This is a column about statues. Now that I got your attention with that arrogant title, I can tell you the spark to write it, has much humbler origins. It starts with my son’s study abroad in central Europe. Because I lived for two years in Budapest, he asked me what to see in that great city. Whatever the Hungarians got wrong since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transformation of those former Soviet bloc countries, they did one thing very right. They were clever in dealing with their socialist realist art, in particular their statues.
Rather than destroy them, the people of Budapest gathered them all up and placed them in a boundless and bare open-air museum on the outskirts of the city. You can stroll amongst these men-who-would-be-dictators, contemplating the empire they attempted to forge for their own glory. The architect who designed the park said that it was about democracy, because only democracy can give us the opportunity to think freely about dictatorship.
This leads me to today’s current activism on tearing down the statues of slave owners, colonizers, and the losers of the U.S. civil war. Rather than destroy them or throw them into a river, we should erect many more Memento Parks. Instead of statues of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, collect the sculptures of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Cecil Rhodes, Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Leopold II.
Then we can do what the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley did when contemplating the statue of Ozymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley wrote of a sculpture with a shattered visage, whose frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command proclaimed with an accompanying pedestal to be a powerful ruler. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" And yet, the ravages of time leveled this great man. The clock levels the greatest egos.
All monuments simplify and many lie but we have the power to put them in a “boundless and bare” park, where “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Roberta Haar, professor of Foreign Policy Analysis and Transatlantic Relations at UCM