Stone Mountain message muddled all these years later
Trump is more reality TV star whose mission is sales, not diplomacy
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Stone Mountain is this towering 1,700-foot granite monolith that looks totally out of place in the Georgia countryside.
It is here the Confederacy made a second stand in 1915, where the "Lost Cause" narrative played out with a monument to the glory of the South with larger than life carved figures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis atop noble stallions; its carved figures rivaling Mount Rushmore in size and prominence.
It was here that the Ku Klux Klan reinvented itself in 1915 and for years burned crosses atop the monolith while promoting the fallacy the Confederate cause was about preserving states' rights, not slavery.
The carved figures, about a football field in size, is faded and as unimpressive as its intended message these days.
Yet, the people still come.
Maybe if they knew about its history with the Klan and the cross burning.
Maybe if they knew the original sculptor was in the Ku Klux Klan, they might feel differently.
After visiting The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and then the Martin Luther King Historic Site in Atlanta, I felt guilty about being at Stone Mountain.
It didn't feel right.
It felt like I was supporting a myth.
It's a beautiful park with a tram ride to the top of the mountain where they used to burn those crosses.
I didn't see any mention of it at all at the top, or anywhere on the site.
That should be part of the narrative.
Recently, $11 million in state funding was appropriated to upgrade the visitor's center and exhibits with little transparency about the actual message.
In recent years as the reckoning over Confederate monuments and statues became a national issue, there were many who believed Stone Mountain should be erased, too.
Its birth came as a reaction to the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that made school segregation illegal when the Georgia state legislature approved buying Stone Mountain for $1.1 million.
The final monument was completed in 1972.
But after the racially motivated Emanuel church shooting in Charleston in 2015, there was a backlash and the confederate flag was removed as part of the state flag.
Confederate statues were taken down in Richmond, the Confederate capital.
But Georgia state law protects Stone Mountain as "an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy."
And slavery, many would quickly add.
The state code reads:
"The memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause."
While walking through the park, I noticed this large placard that read:
Notice to
General Public
It then said that "free speech activity in this area is not sponsored, endorsed or approved or disapproved by Stone Mountain Park."
But it's tough to be neutral when four prominent members of the Confederacy are glorified in 75-foot tall rock carving for all to see as an endorsement of the abomination of slavery.
The Stone Mountain Park attendance continues to go down, but support for it is strong in Georgia.
In the summer of 2020, 100 to 200 armed protesters came to Stone Mountain to call for the carving to be removed.
But a month later, the park closed its gates when a gathering of white nationals planned a gathering there. Later that day a fight broke out in downtown Atlanta between groups of white supremacists and Black Lives Matter counter-protesters.
The tourists seemed unaffected by the controversy this week.
Unaware of the hypocrisy they were observing.
And the law protecting the monument remains unchallenged.
Queensbury ethics
The Queensbury Town Board is finally getting around to talking about its conflict of interest.
There is a workshop scheduled for Thursday at 3 p.m. with one of the items “ethics code and disclosure.”
As many of you already know, I filed an ethics complaint that current Town Board member Tim McNulty has the appearance of a conflict of interest because he also serves as chairman of the Warren County Republican Committee and ultimately is the boss of other Republican board members. The town Ethics Board agreed that McNulty had an “appearance” of a conflict of interest and should address the issue.
From the vague description on the agenda it sounds like the board may try to change the the wording of the ethics policy.
Anyone who has spoken about this conflict should try to attend Thursday’s meeting at Town Hall. It is open to the public.
War on science
Substack columnist Heather Cox Richardson pointed out that the anniversary of another political attempt to silence science is 100 years old this week.
Richardson wrote that, "On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee’s law, passed in March of that year, that made it `unlawful…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.' In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching of human evolution."
Trump $$$
Sometimes when I watch those Oval Office meetings with some head of state they remind me of one of those desperate late-night informercials peddling junk.
I go back and forth trying to decide if the current occupant of that office is president or the star of his own carefully choreographed reality TV show where product placement is of the utmost importance.
The New York Times summed up the Trump family presidential profit machine this way:
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
Sometimes I wonder if Trump's new goal is to supplant Elon Musk as the richest man in the world.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put it more succinctly:
Trump is deeply corrupt. All presidents are accused of shady practices: Remember that President Barack Obama was said to have diminished the presidency by wearing a tan suit. But Trump is a felon who is using his office to enrich himself as no president has in history.
The Times reported that more than $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just a month, and some of his ventures look alarmingly like opportunities for influence-peddling. How else do we explain his announcement that the biggest investors in his new cryptocurrency memecoin, $TRUMP, would get dinner with him? Some guests flew in from overseas for the dinner, held Thursday, and acknowledged earlier that they hoped to influence Trump and his administration’s policy on financial regulation.
The Trump family started a different cryptocurrency outfit, World Liberty Financial, that received a $2 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates. Don Jr. is also starting a members club in Washington, with a $500,000 charge to join. And Saudi Arabia and Qatar are investing in Trump businesses, putting money in family bank accounts.
Remember George Floyd
It may seem like a century ago, but five years ago George Floyd died in the custody of a policeman that was captured on an infamous video.
Out of that tragedy came the Black Lives Matters protests and a reckoning that police departments had to do better.
The policeman convicted in Floyd's death, Derek Chauvin, went to jail for 22 years.
According to the New York Times, there is a movement to have him pardoned by Trump.
"Disputing facts that most people once agreed on has become part of a new political playbook, often employed by right-leaning pundits and politicians," The Times reported Saturday. "But the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 was not just any news story. For conservatives, it was the catalyst for a kind of liberal mania that, some of them assert, led directly to racial hiring quotas, “woke” curriculums in school and white guilt."
Prominent Trump supporters like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Charlie Kirk and Christofer Rufo have joined the defense of Chauvin with the contention to what happened to Floyd did not happen to Floyd.
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"We all realize that time moved on, and the daily paper lost its audience to computer generated information, both fact and fiction. Those of us that subscribe to your newsletter are very fortunate to have your column as a link the past when daily news was both informative and thought provoking. You continue to produce material that gets us thinking.. Thank you for keeping us informed. I wish we could attend your upcoming play, but we have a conflict during that time period."
The play
Apparently, the Friday night reading for The Last American Newspaper (July 25) is sold out which left my brother mad at me because he couldn't get a ticket.
But a fourth show was added for Saturday afternoon to go along with the Saturday evening performance and another Sunday matinee.
Hope to see you there.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
Isn't it amazing that the jet from Qatar is already out of the news feed? A big deal for 3 or 4 days and then, poof, gone! He just keeps throwing plates in the air and, like children, we are momentarily distracted while he does his dirty deeds. That, I think, is the real danger here...distraction.
There are a lot of monolithic stone relief carvings around the world, many of them incredibly ancient and awe inspiring. A lot of them are architectural, serving as religious structures or tombs, like a lot of Egyptian carvings, but also many in India, Southeast Asia or central and South America.
Some serve as records of the accomplishments of great monarchs. Nash-e Rostam is the best example that comes to my mind, with carvings as records of conquerors from several different empires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rostam
To the best of my knowledge nobody put that much effort into making giant sculptures to celebrate losers, except for Stone Mountain.
Why not just re-name it Loser Mountain? Maybe they could just carve “LOSERS” in languages of all ages starting with hieroglyphs and cuneiform, Greek, Persian, Latin, Mandarin and Japanese, Russian, French, German, English… make it a real message to people of all time. It might become a tourist destination for travelers from around the world if they don’t get arrested by Customs first.