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For Now                

London Conservative activists have received local government planning permission to erect sixteen feet of Ronald Reagan statue outside America’s Grosvenor Square embassy, but the statue may become an orphan when a new embassy is built in South London.

Westminster Council overrode its own rule that monument subjects must be dead ten years, and the ten foot statue [with a Berlin Wall chunk placed demurely at its feet] is to be mounted on a six foot high plinth.

It might be considered a companion piece to the Eisenhower statue which already dresses up the Embassy’s impressive      barricade collection.

The Obama administration has yet to name an Ambassador to Britain, and in the meanwhile we are free to draw humorous inferences from anonymous embassy utterances, which make clear this is not their deal:

“This is not something that we have requested or actively tried to get brought about,” an embassy spokesman said yesterday. “We’re happy to have our presidents honoured but this statue was not a US Government initiative.”

Asked whether the mission would take the statue with it when it leaves Grosvenor Square for its new head-quarters in Nine Elms, south of the Thames, he replied: “It’s not our statue.”

If  Reagan is left behind he may soon be engulfed in a construction site: Westminster wants the sixties classic building gone.

It Hurts Too Much To Cry   

Nixon Library gets joke, sells it.

Seeing what the kids are up to, the Nixon Library Foundation has introduced snappy new gear for youthful Nixon fans, and those broadly engaged in irony.      

Their commercial predecessors are a little more creative on the appropriation of images front however.  

Good Times Not Forgotten!

The Dallas Morning News reports that President Obama will answer the prayers of cracker hearts, and continue the tradition of presidents honoring an Arlington Cemetery Confederate War Memorial.

An historians’ petition had pointed to the unreconstructed racism and white nationalism of the bitter-enders who built the memorial, as well as the historical falsehoods it perpetuates.

Before Obama’s decision was known, the Washington Post op/ed page displayed a stirring example of thoughtfully splitting the difference.

University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage is author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.” He explained that Obama could have it all:

“To single out the ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy as beyond the moral pale does not help us come to grips with slavery’s more profound role in American history… President Obama, why not send two wreaths? One to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery and another to the African American Civil War Memorial in the District, which commemorates the 200,000 black soldiers who fought for liberation from slavery in the Union armed forces…Send two wreaths with one common message: that the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slaveholders should recognize each other’s humanity, and do the hard work of reckoning with the racial divide that is slavery’s cruelest and most enduring legacy. “

But the Confederate apologists don’t seem interested in any fuss about slavery.

“Jane Durden, president general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy — the group that erected and maintains the monument — said the controversy over the wreath reflects a misunderstanding that the Civil War was a defense of slavery rather than a patriotic call to arms.“I am not totally shocked, and it’s not just with Obama, but with a lot of the American public,” Durden said. “This is a very controversial subject — we realize that. But all we ask is: I respect your views on things and I expect the same in return.“

The Daughters will pocket Obama’s Memorial Day wreath and then move on to their real priority, the annual  Jefferson Davis fest in June:

Cause For Alarm 

A group of academics have petitioned President Obama to end a beloved presidential tradition dating back to Liberal Idol Woodrow Wilson: sending a wreath each year to a Confederate war memorial in Arlington.

 

The legacy of the man who segregated Washington DC lives on in this sacred annual remembrance, only shifted from Jefferson Davis’s birthday to Memorial Day by the first President Bush.

And not just any cracker monument.

“The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers.“

The monument is a relic of lost cause-ism, reading in part:

“The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth.”

Straw for Last Gaspers to grab hold of:  the distinguished professors whose names are enrolled on the petition to the President include old pal Bill Ayers!

Bridgehead Regained?
A ten-foot bronze Ronald Reagan statue somehow incorporating the Berlin Wall may overcome setbacks which would stop lesser metal, and be erected at America’s London embassy.

The proposed statue was rejected last year on the grounds Reagan had not been dead long enough,  and/or because it was “lacking gravitas.”  One account has the statue’s failings being structural:

“The original sculpture depicts Reagan leaning on a pedestal, but [statue fabricator] Walker said this design was rejected for the British statue because the pose would be seen as weak in that part of the world.“

 Alfred the Leaner 

How these obstacles can be bypassed is unclear, but Westminster reportedly will ponder the question again. This urge to create facts on the ground is endemic in the fabled Westminster Council, where the Tories came to grief in the nineties for selling off public housing as a means of driving out Labour voters.  One Conservative Council Member committed suicide during the “homes for votes” investigation, and another paid 12 million Pounds as punishment.

The statue scheme is another effort to shape the battlefield,  plunking Reagan in front of the US Embassy during its final days in Grovesnor Square, allowing the statue to then land at the new South London Embassy site as a package deal.

Sadly no representation of the proposed statue is available, but let’s take the leaping stallions  at the College Station Bush Library’s Berlin Wall, and in our minds eye substitute a spry, youthful Ronald Reagan.