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comment by mk
mk  ·  1158 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thomas Jefferson statue coming down in New York's City Council chamber : NPR

Ironic that those good ideas allow us to choose what to do with the statue.

    Carrying the baggage of the human being along with their ideas is pointless and destructive to the actual numerical majority of Americans.

I disagree. We all have baggage and the lens of history will increase its impact. We factory farm and eat patented seeds and fly in planes and heat our homes with coal and wear clothes made by poverty stricken peoples in serfdom and use phones made in factories with suicide nets made with materials mined by children and the list goes on and on and we don't care enough for our descendents.





goobster  ·  1158 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Ironic that those good ideas allow us to choose what to do with the statue.

In fact, it is not ironic at all. The idea is good, even if the man is not. Just further proves my point.

mk  ·  1158 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I do think that qualifies as irony. But ok to agree to disagree.

goobster  ·  1156 days ago  ·  link  ·  

For it to be irony, the statue itself would have to express the good idea... which it does not. It presents an idealized image of a man (created close to 200 years after his death) to commemorate a completely different thing.

The piece was commissioned to recognize Jefferson's defense of religious freedom ... which even you, in defending the statue, have failed to equate it with.

A far more powerful and appropriate statue would have been a ring of religious symbols with Jefferson's face in the center of them... arranged around his head like a constellation. That would at least demonstrate the idea the man is being recognized for. So even on an artistic basis, this plaster cast of the real bronze statue fails to live up to even it's most basic purpose and intent of its creator.