A lesson for all you gentlemen out there » « The data is suggestive

At least Mothman never owned slaves

I would support the effort by West Virginians to replace Confederate monuments with statues of Mothman.

Now Minnesota, though — we need to rethink those giant statues honoring Paul Bunyan before the environmentalists notice. I recommend more statues celebrating spiders, in every town.

A lesson for all you gentlemen out there » « The data is suggestive

Comments

  1. blf says

    “more statues celebrating spiders, in every town”: Shelob Lives!

    More statues? There are some already?
    (Does Minnesota have an official state spider?)

  4. KG says

    More statues? There are some already? – blf@1

    It’s very easy to have more than none!

  5. says

    Can we get some Sasquatch statues here in the PNW? Or maybe just one really really big Sasquatch. OH how about Sasquatch fighting NAZIs. That would be super cool.

  9. Akira MacKenzie says

    Last night in Madison, WI, protestors tore down the Forward statue at the Capitol and of Union Col. Hans Christian Heg. Of course, this prompted a rant from my father about how stupid and ungrateful blacks tore down the statue of a Civil War “hero” who fought to free them. My response… turn up the volume on my headphones to drown out the stupid.

  10. smeghead says

    Great idea, but they shouldn’t look like that particular one. It always bothered me how unfaithful it is to the original concept — it’s too much man, not enough moth!

  11. DrewN says

    Sweden has a statue of an old lady smacking a nazi with her purse. Maybe a big milkshake statue would be a good replacement?

  12. blf says

    DrewN@11, According to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge (The Woman with the Handbag), it gets even better. For context, the statue is based on a famous 1985 photograph of a nazi nutcase being wacked by Danuta Danielsson (image at the link). About the statue (my added emboldening):

    A local artist, Susanna Arwin, expressed desire to raise a life-sized statue of Danielsson in Växjö but in February 2015 it was decided against for two reasons, the first being that council members were concerned such a statue could be interpreted as promoting violence and the second being that Danielsson’s surviving family reported that they would be unhappy with Danielsson memorialized in such a manner. To protest the decision people across Sweden began adding handbags to statues.

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Re @14
    How about Sherman driving a Sherman over the Confederacy? Or Shelob eating a Klansman.
    If the Southerners insist on statues depicting baddies, they should be restricted to Team Rocket from Pokemon.

  16. blf says

    If the Southerners insist on statues depicting baddies, they should be restricted to Team Rocket from Pokemon.

    Or Scooby-Doo villains.

  18. robro says

    I’m a little surprised that there are any Confederate memorials in West Virginia. The reason West Virginia exists is that those counties of Virginia voted to remain in the union, and form a new state. It was controversial, of course, but there was enough support to stay in the union that they did. There were units from West Virginia in both armies.

  19. blf says

    robro@18, There are pro-slavery symbols all over the place, Mapping the hundreds of Confederate statues across the US:

    […]
    Across the United States, there are an estimated 1,741 public symbols of the Confederacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    These symbols include schools, parks, bridges, roads, statues and more.
    […]

    According to the interactive map at the link, there are 9 mouments in W.Virginia (21 symbols total). Nationwide, they are heavily concentrated in the ex-confederacy, but are not exclusive to that region.

  20. littlejohn says

    I’m a West Virginian, and I’m appalled that we have no statues of our nation’s most prominent abolitionist, John Brown, and his fellow freedom fighters. In fact, the only statue of Brown is in Kansas.
    John Brown’s home was in Pennsylvania, and he led a slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). I’m a fan of Mothman (who isn’t?), but Brown was a genuine hero and martyr. He declined a deal to avoid execution if he would only plead insanity. He likely would have served only a short sentence (although the blacks, of course, would have hanged).
    But West Virginia won’t do that, of course, despite the fact that WV was a Union state. The place today is infested with Confederate flags.

  21. birgerjohansson says

    I want a statue of John Brown standing alongside Malcolm X. And the Haitian guy who led the first successful slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere, ridding Hispaniola of slavery.