Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Cole is on a roll !

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

No Justins, No Peace

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

I really should read my own blog.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Something Good Open Thread / Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Another Monument to Treason Fallen

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Another Monument to Treason Fallen

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Per the Nashville Scene:

… A notorious statue of Confederate general and early KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest that has stood beside I-65 in Crieve Hall for more than two decades has now been removed. The statue — a frequent source of mockery and vandalism — was sculpted by Jack Kershaw. Though visible from the interstate, the eyesore sat on the private Hogan Road property of a man named Bill Dorris, who once said of Kershaw, “As an artist, mediocre.”

Dorris died a little more than a year ago and made national headlines for designating a $5 million trust to his border collie Lulu upon his death. (You read that correctly, yes.) A source at the time told the Scene that the estate was valued at closer to half a million dollars.

As reported Tuesday morning by NewsChannel 5’s Nick Beres: “The executor of the will ordered for the statue removed early Tuesday morning. … It will be held in storage and possibly be put up for sale. For now, the flags will remain at the site.”

Reader Interactions

89Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I’ve seen that, albeit from a distance. Ugliest damned sculpture a sculptor ever sculpted. Just a wretched and bizarre tribute to a wretched and hateful person. I’m thrilled it’s been removed.

  2. 2.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Wearing either my art critic hat or my decent human hat*, I say the same thing: Good, melt it down for scrap.

    *Not saying that art critics can’t be good people. It is theoretically possible.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    Well, the quality of the art matches the quality and humanity of the subject, so I guess there’s that.

  9. 9.

    RaflW

    @Sure Lurkalot: Is that where the idea for the demon sheep ad originated?

    Also, that thing does catch my eye most times I travel to or from DIA. I have a preference for the convention center bear, tho.

  10. 10.

    Yutsano

    Open thread?

    My spinal steroid injections went well. I guess I fell asleep during the meat of it because I don’t remember the actual shots part. But right now my back feels amazing. It’s just from the lidocaine and will fade in a day or two but in the immediate I will take it.

  11. 11.

    Almost Retired

    Oh my.  Are we sure it wasn’t the estate of Nathan Bedford Forrest that demanded its removal?

  14. 14.

    Jay C

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    Personally, I think that when it comes to “bad sculpture” to the level of “probably cursed” – “Blucifer” (the common nickname for the Denver Airport horse) takes the prize on an all-time basis, as he actually killed the artist than made him.

     

    Seriously: it was created by the Mexican-American artist Luis Jimenez, Jr. : it was his last piece, and while he was assembling it in his studio in 2006, some rigging failed, and a section of the horse fell on, and mortally injured Jimenez.

    Now that’s bad karma…..

  15. 15.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @RaflW: The Denver Convention Center bear is quite popluar. Someone gave me a minature souvenir one and it’s proudly displayed on a dresser in the boudoir.

  16. 16.

    RAM

    Actually, it would seem to me to have been much more disrespectful to Forrest to have left the statue there. It’s always reminded me of a demented ventriloquist dummy.

  17. 17.

    CaseyL

    In Atlantic City, one of the amusement park piers was called Steel Pier.  Its biggest star, for over 50 years, was the Diving Horse.  A horse, with rider, would jump/slide off a platform into a very large pool about 50 feet below.

    The pier also had coin-operated souvenir machines, where you would put in the money and the machine would extrude hot plastic into a mold.  One of these machines would create a horse, a la the Diving Horse.

    The horse was smooth and golden-amber, with no details of musculature or anything like that.

    The horse part of that statue always reminded me of those extruded-plastic horses

    It even looks like it’s in much the same pose.

  18. 18.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Jay C: There was some brouhaha about criticizing the sculputure both because the sculptor was a minority and his tragic death. I don’t see what those things had to do with the fact that his creation is abominable and pretty much everyone hates it, which would have been the case if he wasn’t tragically killed, I’m afraid.

    Much like how one is labeled anti-semitic if there’s a whiff of criticism about Israel.

  22. 22.

    CaseyL

    @Jay C: Well, other than the fact that the original statue looked more like the Screaming Demon idol from Indiana Jones than it looked like Lucy, I don’t see what the fuss was all about.

  25. 25.

    Tony Gerace

    That “statue” makes Nathan Bedford Forrest look like an ignorant, hateful lunatic.  A very realistic portrayal!

  34. 34.

    Jay C

    @eclare:

    Well, Milwaukee’s “Bronze Fonz” doesn’t look much like Henry Winkler: which I imagine they did on purpose so he wouldn’t be tempted to sue them…..

    (Though who, exactly, “owns” the IP for the “Fonzie” character is a good question)

  36. 36.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @eclare: Most of the redevelopment of Milwaukee’s riverfront has been very well done.  This is a glaring exception.  If anything, it is worse in person.

  38. 38.

    Ken

    There is probably a Tim Burton animated movie where all these horror statues come alive one night a year and get together to… well, I don’t know. Since it’s a Tim Burton movie, probably to weep that they never really made a connection with their fathers.

  43. 43.

    germy

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_von_Braunhut

    Harold Nathan Braunhut (March 31, 1926 – November 28, 2003), also known as Harold von Braunhut, was an American mail-order marketer, and inventor most famous as the creator and seller of both the Amazing Sea-Monkeys and the X-Ray Specs.

    The Washington Post stated in a report that, despite his Jewish ethnicity, he had a close association with white supremacist groups, buying firearms for a Ku Klux Klan faction and regularly attending the Aryan Nations annual conference.

    No statues dedicated to him, but he made a fortune from gullible kids.

  48. 48.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @zhena gogolia: Someone on this site recently accused me of being the kind of person who bought sea monkeys as a child.  It was in response to my rejecting some doomsday theory or another.  I never showed the least interest in having sea monkeys.

  49. 49.

    cain

    @germy: ​Amazing Sea-Monkeys and the X-Ray Specs.

     

    Whaaa??! I actually bought the sea monkey thing. I was like wtf is this! Glad I didn’t get the x-Ray Specs. They were regular ads on comic books back in the early 80s.
    I’m kind of pissed that I helped fund white supremacy.

  52. 52.

    germy

    @cain:

    You had no way of knowing.

    I was a big reader of DC comics in the 1960s, so I saw all those ads:  “Throw your voice!”  “Mystery box!” “X-Ray Specs!”

    They got rich, 75 cents at a time.

  59. 59.

    Gin & Tonic

    @germy: I sent away for stuff from those tiny ads at the back of Popular Science. Never comics, because my mother thought they were worthless.

    If she were alive I’d tell her about a co-worker who sold off a bunch of comic books and bought himself a beautiful vintage MG-B.

  63. 63.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @cain: @cain:  Wait, you bought sea monkeys and then had the sheer unmitigated gall to accuse me of sea monkey buying?  Consider yourself cancelled, bruh.

  65. 65.

    Ken

    @cain: I actually bought the sea monkey thing. I was like wtf is this!

    Brine shrimp do not, in fact, stand on two legs, nor do they have human faces.

    (I image-searched to verify my recollection of the ad; I see that people are selling reproductions of the ad for more than the sea monkeys cost.)

  67. 67.

    zhena gogolia

    @germy: I have a huge pile of MAD going back to the JFK administration, but they’re in pretty ragged shape. I use them in my teaching.

  69. 69.

    trollhattan

    @Ken:

    Amused reminding myself of the brine shrimp hatchery I once had, to use the little critters (and out of the egg they’re really, really little) for feeding baby tropical fish.

    You could buy live adults from aquarium shops–they came from Utah or San Francisco–or frozen into the convenient lump.

    They neither ate bananas nor went “Eee-eee-eee.”

  70. 70.

    eclare

    @zhena gogolia:  Awesome!  My dad got them, and I always loved the back inside cover “fold-it” cartoon.

    I was too young to get a lot of the other stuff, would love to see them now.

  71. 71.

    cain

    @Gin & Tonic: I still have my comic book collection including first edition of the Killing Joke.  Not sure how much my comic book collection is work – maybe $1k?

  75. 75.

    Gin & Tonic

    @cain: Once I was old enough not to care what my mother thought I started buying “comix” instead. But those are long gone – other than Zap I fondly remember one called Deviant Slice. 

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    Former Senator David Perdue is challenging Brian Kemp for the Georgia Governor’s nomination, and I just watched his two and a half minute announcement video. What a creepy guy! There was an eerie, dystopian sound track that made me think I was being addressed by an evil robot. It was scary.

  78. 78.

    Shana

    Don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but Ralph Northam (D) and still governor of Virginia for another month or so, has announced he’s removing the plinth from the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond and donating the land to the city. I believe he wanted to remove it before Youngkin could have all the graffiti removed.

  79. 79.

    Ohio Mom

    The only valuable issues of MAD are the very early ones. They didn’t print very many copies and no one had any idea they were worth saving.

    It’s pretty easy to find copies from the 1960’s on up in places like antique malls and comics shops. They are usually about $5 each (which means the person selling them to the reseller probably got only a dollar or two per issue).

    Ohio Son has a collection of (I’m guessing) well over a hundred. He grew out of MAD but back in the day they were very useful to me, as bribes (uh, “rewards”) and distractions during dicey moments (long car rides, visits to boring relatives, any time his patience was stretched to his breaking point by circumstances that couldn’t be helped).

    MAD stopped publishing new issues a couple of years ago, though every now and then they do publish new special issues of collated old materials. I believe you can subscribe to a digital archive of all the issues, starting with the very rare first one; there is also a coffee table book of the full collection of Al Jaffe’s back page fold-ins.

    Finally, I highly recommend Al Jaffe’s memoir (the title escapes me at the moment). He has lived an incredible life.

  80. 80.

    Geminid

    @Shana: Northam is trying to get out ahead of Youngkin. Virginia has a large budget surplus, and Youngkin called on Northam to cut taxes in his new budget. Instead, Northam announced a 10% pay increase for Virginia teachers.

  83. 83.

    prostratedragon

    @Leto:  Archaic smile? Always thought that entering a hall full of those things would be a very weird experience.

  85. 85.

    mrmoshpotato

    The laziest of all the Confederate monuments, which is either a statue of Nathan Bedford Forest or maybe 40 mufflers hastily stapled together, was taken down this morning.

    Burn in hell, beaten bitchass!

    Thank you for your previous service to 40 automobiles.

  89. 89.

    Kosh III

    The sensible folks here in Nashville cheered that this hideous statue is gone. Apparently it broke when it came down.
    There was the usual whinging about “erasing history.”

    The  artist reportedly said “someone needs to say a good word about slavery.”

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