Hitchens on The Great War

Hitchens talks about World War I, particularly from the British perspective: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/hitchens-somme. I've done some reading on "the war to end all wars" and it's mostly a process that leaves you shaking your head in trying to comprehend the magnitude of outright butchery and idiocy that went on from 1914 to 1918. Hitchens talks about the "Donkeys" or the British generals as they were so aptly described by the Germans and mentions Sir Douglas Haig as the worst offender of the bunch, sending a generation of British soldiers to death or disfigurement. If you ever go to Whitehall in London, right across from Horse Guards is an equestrian statue of Haig. Every time I've seen it, I've wondered at the cruel irony in life, perfected in that beautiful statue of a wretched ass who murdered thousands upon thousands of his own men.

Statues are an interesting thing. If you go to Mexico, you've no doubt been impressed by how often you see statues depicting various heroes of the revolution or some other aspect of Mexican culture, often right next to a highly blighted area. You don't see statues in the states with the same frequency. Right now, there's sort of a statue revisionism going on. Statues now tend to reflect a need to correct a perceived wrong. For example, in Austin you not only have a statue of the late congresswoman Barbara Jordan greeting passengers at the airport, but also now one of her just erected on the UT campus. The message there, I guess, is you damn well better know that Barbara Jordan was damn important, you backward knuckle draggers out there. I always liked the statue of Sam Houston near Herman Park in Houston. It's a classic and highly distinctive. I've seen a lot of statues all over the place depicting the Rev. Martin Luther King and he mostly comes off looking like a menacing, hulking mongoloid. Somebody needs to work on that. The World War I "doughboy" statues and the Confederate statues that you see usually on or around a courthouse square are almost always well done. From what I've read, towns recruited Italian artists to do the depictions and paid them well to do justice to their loved ones who went off to fight. Now, it's not so easy doing a military statue in that so many groups and sub-groups have to be pleased in the process of coming up with what will actually go up. Will he carry a weapon, will he look victorious or humble or will it indeed be a "he" and what kind of racial features will be highlighted. Probably now better to just go with a goddamn obelisk but that would probably piss off the hard core lesbian crowd. Life is curious in an enlightened society.