Racist Fish

Some people are still getting very worked up about statues being pulled down.   As I've noted before, statues are inanimate objects, attacking them is not equivalent to attacking the actual person. I’d much rather that people vented their anger against these symbols than against flesh and blood people. Because, like it or not, they are symbols, often very powerful ones, representing not just the individuals whose likeness they carry, but of the ideas and ideology they represented.  It is important to remember that, more often than not, monuments of this sort are erected without recourse to any democratic process: more often than not they are the result of lobbying on the part of political groups, institutions or corporate bodies, all with an interest in perpetuating the ideas represented by said monuments.  Conversely, surely if people en masse decide to remove them, this is an clear expression of the ‘will of the people’.  Or some of the people, at least, which was got them erected in the first place.  Moreover, statues are as subject to the process of history as any thing else – when statues of Hitler, Lenin and Saddam, for instance, were erected, it was because they had some kind of populist support. But times move on and what we know of them changes and consequently so does our perception of them. Should we wait for some civic committee to decide whether we should tear them down, or not?  Or is it better to let them be swept away by the tide of history?

Not that any of the above should be taken as a blanket endorsement on my part for the indiscriminate destruction or defacement of public monuments.  Indeed, I have some serious reservations about the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol - they really shouldn't have thrown it into the harbour.  That's just wanton pollution.  The same applies to the toppling of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston the other day - don't put the bloody thing in the harbour.  Actually, I have another problem with the latter case - namely that I can't really see the political significance of it.  While I'm sure that it is possible to argue that Columbus is responsible for all of the inequalities in the contemporary US by virtue of having discovered the Americas for Europe which, in turn, led to its colonisation by white Europeans, their importation of black slaves and the eventual founding of the US itself, it is a bit tortuous.  This, surely, is one of those cases where the statue is clearly celebrating the historical event - the discovery of the Americas by Europeans - rather than simply the individual it portrays.  Interestingly, this particular statue isn't of any great antiquity - it dates only to the 1980s.  Which is another often overlooked point about many of the statues being targeted by protestors: they are, more often than not, relatively modern, rather than having been erected by contemporaries of their subject in innocent celebration of them, before everything was known about them.

But the bit of monumental vandalism which has most amused me of late has been the graffiti sprayed on the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen: 'Racist Fish'.  I mean, this is magnificently surreal.  What does it even mean?  It raises so many questions, not least of which is, as she is only half fish, is it only her lower half which is racist?  More than that, even, just how can a fish, let alone a half fish, be racist?  Does it discriminate against molluscs?  I do so love it when 'protest' topples over into the nonsensical.  It is as if somebody was so wound up, so determined to protest at something, anything, they just daubed the first two words that came into their head on the statue.  Wonderful stuff.   But to return to the original point, it occurs to me that many of those now decrying the toppling of statues of slave traders and Confederate war generals (who wants to celebrate those losers, anyway?), are the self same people who were cheering and whooping when those statues of Lenin and Saddam came down. Just saying.

'Racist Fish', indeed!