese Communists would have pounded it into gravel with a thousand sledges.
But Americans leave it like a gaping hole in the civic soul, a place for a bum to drink a beer alone in the cold.
Sunday, January 21 2018
A Once Great Medieval City: 2016: Impressions of Baltimore Maryland
Hi James. Will you be voting for Bradley Manning for Senate? Do you think his trannyism and disclosing of state secrets makes him more or less qualified for public office? Hope your beak is healing well. Best regards, Manny.
Thanks, Manny.
I don't vote.
However, I think Bradley Ying Manning would be a perfect senator for the People's Republic of Maryland—this is a representative slaveocracy after all.
Future generations might raise a giant buttplug statue in honor of him/her/it where Lee and Jackson once stood.
The actor who played the tranny in Hair Spray has been floated as a possible icon for that platform.