Statues in Peril Alert: San Fran Taliban On the Scan

Statues are offensive in the worst way, you know.

The most offensive statues are in areas inhabited by the uber-progressive of the species, who cannot pass by a patina-encrusted hunk of bronze or steel while gnashing their teeth together in feigned agony, tears welling in their pain-filled eyes, and looking about desperately for someone – anyone – to ask them to “show us where the statue hurt you.”

If the statue is of a white man or in some manner of religious garb, that answer comes naturally.

They have to work harder if the subject seems to be from a recognizable ethnic group of one sort or the other.

Individual statues can be minding their own business for decades – gathering dust, dirt, and pigeon poo – with little to no fanfare and few who knew what they represented or why they were erected to begin with.

And then, suddenly, a passer-by with victimhood grievance issues notices a seated native American in the presence of a WHITE MAN – can’t have that. A cross raised in benediction in another from a guy with a tonsure. A vaguely military aspect on yet another.

All succumb to the outrage mob in their own time.

The city of San Francisco, awash with excess cash and time as it is, has decided to inventory its complete public statuary holdings in an effort to determine which are appropriate and reflective of today’s modern San Francisco.

In the city’s own words, they’d very much like to eschew traditional public art, which is now offensive to modern tastes and sensibilities, and are asking the general public to weigh in – snitch actually – on those statues that “no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for.” 

The Taliban have come to town in an official capacity.

San Fran Taliban alert https://t.co/QZmiU6MiE3

— tree hugging s*ster 🎃 (@WelbornBeege) August 29, 2024

The “WE” in who gets a say is subjective, I’m assuming as the criteria “WE” are laying out is the usual race-baiting, rewriting history, grievance-industry crap.

Or am I being too harsh?

…The debate over the city’s monuments began in 2018 with the removal of the “Early Days” sculpture from the Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center because it represented a Native American seated before a Spanish Catholic missionary. The effort gathered steam amid the racial-justice movement in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd. That year, crowds toppled statues throughout the country that glorified Confederate Civil War leaders, which critics said paid homage to the country’s racist past.

The survey of San Francisco’s civic art collection  — funded by a $3 million Mellon Foundation grant — will be conducted by an outside firm and should be completed by January.  

The project, called “Shaping Legacy,” was discussed at an Arts Commission meeting last week when senior project manager Angela Carrier explained that looking at San Francisco’s monuments and memorials as a whole shows “a concentration that talks about power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”

“These monuments no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for,” she added.

Nah. I think I’ve got it just about right.

I have noticed that rewriting history is usually the most effective when you completely ignore history. San Francisco statue haters are very good at ignorance.

Reminds me of another bunch of righteous pretenders. The guy they interview here actually did the deed, and now he’s all, “Well, I don’t know why I did it other than they would have killed me.”

I don’t believe San Fran progs are capable of that sort of retrospective reflection or could ever achieve that level of self-awareness.

They’re too busy twiddling their pronoun-identified navels.

For example, during the Floyd riots, by God, they scored themselves one white man statue.

You won’t be glaring over a park and making Berkeley students cry anymore, will you, tough guy?

Take THAT, you white supremacist colonizer patriarch *checks notes* Ulysses S. Grant. 

The Ulysses Grant statue has been toppled in San Francisco. The commander of the Union Army that won the Civil war! 🤦‍♂️

pic.twitter.com/ws7siiaDMS

— Unfiltered☢Boss (@Unfilteredboss1) June 20, 2020

They marked this one up, too, even though…well…never mind. White Spanish guy’s head on a rock. Has to be a colonizer.

Miguel de Cervantes Memorial created by Jo Mora in 1916, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Cervantes, together with his brother Rodrigo, was sold into slavery in Algiers, the centre of the Christian slave traffic in the Muslim world. pic.twitter.com/5bG3g6QJgr

— EUROPEAN ART (@EuropeanArtHIST) June 20, 2020

I do hate to be cynical – you know I do – but a fellow on X did a little digging, and it seems as if the San Francisco Art Commission has a neat little side grift going (actually a couple of them), all wrapped around statues that hurt the #feelz.

@SFAC also compiled a 65-page “Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee Final Report” which recommends a new tax for a “monument reparations program” (???)https://t.co/UIYZnHOQq2 pic.twitter.com/CtLBRmc8pR

— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) August 28, 2024

A monuments reparations program? As if that wasn’t bad enough, you also get to pay the SFAC a cool $1000 for their “consult” which gives your proposed public art project a stamp of approval (“what WE say” again), meaning its been declared free of the listed deadly sins and is blessed safe for public consumption.

Art can be so unhealthy. Who knew?

It also makes one wonder why the Mellon Foundation, liberal funders of arts and humanities endowments, is underwriting this entire exercise. Are they attempting to recast the streets of San Francisco to their own world view? Instead of the residents and history of San Francisco continuing being represented, warts and all?

If you’re paying the bills, I would imagine you have a lot of say.

And they’re not buying or sponsoring art, mind you. They’re paying for its removal.

I did find where other folks were asking similar questions about this program.

…Not to be outdone by The New York Times’ 1619 Project, the Mellon Foundation recently announced its appropriation of $250 million for a “Monuments Project: Building the Commemorative Landscape for the 21st Century.” This is said to be the “largest initiative in the foundation’s fifty year history.”

If this allocation were devoted to the creation of new monuments, there could be no objection to it. As Maryland’s Senate President Emeritus, Thomas V. Mike Miller recently observed, we need more monuments, not fewer of them. In an increasingly collectivist age, it is useful for the young to be reminded of the difference individuals can make, and for the middle-aged to be given the hope that their achievements will be indelibly memorialized.

But construction of new monuments is not the focus of this new endeavor. The first grant announced from the $250 million is one of $4 million for a “National Monuments Audit,” to be accompanied by a “concurrent database of reported protest activities tied to monuments.” An additional $1 million is allocated for “ten Monument Lab field offices” that will “re-imagine monuments,” including the “relocation or re-thinking of existing monuments.”

…The Mellon Foundation’s project is totalitarian in its proposed scope and radical vision, something utterly in conflict with American pluralism and preference for localism, a brazen effort to wrest control away from communities as to the state of their own public spaces.

The product of centuries of accretion is to be “audited” by  teams of activists  equipped with a spectacularly large budget for what is euphemistically called “re-location” but which generally means disappearance. It is clear that this sort of activity is what the Mellon grant is designed to support. It was one of five foundations (with total assets of $34 billion) contributing to the disappearance of four monuments in New Orleans. The purpose here, sought to be so systematically advanced, is that anticipated in George Orwell’s 1984, where “every statue or street or building has been re-named.”

Well, I’m sorry. It’s hard to get much creepier than that unless you had Klaus Schwab reading it aloud to you.

One foundation working through an obviously radicalized group of woke and deranged uber-progressives is going to be allowed to destroy San Francisco’s incredibly rich and historic public art unless it meets “what WE say” represents San Fran “values.”

Somewhere, shattered boulders that used to be buddhas are weeping because nothing will stop the woke.

It ruins everything.