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Trumps signs executive order to create Garden of American Heroes

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Carl Herrera, Jul 4, 2020.

  1. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    LOL I'm creole, I know...but Michael was never that.
     
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  2. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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  3. SamFisher

    SamFisher Contributing Member

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  4. vlaurelio

    vlaurelio Contributing Member

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    he can toss Trump and his cabal to the

    Country Club of American Traitors
     
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  5. mazinger

    mazinger Member

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    Trump speaks the language only the very stupid understand.
     
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  6. Carl Herrera

    Carl Herrera Contributing Member

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    It's not like the candidate you and I support doesn't make verbal mistakes...



    But Trump just keep dragging this one out and making it worse-- much like he does in other parts of his job.

    My theory on what happened there-- maybe the text on the teleprompter made Trump think the "swift and sweeping victory" thing related to Vietnam rather than Desert Storm-- and he though "wait, this can't be" so he got stuck improvising?
     
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  7. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  8. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/07/it-shall-be-policy-of-united-states-to.html

    Althouse writes:

    "The National Garden should be located on a site of natural beauty that enables visitors to enjoy nature, walk among the statues, and be inspired to learn about great figures of America’s history. The site should be proximate to at least one major population center, and the site should not cause significant disruption to the local community."

    From Trump's "Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes."

    These realistic statues must be of "historically significant Americans" and "Americans" is deemed to include those who "lived prior to or during the American Revolution and were not American citizens, but who made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States." In that category, he names Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and the Marquis de La Fayette.

    There's a list of the kinds of people who are deemed to "have contributed positively to America." The list includes "opponents of national socialism or international socialism" — a phrase that must rankle the hell out of present-day American socialists — e.g., Bernie Sanders. It implies that no socialist can be among the heroes — only opponents of socialism. What about James Baldwin? Woody Guthrie? Noam Chomsky? W.E.B. Du Bois? Kurt Vonnegut? Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Gloria Steinem? Pete Seeger? Margaret Sanger? Paul Robeson? Dorothy Parker?

    Who are your heroes? Who are mine? I tend to eschew idolatry, but if we're going to make a list of American heroes, I want the left wing represented.

    And speaking of idolatry, is anyone talking about the impact of this sculpture garden on people who have a strong moral or religious opposition to statues? I'm thinking in particular of Muslims. From the Wikipedia article, "Aniconism in Islam":
    Note that Trump's requirement that the statues be "lifelike or realistic" mandates the very quality that is the problem for Muslims (who have traditionally sought ways to depict human beings without competing with God, the maker of forms.
    [​IMG]
     
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  9. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://ethicsalarms.com/2020/07/06...-flop-doesnt-anyone-do-any-research-any-more/

    Marshall writes:

    “So today, under the authority vested in me as President of the United States, I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National [Garden] of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.”

    President Donald J. Trump, in his otherwise superb July 3, 2020 Mt Rushmore speech.

    Ugh. I winced when I read those words, and I’m sure I was not alone. Did the President just come up with that hare-brained idea on the spot? I hope so. I hope his staff is better than to endorse or, worse, support such a terrible, half-baked idea. It is incompetent and irresponsible, and guaranteed to be divisive. Here are three unsolvable problems:

    I. The project exposed itself as ill-planned and poorly conceived immediately. The initial list of “great Americans” looked as if it had been assembled by throwing darts at a poster, with someone coming in later to try to make politically correct additions. Here is the (incomprehensible) list, in alphabetical order:

    • John Adams
    • Susan B. Anthony
    • Clara Barton
    • Daniel Boone
    • Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
    • Henry Clay
    • Davy Crockett
    • Frederick Douglass
    • Amelia Earhart
    • Benjamin Franklin
    • Ulysses S. Grant
    • Billy Graham
    • Alexander Hamilton
    • Thomas Jefferson
    • Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • Abraham Lincoln
    • Douglas MacArthur
    • Dolley Madison
    • James Madison
    • Christa McAuliffe
    • Audie Murphy
    • George S. Patton, Jr.
    • Ronald Reagan
    • Jackie Robinson
    • Betsy Ross
    • Elvis Presley [2]
    • Antonin Scalia
    • Frank Sinatra
    • Harriet Beecher Stowe
    • Harriet Tubman
    • Booker T. Washington
    • George Washington
    • Orville and Wilbur Wright

    To only mention some of the choices that make no sense: How can the first group include Douglas MacArthur, who was justly fired for insubordination by President Truman, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, who coordinated the victory over Hitler in Europe, or his boss, General George Marshall? Why would Dolly Madison make the cut, while two far more important First Ladies, Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt, be omitted? I am an admirer of Davy Crockett, but he didn’t do much of anything except create the model for media-hyped celebrities and manage to get himself killed at the Alamo. There are, oh, I’d say several hundred more substantial “great Americans,” including almost every President, than Davy. If there is going to be an inventors on the list, why only the Wright Brothers? Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Alexander Graham Bell all were of equal importance. Henry Clay’s naive compromises on slavery really did enable the slave trade. He’s a better choice than John C. Calhoun, but less deserving than Daniel Webster. Frank Sinatra? FRANK SINATRA? Ol’ mobbed-up Blue Eyes, leaving off Bing Crosby and Elvis, to name just two equally important pop singers? I’d have Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry planted in the Garden before the likes of Sinatra. Meanwhile, why singers but no songwriters? Where’s Irving Berlin? Rodgers and Hammerstein? The Gershwins? Hank Williams? Why singers but no dancers?

    I know that the President doesn’t read, but the only author on the list is Stowe, and she’s only there because her book had such political and social significance (and I’ll bet my head that he’s never read her novel.) No Melville? Hawthorne? The Presidentdoesn’t go to plays either, but there are at least three playwrights everyone could agree on: O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. You could justify adding Lillian Hellman and August Wilson for “diversity,” though both are a notch below the top three.

    Other diversity choices are embarrassingly transparent, and pure pandering. Amelia Earhardt, who is mostly remembered because she disappeared, but not Charles Lindberg? (I know, he was a Nazi sympathizer, but the Thomas Jefferson principle applies.) How about Jimmy Doolittle? Naming Christa McAuliffe is the worst kind of hero affirmative action: she was a woman, a teacher and she died in a national tragedy, but placing her before the real astronauts like Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong makes the whole list look careless, amateurish, cynical and arbitrary, which, of course, it is.

    Omitting Franklin Roosevelt is indefensible. Including Justice Scalia as the only Supreme Court Justice is ridiculous: he would have mocked that himself. John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, Hugo Black, Learned Hand, Thurgood Marshall...the list of equally or more qualified jurists is long

    I could go on and would love to. (Where is Hamilton?) It’s a terrible list, but nicely characteristic of the careless, seat-of-the-pants manner in which this President handles everything.

    2. The selection process is guaranteed to become a politicized, contentious, ugly mess, for reasons I shouldn’t have to elaborate upon. Already, there are complaints that the list is “mostly white men.” Well, of course it is: for most of our history non-white men had limited opportunities to excel, and women were relegated to subordinate status well into the 20th Century. Is the “Garden” going to recognize genuine achievements and importance, or employ lower standards meet affirmative action quotas?

    3. It’s been tried before, and nobody cared. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is an outdoor sculpture gallery located on the grounds of Bronx Community College New York City. It was completed in 1900 with a grand 630-foot colonnade (designed by Stanford White—where are the architects and builders that Trump boasted about in his speech?) exhibiting 98 bronze busts of prominent Americans. It was the original Hall of Fame in the U.S., before baseball,s before any of them. No new busts have been added in decades, and most Americans don’t know the place exists. It is seldom visted and isfalling apart, but even without updating, the Hall’s list of members is better than what Trump proposed.

    See Bell’s name in the photo above?

    Then there was this variation, which I wrote about in May, “Presidents Park” in York County, Virginia, near Williamsburg. That10-acre park “featured a museum and a sculpture garden, and visitors could walk among 43 huge concrete busts, each about 20 feet high and weighing as much as 22,000 pounds, of the U.S. Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush.” As with the Hall of Fame, nobody went to see it, nobody cared, and it ended up like this…

    presidents-park.jpg
     
  10. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    I'm guessing Dolly Madison made it because of the snack cakes.
     
  11. Buck Turgidson

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  12. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    Makes me think of the Godsway from Game of Thrones -- the collection of all the idols from cities conquered by the Dothraki. Something about collecting a bunch of statuary of everything to be venerated feels more like a cemetery than a garden. Honestly, I don't think it is a good way to honor our heroes.

    The irony is that even if Trump manages to get his garden, the only way there will ever be a Trump statue in it is if he puts it there himself.
     
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  13. London'sBurning

    London'sBurning Contributing Member

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  14. Carl Herrera

    Carl Herrera Contributing Member

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    Look, this is an easy problem to solve. All Muslim heroes can have statutes with their jersey numbers in the garden.
     
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  15. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

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  16. Rashmon

    Rashmon Contributing Member

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  17. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    The Romans did that too and would take idols and symbols from lands they conquered.

    That did give me thought. Minnesota still has a Confederate Battle that the First Minnesota Regiment captured at Gettysburg. They used to display it in the MN History Center. Virginia has asked for it back but Minnesota has refused to return it. What if the Confederate statues are moved to Northern states and celebrated as spoils of war. ;)
     
  18. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    Don't like to quote myself but this was and is the American Dream...

    Duke Ellington said of him after his death that he “was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way.”

    Today we're going backwards...it used to be that you would do better than your parents most of the time but now you're lucky if you can get a solid wage, hell forget about a pension plan, and hope for the best when it comes to home ownership.
     
    #58 Andre0087, Jul 8, 2020
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2020
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  19. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Might be overpriced for taxpayers, but what isn’t these days. I can’t feel a reaction compared to the bigger issues right now...

    P.S. Michelle’s garden was far more superior
    Londo Mollari is on the list? B5 geeks rejoice!
     
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  20. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

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