And down came that accursed statue -- Colston in Bristol UK ... and also Castleman in Fischerland KY.

Now we're getting somewhere: "Historic scenes were witnessed in Bristol over the weekend as Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a controversial statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and rolled the memorial into the city's harbour."

More here:

BLM protesters topple statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, by Haroon Siddique and Clea Skopeliti (The Guardian)

Statue that had long been a focal point of local anger rolled down to harbour and pushed into the water

The historian David Olusoga compared the action to the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. However, the home secretary, Bobby Caesar Priti Patel, urged the police to respond. She told Sky News: “I think that is utterly disgraceful and that speaks to the acts of public disorder that have actually now become a distraction from the cause in which people are protesting about.”

And yes, Greg Fischer at last mustered the cojones to remove an inanimate Confederate statue, even if he hasn't yet managed much for living human constituents. It might be wise to hold the applause until we're certain Fischer isn't selling the "replacement sculpture" rights to Brown-Forman to erect a bourbon bottle on the spot.

Louisville Removes Controversial Statue Of John Breckinridge Castleman (NPR)

We've been here before ...

Reconstruction: "Democracy was subverted, and the human toll, however inexact, was enormous." Bye bye, Castleman and Prentice.

Even as we foresee the Champs-Ély-Jéffrey, Berlin "contends with street names of a brutal, overlooked past."

Statue removal? Yes, the Civil War was about slavery -- and I'm just fine with tracing it all the way back to the Founders. Now, let's all go read a book.

Nick thinks the city needs a flag redesign. Roger says: Start with those colors.

Yes, I know; there shouldn't be words on the flag. What if it's a hash tag? Here's the official flag of New Albany.

At The Aggregate, Nick's on a flag jag.

New Albany’s Flag Needs a Redesign

So, without being an expert (but perhaps a casual flag critic), and only being someone who loves his community, and his community’s history, here is my rough draft of a version of New Albany’s flag which I think the community could rally around and be proud of.

Click through, read the entire essay and tell Nick what you think. The Aggregate is a relatively new source for local news. Reading Nick's piece, it seemed to me that I wrote something about the city's flag fairly early in NA Confidential's run.

Sure enough, here it is -- from November 20, 2004.

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Dissonance and New Albany's green and gold?

For those who may be curious about the description of the official New Albany flag, as described by B. several times previously, here's the way the official ordinance describes it:

CHAPTER 11: CITY STANDARDS

NEW ALBANY FLAG

§ 11.01 DESCRIPTION OF FLAG.
A green background, symbolic of our green hills and of the many different kinds of trees native to our area and Indiana, on which the following are emblazoned: white shield edged in gold, symbolic of the character and courage of the varied nationalities of our ancestors, with a gold torch thereon, representing enlightenment and liberty; and the numerals “1813,” the year of the establishment of the City of New Albany, all within a semicircle of 19 gold stars, representing Indiana as the 19th state; and a gold pilot wheel in the lower right-hand corner, symbolic of our historic background as a river city.

(Res. R-62-7, passed 10-1-62)

All this bears more than a passing resemblance to the color scheme of Floyd Central High School, which is the Floyd County consolidated school and a bitter arch-rival of New Albany (city) High School, which has the colors of red and black.

The blame for this multi-hued anarchy surely must rest with Floyd Central, which came into existence five years after the resolution describing the city flag.

Ideally, none of this should matter one jot when it comes to reproducing the city flag as a symbol of our "Somehow Transform New Albany into Something Quasi-Weird" campaign.

However, we must remember that New Albany's unofficial city ethos (never codified, but tangible) is "Arrested Development," and this implies allegiances to high school that go far beyond the norm, particularly as they reflect high school basketball. 

Just ask Chris Morris of the New Albany Tribune.

A certain number of New Albanians probably won't accept the flag for this most petty and senseless of reasons. Do we attempt (reviving) it anyway?

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Late note (June 24): a comment by reader Randy Smith.

That website isn't allowing comments on the post, although it explicitly asks, "What do you think?"

I think there's a significant amount of revisionist history being put forth, but I'm willing to be persuaded I'm wrong. TO say that New Albanians were "ardent abolitionists" is the most objectionable. This region is also well known for it's "Copperhead" tendencies. I've never heard about New Albany being an abolitionist stronghold.

Incorporating the "Town Clock Church" into a municipal flag is not something I'd be happy with. I frankly question whether it is iconic. It exists and is appreciated by some, but it has nothing to do with the founding of the city and it barely represents any long-term aspect of the city's history. The inclusion of a piece of sectarian imagery is also inappropriate.

I will concede that New Albany has a slight Irish connection. The divisions in the Catholic church and the "riot" bear witness to that. But I would wager that NA had more Scots-Irish protestant residents when the Irish influx peaked. By the 1850s, if not sooner, the German influence was dominant.

It reminds me of a previous attempt to change a municipal icon. A local cop designed new patches for the police department and was compelled to include the fleur-de-lis. His rationale was a nod to New Albany's "rich" French heritage. There is no doubt that Louisville has a French Catholic heritage (Louis?) and Floyd County still has signs of its French-ness, but the only indications of a historic French influence in New Albany predates the city by decades. Yes, voyageurs encamped here. But French "settlement" was pretty much outside of the city and came much later.

Finally, if the clock were removed, Nick's proposed flag would make a decent 1970s rugby shirt. Beyond that, it leaves me cold. Analogizing to current affairs, if this sincere offering were one of the 24 Democratic candidates for president, Nick's would be the Tulsi Gabbard.

Statue removal? Yes, the Civil War was about slavery -- and I'm just fine with tracing it all the way back to the Founders. Now, let's all go read a book.

But what of Thrasher's fork?

Our lead photo is from The Baffler's elegant summary: Weekly Bafflements: What a dogshit week.

Man, what a terrible week. Just an unrelenting deluge of morally bankrupt people parroting stupid opinions. Usually we round up a few good and funny things we read this week but honestly, everything is so fucking bad right now. So, here are some statues that are better than Confederate monuments.

The statue controversy? We visited this territory just this past May.

From Berlin to Budapest to New Orleans: "Historically, Confederate symbols have appeared at times of racial discord."

 ... Symbolism matters, but at the same time, if we're determined not to learn lessons from 152 years ago, symbolism just might be the least of our concerns.

Did these lessons somehow begin with the shelling of Fort Sumter? Of course not. As NAC's junior editor Jeff Gilenwater observed last week on social media:

I've seen several mentions now saying that comparing Confederate leadership to patently racist, pro-slavery, slave owning, slave raping, slave and any "other" murdering founding father types is a false equivalency. It's not. It's the latter who brought white supremacy to these shores in the first place and used it not just as justification for their own violent, self-serving actions but as the foundation upon which this country was built. If you're still clinging to some alternative mythology, perhaps you're not ready yet for the truths we have to accept. It's somewhat understandable given several hundred years of Eurocentric storytelling, but get ready anyway.

Mythology.

Hold on to that word; I'll get there in a moment. First, I point you to Daniel Suddeath's stand-alone commentary in the Glasgow Daily Times ("You can love the South without loving its biggest mistake.")

If anyone has to explain to you why supporting a group that believed it was OK to torture and murder people for personal gain isn't a good thing to do, you have bigger problems than worrying about the future of a statue. And that goes for supporters of the Confederacy and Nazis.

At Insider Louisville, Joe Dunman addresses the Castleman equestrian statue in the Highlands, beginning in Berlin.

Commentary: The Castleman statue has stood long enough

... Missing from our tour, and from Berlin in general, are any memorials to Hitler or any of his subordinates in the Nazi regime. No dignified bronze casts of Herman Goering or Josef Goebbels, no marble statues of Heinrich Himmler or Wilhelm Keitel on horseback. No murals of brave Wehrmacht soldiers marching off to invade France or Russia.

And yet, without any of these relics, the history of the Third Reich is alive and well in Berlin and across the rest of Germany. The country has not forgotten its past. In fact, it still works daily to reconcile with it. To atone. To make sure that through a very clear memory of what happened in the past, it will never make the same horrible mistakes again.

Don't worry -- I'm working my way around to the mythology. In the following video (circa 2009), historian James M. McPherson refutes the "states' rights" Confederate apologetic.

That's right, kids -- it really was slavery that ignited the American Civil War. Sorry about that faux "Lost Cause" verbiage. It's merely barroom banter after the fact.

In 2001, McPherson's argument in the lengthy book review linked below is a detailed, fact-based, well-nigh irrefutable case for slavery as first cause of the war. It's a long read, but it effectively rests the debate, and I've highlighted the "mythology" explanation.

Southern Comfort, by James M. McPherson (The New York Review of Books)

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, at the end of four years of civil war, few people in either the North or the South would have dissented from his statement that slavery “was, somehow, the cause of the war.” At the war’s outset in 1861 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had justified secession as an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless,…thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”

The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast,

is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Unlike Lincoln, Davis and Stephens survived the war to write their memoirs. By then, slavery was gone with the wind. To salvage as much honor and respectability as they could from their lost cause, they set to work to purge it of any association with the now dead and discredited institution of human bondage. In their postwar views, both Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states had seceded not to protect slavery, but to vindicate state sovereignty. This theme became the virgin birth theory of secession: the Confederacy was conceived not by any worldly cause, but by divine principle.

The South, Davis insisted, fought solely for “the inalienable right of a people to change their government…to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered.” The “existence of African servitude,” he maintained, “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Stephens likewise declared in his convoluted style that “the War had its origin in opposing principles” not concerning slavery but rather concerning “the organic Structure of the Government…. It was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other…. Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles…were finally brought into…collision with each other on the field of battle.”

Davis and Stephens set the tone for the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War during the next century and more: slavery was merely an incident; the real origin of the war that killed more than 620,000 people was a difference of opinion about the Constitution. Thus the Civil War was not a war to preserve the nation and, ultimately, to abolish slavery, but instead a war of Northern aggression against Southern constitutional rights. The superb anthology of essays, The Myth of the Lost Cause, edited by Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan, explores all aspects of this myth. The editors intend the word “myth” to be understood not as “falsehood” but in its anthropological meaning: the collective memory of a people about their past, which sustains a belief system shaping their view of the world in which they live ...

Finally, what to do with all those empty plinths? Public art, dad.

What To Do With Baltimore's Empty Confederate Statue Plinths? by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

Put them to work, Trafalgar Square style.

Baltimore suddenly has a surfeit of empty sculptural plinths. Overnight, Mayor Catherine Pugh and a fleet of trucks removed four Confederate monuments with a quickness not seen since the Colts skipped town. While other cities fret over what to do with Lost Cause memorials that are increasingly targets of ire and vandalism, Baltimore appears to have put the issue to rest.

With the statues gone, only opportunity remains. What can the city do with those empty (and now graffiti-covered) pedestal plinths? Baltimore could do worse than to take a page from London’s Trafalgar Square.

The last word goes not to me, but to Jamil Smith.

Happy demolition, sports fans.

From Berlin to Budapest to New Orleans: "Historically, Confederate symbols have appeared at times of racial discord."

A concise, yet comprehensive essay about symbolism.

‘They were not patriots’: New Orleans removes monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, by Janell Ross (Washington Post)

NEW ORLEANS — They are all gone now. On Friday, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee became the last of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied Southern pride and racial oppression.

Getting down to the heart of the matter:

Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University, says that the various reasons given for defending Confederate monuments and symbols share a common underlying expectation — that even in an increasingly diverse democracy, power and influence should remain unchanged.

Speaking personally, my feeling for the "heritage" argument runs to a temperature far less than zero.

However, I'll concede to a shade of appreciation for the "landscape-defining art" defense, because while in East Berlin in 1989, I was intimately acquainted with an example of it.*

Lenin was removed shortly after German unification, and this is how it looked in 2014.

At the time, the multi-story apartment building would have been among the sleekest and most modern in East Berlin. The statue was placed to be framed by this structure, with the greenery of the adjacent public park softening the harshness of the concrete. The plaza and postwar Communist buildings facing Lenin's statue were all of a piece, flowing outward from the statue.

It may have been totalitarian, but there was a unity of purpose in design. When Lenin was toppled, there remained a pedestal with nothing, like a missing limb. You wouldn't need to know a statue stood in this spot without feeling something is missing.

Is there symbolism in omission?

A fair number of neighborhood activists opposed the statue's removal on precisely these grounds of landscape-defining art. They also made an argument worthy of reasoned consideration: we can't scrub the past entirely clean, and shouldn't try. Reminders of bad times are needed, so as to avoid their repetition.

Had the Lenin statue remained in place, would it have served as a shrine for remaining Communists? Perhaps, though it might also have been deployed in the manner chosen by the Hungarians. In 2002 while in Budapest, my tour group visited Statue Park (now apparently rebranded as Memento Park).

Memento Park in Budapest

Displayed in the Park are 42 pieces of art from the Communist era between 1945 and 1989, including allegorical monuments of “Hungarian-Soviet Friendship” and “Liberation”, as well as statues of famous personalities from the labour movement, soldiers of the Red Army and other gigantic pieces: Lenin, Marx, Engels, Dimitrov, Captain Ostapenko, Béla Kun and other “heroes” of the communist world. A favourite with visitors is the Liberation Army Soldier. A hammer-and-sickle flag in its hand and a cartridge-disc machine pistol hanging in its neck make the statue complete. This 6-meter tall statue of the evil-eyed Soviet soldier once stood on the top of Gellért Hill in central Budapest, well-seen from every direction.

When facing it, the main entrance bears the image of a monumental classicist building. Looking behind it, though, it resembles a 12-meter high, under-propped communistic scenery ? a perfect introduction into the nature of dictatorship.

The words of architect Ákos Eleőd, the conceptual designer of Memento Park serve as its motto: “This Park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described and built up, this Park is about democracy. After all, only democracy can provide an opportunity to think freely about dictatorship. Or about democracy, come to that! Or about anything!”

Here are two photos from our visit, taken from the Tom Henderson Collection.

Ironically, the late Jim Scott (second from the right) lived in New Orleans.

For now, New Orleans will store the four Confederate monuments in an undisclosed location, due to threats made against city officials, activists, contractors and work crews involved in taking them down. City officials announced late Thursday that an unspecified water feature will replace the Lee statue, and an American flag will fly where the Davis fixture once stood. Nonprofits and government agencies will eventually be allowed to submit plans that would put the statues on private property. City Park officials will decide what will replace the Beauregard statue.

Symbolism matters, but at the same time, if we're determined not to learn lessons from 152 years ago, symbolism just might be the least of our concerns.

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* The oft-told story of how I came to be in East Germany in 1989 can be found at these links.

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part One).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Two).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Three).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Four).

Susan Ryan's excellent newspaper column about symbols.

I've known the author for a while, and she's a fine writer. The teaser paragraph actually is her conclusion, but it might as well serve as introduction. You'll want to read it all.

Certainly Susan is correct, and symbols genuinely matter. She's a left-winger like me. Let's hope she'll be writing about the wretched symbolism inherent in the Floyd County Democratic Party's oblivious acquiescence in Jeff Gahan's public housing takeover scheme.

If indeed the putsch against affordable housing is disturbing, then shouldn't the rank and file say as much? It's making the local party look even worse ... if that's even possible.

Are there any Democrats in New Albany "brave enough to say 'this is not what we are about'"?

RYAN: Outward symbols the hallmark of inner feelings, by Susan Ryan (Hanson Slip Stream)

 ... Symbols matter. The symbol of the steeple on the Town Clock Church is a symbol of fraternity, of hope, of sacrifice, of honoring God’s image in one another. The symbol in front of the Police Station is one of fear and is inappropriate for a city-owned building. Is there any public official in New Albany brave enough to say “this is not what we are about”?

Sicilian symbolism: "The Trinacria: History and Mythology."

Such a symbol would interest me even if I didn't live in a city that now must abide with an anchor as its woeful metaphor.

Here's a bit about the food in Catania, where we'll be soon, licking wounds and drinking wine after the conclusion to America's stupidest ever election: What to Eat in Sicily.

Back to the symbol ...

The Trinacria: History and Mythology, by Ninni Radicini

The symbol of the Hellenic nature of Sicily

The symbol of Trinacria is now known because in the flag of Sicily and that of the Isle of Man. Its history is complex and in some ways still shrouded in mystery, or at least in indeterminacy, as it relates to mythology. The Trinacria, symbol of Sicily, is composed of the head of the Gorgon, whose hair is entwined serpents with ears of corn, from which radiate the three legs bent at the knee. The Gorgon is a mythological figure who, according to the Greek poet Hesiod (VIII - early VII century B.C.), was each of the three daughters of Ceto and Phorcys, two gods of the sea: Medusa (the Gorgon for excellence), Stheno ("strong"), Euryale ("the large").

How paint has become a weapon in Macedonia's "Colorful Revolution."

Bear with me. This story is deeper than it seems at first.

How Paint Became a Weapon in Macedonia's 'Colorful Revolution', by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Paint-balling your way to fair elections.

Look at the aftermath of recent protests in the Macedonian capital Skopje, and you might assume a festival had just left town. Archways appear splattered with polka dot blotches of color, statues drip pink and blue streaks, and fountain water runs scarlet. This colorful makeover isn’t the result of some Balkan version of Holi, however. It’s the product of a protest movement whose dazzling tactics—dubbed Sharena Revolutsiya or “the colorful revolution” despite its overwhelmingly peaceful nature—has meant covering city walls and monuments in splashes of brightly colored paint ...

 ... Macedonia’s Colorful Revolution actually kicked off last winter following shocking revelations over the scope of alleged state surveillance in the country.

Macedonia became an independent country following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since time immemorial, the geographical vicinity of present-day Macedonia (not to mention the Macedonians themselves, many of  whom live in Bulgaria and Greece) has been a regional bone of contention. Now, Macedonia finds itself astride a major refugee route, with geopolitical ramifications.

With the E.U. relying on Macedonia to stem the flow of refugees trying to cross the country from Greece, European governments have largely taken a softly-softly approach, concerning themselves more with brokering stability than pushing for regime change. All that has forced local protesters to get creative. Instead of throwing bricks or Molotov cocktails, they’ve been firing paint balls, scattering Macedonia’s parliament and public buildings with glaring color.

Here's the kicker. Macedonia's political crisis derives in part from ongoing efforts to plasticize and Disney-fy the capital city, Skopje.

That demonstrators are especially concerned with altering the capital’s appearance is not insignificant. In many countries this might come across as a wanton, self-defeating attack on public property that has served many governments, not just the current one. In Macedonia’s capital, however, those very buildings are often new, and represent the forces in the country that protesters loathe.

Skopje has in recent years been undergoing a massive reconstruction project to make it look grander and more imposing (and in Europe, it’s not alone in doing so). The ruling VMRO-DPMNE party has splurged on giving the city a neoclassical makeover that has smothered the city with Brobdingnagian monuments to Alexander the Great, bridges bristling with bronze reliefs, and endless hollow colonnades. At a mushrooming cost of €633 million ($722 million)—meaning that the country is paying out €10,400 ($11,860) every hour—the results are dramatic, oppressive, and hideous. It’s no wonder that these new monuments have been taken as symbols of the government’s grandiose delusions and petty oppression, stone and masonry canvasses on which people are now writing their frustration in day-glo paint. This isn’t just a case of protesters writing their anger on walls. In Skopje, the walls themselves are part of the problem.

Sound familiar?

Branding mud-struck: Why did the city of New Albany steal Anchor Brewing's seal?

There's a definite resemblance. Maybe the legal department should have looked a bit closer before anchoring the city to a new "branding mechanism."

We receive comments, like this one here: Seals, branding mechanisms and a city anchored into place by sheer dullness of bureaucratic intent.

It's sadly fitting they've chosen an anchor as a graphic representation of the city. An anchor fixes a potentially moving object to a place. It gets stuck in the mud and silt and keeps things from moving. That's why it's called an anchor.

This is not a "marketing piece", a "branding image" - it's not a progressive symbol, it doesn't imply a growing and vital city. An anchor? Who designed this?

This is "marketing" just like offering seven MILLION dollars to Pillsbury AFTER they said they they were leaving - that wasn't a "plan to attract businesses to the city" either. Too little and much, much too late.

And another by e-mail.

In going through files recently, I noticed that the city's new "branding logo" has replaced the old city seal on mundane printed things such as the city sewer bill.

I'v also noticed the inclusion of the city's new "branding logo" on the new street signs.

Questions abound:

1) How can the city seal be changed without public discussion and vote by council?

2) Why wasn't someone with real graphic design experience used to create versions of the logo that could be easily seen at various distances or in various uses?

The artwork is much too "thin" and confusing when seen in reverse, at a distance on street signs.

Who designed it, why and at whose request? Was a fee paid?

Sorry, but these questions are disallowed. After all, the new un-seal, as appended to metal and stone objects all across town, is temporary. Only permanent features may be questioned.

But if you persist, try sending smoke signals to the Bored of Works.