Cancel—as in noisily toppling George Washington’s statue and striking his name off of buildings? In 2020, one group demanded the removal of his statue from the campus of the University of Washington. Another outfit called for displacing, renaming, or “recontextualizing” the Washington Monument, the 74,000-ton obelisk on the Mall of the nation’s capital. In June 2020, a crowd of protesters in Portland, Ore., lit a fire on the head of a statue of Washington before pulling it to the ground. Spraypainted on this figure were such words as “Genocidal Colonist,” “You’re on native lands,” “BLM,” “1619,” and “Big Floyd.” Some observers have wondered whether the name of Washington & Lee University will eventually be reduced to an ampersand.
The tendency of many today is to embrace with a vengeance Mark Antony’s lines from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones…
More HERE
