The Barbering of Memory

One of the things Republicans clearly understand much better than Democrats is that politics is not just about laws and budgets and tax rates. It's also about shaping the past. About memory. About who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. About whose names get carved into stone, bolted onto airports, and slapped across every highway exit sign in America until future generations can barely remember a time when it wasn't there, which is why Grover Norquist spent years pushing his project to put Ronald Reagan's name on damn near everything that wasn't nailed down.

His goal was to have some landmark, building, road, bridge, school, or monument named after Reagan in every one of America's 3,141 counties. Hence Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, and the Ronald Reagan Memorial Whatever-The-Hell. The point wasn't commemoration. The point was colonization.

Because that's what monuments are for.

And before some tote-bag Centrist starts hyperventilating about how monuments are merely expressions of civic pride, let's remember when and why most Confederate monuments went up. Not immediately after the Civil War. Not as spontaneous expressions of grief from bereaved widows. The great boom in Confederate monument construction came decades later, during the rise of Jim Crow, and then again during the Civil Rights era. They were not messages from the dead to the living. They were messages from the living to the living. They were giant bronze and marble "Fuck You!" billboards announcing who was in charge and who was expected to stay in their place.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Trump's obsession with naming, renaming, branding, rebranding, gold-plating and self-memorializing isn't just some eccentric personality quirk. It's part of the same tradition. Every building renamed. Every institution bent to his will. Every historical marker rewritten. Every federal program that had his brand slapped on it without even changing the font.  The point is to create the illusion of permanence. To make his movement seem inevitable.  To not just make his fascist movement a permanent part of the American political landscape, but to turn it into landscape itself, making future generations assume that all of this was always here and always would be.

The Romans had a name for the opposite process: Damnatio Memoriae. The condemnation of memory. When a tyrant fell -- through causes natural and otherwise -- if they were unpopular or there was political hay to be made damning their memory, then their statues came down, or their names and dates were chiseled off monuments and scraped from coins. Not because people suddenly forgot who the tyrant was, but because the public square isn't neutral and it isn't eternal.  

Every monument is making an argument, and every brass plate on every bench and building is an editorial. These are votes being cast in favor of a particular version of history. So if one generation has the authority to fill the landscape with propaganda, the next generation has exactly the same authority to haul it to the dump.

So, if the Trump administration can rename, redesignate, reclassify and reinvent public spaces to flatter the Dear Leader, another administration -- a Democratic administration -- can undo it.  Hell, who's to say that, in the name of "national security", a future administration couldn't seize Mar-a-Lago, compensate whichever of Trump's shell companies owns it one dollar as a fair market estimate of the value of a toxic shithole owned by the worst president in history, then turn it into a COVID Memorial Park.

If that's the future, Democrats need to come ready to play hardball.  Not to memory hole the record of the worst president in history, but to preserve the memory forever -- in parks, and statues, and piles of roped-off rubble -- that he was the worst president in history, that his collaborators in Congress and the media did betray this country, and that, driving all of it, was a mob of MAGA bigots and imbeciles.

Burn The Lifeboats