Monday, December 15, 2014
Can't Say that Anymore
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Yesterday I made a brief stop at the Princeton Battlefield in New Jersey, scene of a militarily minor but psychologically important American triumph during Revolution. I was struck by this half-dismantled monument. What, dare one think, did the sign here say that made it imperative for us to remove it? What horror of racism, sexism, historical inaccuracy or bad grammar made this official vandalism necessary?
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
Favorites
Blog Archive
-
▼
2014
(1177)
-
▼
December
(95)
- Comet Lovejoy
- The Warcq Chariot Burial
- The Long Way to Freedom
- Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts
- Still Life with Archaeological Site
- Gray
- Stagnation
- Vincent Munier
- Jeff Pearce, Prevail
- More on Suffering and Belonging
- Art in the City of Money
- Are Poets Crazier than Other People?
- The Deer
- Emile-Antoine Bourdelle
- Copper Goat from Sumer
- Thinking about International Development
- Religion and Experience
- Merry Christmas
- Cookie Decorating
- Three Kings
- Tiles, Samarkand
- New York Bans Fracking
- RIP Joe Cocker
- Hans Eijkelboom
- Fragile Law Students
- Christmas at Chartres
- Teaching in a Community College
- Looking out the Back Window
- Today' Sentence
- Denmark and Egypt in the Bronze Age
- Happy Sunreturn
- Samsø, or, It Can Be Done
- Greg Dunn
- What We Learn From
- Quantum Duality and the Uncertainty Principle
- Torture and False Information
- Still No Life on Mars
- Vending Machine
- George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral
- Welfare and Work, or, Economics is Stupid
- Human Diversity and the Paleo Diet
- Sean Lynch, or, A Young Irishman Documents his Adv...
- Reinhold Niebuhr Explains Modern Politics
- Words
- Gondi Pictographs and the Indus Valley Script
- Dupont Underground
- Antwerp Stock Exchange c 1900
- Deadly Fruit of Pakistan's Poison Tree
- Curses and Pins
- What the Swami Said
- Can't Say that Anymore
- K'wati and the Red Lizard
- Princeton
- Princeton Theological Seminary Library by EYP
- Two Christmas Parties
- The Lough Derg Sword
- A Note on the Outstanding Heroes Running for Presi...
- Toys of War
- Noah Millman Explains American Torture
- Even Ted Cruz
- Gold from Panama
- Hearing the Right Voices
- Ocean Plastic, Continued
- Torture and Middle Earth
- Still with the Secrets, Still with the "Executive ...
- The Minoan Frescoes of Akrotiri
- Today's Find
- Ketamine and Depression
- An Interesting Idea about American Torturers
- Ming Dynasty Textiles from a Coastal Tomb
- Blaming the CIA for Our Sins
- Anglo-Saxon Bead Necklace
- Obamacare and the Fear of Good News
- Padlock
- The Sad Collapse of the New Republic
- The Plot Summary
- Celtic Silver
- Anti-Racism as Class Warfare
- The Mosfell Archaeology Project
- Orion Launch
- Chris Maynard's Cut Feather Shadow Boxes
- Six Designs for the Guggenheim Helsinki
- Stay out of the hospital, even when having a baby
- Today on the Party Circuit
- The Rudham Dirk
- Reverse Graffiti
- Despising the Poor
- Royal Infidelity and Richard III's DNA
- The Towers of Svaneti
- Whaling Art
- Love is Attention
- In the Woods
- Confidence and Memory
- Master IAM of Zwolle
- Are Electromagnetic Fields a Health Threat?
-
▼
December
(95)
About Me
- John
- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
7 comments:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/PrincetonBattleb.jpg
"What, dare one think, did the sign here say that made it imperative for us to remove it? What horror of racism, sexism, historical inaccuracy or bad grammar made this official vandalism necessary?"
What lead you to the conclusion that this was a monument? Or that it was dismantled by human design rather than the possibility that it fell apart in the natural course of time? Or if it was dismantled, that it wasn't merely because it had been ravaged by the elements over said course of time? Or perhaps even by decidedly unofficial vandalism?
As "kpgoog" so helpfully demonstrates, this was in fact the site of a damaged map, not a monument, which was presumably removed (either officially or not) because it was literally falling to pieces. In hindsight, this seems like an obvious explanation - but reading your post in the absence of the photographic evidence of the site's prior state, I found myself immediately believing your viewpoint as accurate. Did we both fall prey to cognitive biases?
How we choose to frame things, the assumptions we choose to make about things that we honestly don't know the truth about but feel we can easily intuit the answer, tells us much about our failings as rational beings. A visual example below:
http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h50/StarwindPhoto/errol-text-edit.jpg
Link error - replacement image link:
http://boingboing.net/filesroot/errol-text-edit.jpg
(An edit feature is sorely missed at times.)
If it had been vandalized, why not replace it?
It occurs to me that the question of where the events in the Battle of Princeton actually happened is being fought over in zoning boards all the time, as people try to block new developments by arguing that they are on the battlefield. An official map of the battle would necessarily be offensive to one or the other party in all these disputes. So maybe it was some homeowners association that came out by night and chiseled away the offending monument.
I suppose it might just be a combination of bad teenage behavior and budget cuts, but come on! How boring is that?
And now I am somehow highly amused, for the first time, by the message from Blogger asking me to "Choose an Identity."
Who do I feel like being today?
"If it had been vandalized, why not replace it?"
Lack of funds? Tied up in red tape/bureacracy? Other options being considered? Looking for or waiting on contractors/suppliers/laborers/artists? Et cetera? All of the above?
Why immediately assume the worst, when available evidence leaves all options roughly equal in plausibility?
"I suppose it might just be a combination of bad teenage behavior and budget cuts, but come on! How boring is that?"
While I do recognize that you are being jocose, in my mind I consider this mentality to be one of the primary failings of humanity - we seek out the most "exciting" and outlandish solutions over the most rational but mundane. We embrace the bombastic and shy away from the jejune - which in essence means we prefer the fantastic to the realistic.
People don't want to believe that we are arbitrarily and semi-randomly descended from apes; they want to believe we are the children of deities intentionally crafted in their image. People don't want to believe that we're all roughly the same when it comes down to what matters; they want to cling to clannish notions of race and nationhood and culture, elevating their own "kind" and demonizing others. People don't want to believe that our lives are essentially meaningless, with our entire history a minisicule blip on the cosmic timelime; they want to believe we will always endure, and that we will somehow always (or even ever) matter in some meaningful sense.
And so we operate on assumptions of our own self importance, and in turn mistreat one another in countless ways, "justified" by our delusions of self grandeur.
But at least we aren't boring, eh?
Post a Comment