Yet another screed....

 I gotta stop doing this, but every freaking day... *sigh*

Dear Mr. Trump:

Don’t know why I start out that way, since you’re unlikely to ever see this, and even if you did, even more unlikely to actually read it, but hey, it’s a nice artifice.

This morning, Mr. Trump, you continued to step in the massive, stinking mess you’ve made of Charlottesville with a series of tweets. You said: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You… can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also… the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

Your lack of logic here is, well, stupefying. One generally doesn’t learn about history by looking at statues. I’m rather a history buff myself, and I’ve written and had published several books of fiction based on historical people and events. My research never consisted entirely of finding statues and looking at them. Instead, I read lots of books, many of them with multisyllabic words like ‘artifice’ in them. I suspect you don’t read much at all, which is a shame. No one is ‘ripping apart’ the history and culture of our country by removing a few statues.

If you really want to learn about the Civil War and the Confederate players involved in it, there are a few thousand history books out there which would tell you all you ever wanted to know about Robert R. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Nathan Bedford, James Longstreet, George Pickett or any of the rest of the Confederate generals. All you have to do is read them.

But (and more importantly) those statues you’re so enamored with are statues of traitors to the very country of which you’re now the president. They’re people who actively attempted to destroy the United States of America, largely because they didn’t want the institution of slavery abolished (and if you want to do the revisionist history dance and say that slavery wasn’t the primary reason for the Civil War, I’d suggest you read -- there’s that word again -- the various southern states’ declarations of secession. For instance, South Carolina’s cites: “...an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them…” In other words, the northern states won’t return slaves to their rightful owners, and instead free any slaves that can reach their borders.

You also might check the dates of when your precious statues were erected. Did they happen to coincide with Jim Crow times or the Civil Rights era? Are they really statues celebrating a proud southern history, or are they actually warnings to people of color that they better not get too ‘uppity’ about wanting equal rights and equal standing in society?

Look, those statues of confederate leaders are an affront and insult to every last African-American in the United States -- in the same way that putting up a statue of Himmler in Germany would be an affront and insult to every last Jew, Romani, and homosexual in Europe (and notice that there *are* no such statues in Germany.) Take ‘em down. Get rid of them. Put them in art museums if they’re of some special artistic significance. But get them out of the parks and public square, away from the entrances of courthouses and public buildings.

No one’s destroying history. The history’s still there for anyone who wants to read it and know it. It's still being taught in school. It hasn't been lost. Not even slightly. And the ‘slippery slope’ argument about Washington and Jefferson? Please… They may have been slaveholders (as many were in those days), but they were NOT traitors. That argument holds no water whatsoever.

But water might help to get the crap off your shoes from those tweets.

ETA. Today there was a vehicular assault in Barcelona where a van plowed into a crowd, killing at least one person and injuring dozens. The details are still hazy as of the time I’m writing this… yet Donald “I wait until I have the facts” Trump tweeted at 2:00 PM that “The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!” Huh. You know in MINUTES that this is a terror attack, and you condemn it? Really? When James Alex Fields Jr. rammed his car into the crowd in Charlottesville on Saturday killing Heather Heyer, why didn’t you immediately tweet how that was “a terror attack”?

I know, you were too busy worrying about the fate of those confederate statues.