09 June 2020

sad times

i despise confederate monuments, i have made love with black men, and have been a vocal supporter of black lives matter, but i also despise people that desecrate cemeteries (the images here are not mine) --- but that's the way it always happens --- the romans destroyed the sacred groves of the druids; sculpture from classical greece was melted down to give the venetian doge what he thought he was owed from the fourth crusade in the thirteenth century; relics of the saints plundered for precious metals and jewels and the monasteries demolished for their lead roofing and what not in the sixteenth, and let's go ahead and ruin all the stained glass and the rest of the relics while we're at it in the seventeenth (also too put cromwell's head on a pike on top of westminster for a hundred years) --- the bones of the french kings all wound up in the seine in the eighteenth century, and god knows what all got fukd up in the nineteenth and twentieth --- and that's just europe --- don't get me started about the taliban and the buddhas of bamyan and everything else which is a whole nother litany of atrocities

in atlanner, in the twenty-first century, we are desecrating cemeteries

this is the memorial to the unknown confederate dead at oakland cemetery after somebody smashed the face with a hammer and poured red paint all over it --- an excellent copy (1894) of the "lion of lucerne" that didn't deserve this fate

the original "lion of lucerne" (1824)