God. Here in Canada we agonize over statues of John A. McDonald or Egerton Ryerson, petrified [sic] that they might have been racists or not done all they could to abolish slavery or maybe had a hand in the abuse of the Indigenous people of their day (although the truth often turns out to be more complex).
In Trump's America, though, an explicitly pro-slavery Confederate statue is being given a $10 million restoration and re-erected in the nation's most prestigious military cemetery.
This is a statue of a tearful, fat, black female slave, cradling the child of her white Confederate master, as he goes off to war. Its official name is the "Arlington Confederate Monument", although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists on calling it the "reconciliation monument" because there is a recent US law preventing anything being named after the Confederacy, a dark period in American history. Hegseth want to reinstate the monument, with its overtly racist imagery and anti-US sentiments, at Arlington National Cemetery.
This is where the USA is today. John A. McDonald? Eat your heart out.
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