A pandemic of symbolism

by David Benjamin

“Waging war on bronze men doesn’t make your life any more moral or just.” 

― Maria Lipman

MADISON, Wis. — In eighth grade, when I was plowing doggedly through Moby Dick, I began to glimpse the power and ambiguity of symbolism. The white whale is perhaps the most compelling symbol in all of American literature. But is Moby Dick really a whale? Or did Melville create a mirage, seemingly a whale but meaning something else entirely? For that matter, is Ahab’s pegleg a prosthesis, a thesis or an apotheosis? Or all three? And is the squeezing of spermaceti actually a metaphor for high-seas intimacies among manly men starved for love? 

Is it all what it is, or not at all — and much more besides?

I thought about Moby Dick around the time George Floyd, a regular guy in Minneapolis, became the global symbol of Black Lives Matter, sadistic cops and 400 years of systemic racism in America. Floyd’s unjust fame blossomed as America was awash in symbolism, most of it so hackneyed and one-dimensional that it barely deserved to be called symbolic.

The left wing had BLM and pink pussy hats, clenched fists, rainbow banners and “I can’t breathe,” among a dozen other signifiers. The right — which is really the market leader in pop symbolism — responded with green frogs, gun silhouettes, tiki torches, iron crosses, ammo vests, swastikas and Robert E. Lee. 

Plus, they own the flag. Liberals are conflicted about Old Glory. Right-wingers hug it. They run it up the flagpole and burst into tears. White nationalists wave it as they march. Donald Trump literally wraps himself in the flag. His followers wear it from beanies to codpieces to sneakers.

Indeed, the Trump era might be deemed the renaissance of facile symbolism. His endless tie is a phallic arrow. His mane suggests leonine predation and his black suit marks him as liberalism’s mortician. When he signs an executive order and spreads it open, all the impotent words go blank in the glare, but his signature, huge, jagged and illegible, rivets the eye and decocts his ego. His very face, masklessly defiant, is a mocking thrust at the Covid cowards who don’t believe in Tinkerbelle. Trump’s permanent campaign is an orgy of symbolism. His rallies evoke the young Schicklgruber at Odeonsplatz. He has symbolically abused the CIA wall of stars, the Lincoln Memorial and Mount Rushmore as backdrops for his permanent reality show. 

When Floyd’s ascent to iconic status upset a Trump not used to being outsymboled, he retaliated fiercely, sending geldings and tear gas to scatter throngs of George Floyd symbolists, after which— in need of a backdrop — he scurried toward St. John’s Episcopal. Alas, he reached his church but it was boarded up, leaving him bereft and unsymbolic. Luckily, Ivanka was Girl Scout-prepared, producing from her $1,540 Max Mara bag (which must symbolize something) — voila! — a Holy Bible. Her dad — who once referred to Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” as though it was the first line in a standup shtick — lofted the Bible in a manner reminiscent of the Russian judge’s scorecard in a diving competition. Symbolically upthrusting Scripture, he thrilled his captive “Christian” legion and scandalized his sanctimonious detractors.

Ironically, the Good Book gambit demonstrated that Floyd’s martyrdom has tipped the symbolism balance. Somehow, Floyd’s eight-minute crucifixion, recorded live and in color, shocked white America into a dazed awareness of four centuries of racism. We were free at last to start tearing down statues of Bob Lee, Stonewall and Jeff Davis and not worry about offending the Daughters of the Confederacy and the state senate in Mississippi. Hell, the state senate in Mississippi just voted to take the Stars and Bars off their flag. 

But symbolism is still hard. Ask any English teacher. Really, what are the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg all about? And what if the anthropomorphic slab of bronze itself becomes symbolic of nothing more than the past, despised purely because it’s past, uncool and not happening now? 

We had a queer example here a while ago. A Black guy named Devonere Johnson barged into a Capitol Square restaurant brandishing a baseball bat and expostulating through a megaphone. According to witnesses, he wanted free food and beer. If he didn’t get it, he said he’d start swinging the bat and burn down the building. The megaphone— in a tight space whose acoustics tend to turn whispers into roars — was ear-splitting, the bat was scary and the batter had no reservation.

Predictably, police arrived. After a brief struggle, they arrested Johnson and took him away. As he departed, largely unscathed, he loudly reminded a growing crowd of restive bystanders that “Black lives matter!” He needn’t have bothered. This is the People’s Republic of Madison, where half the buildings within a three-block radius bear that very same slogan, in letters four feet high. The cat might’ve been nuts, but everybody in the joint and on the street, morally and politically, was on his side. If he’d quieted down, somebody would’ve actually bought him a beer. 

Never mind. He’d been arrested — by police, who needed to be taught, after they were gone, a lesson in systemic racism. A symbol of bigoted evil had to be found — which is not just difficult in Madison. It’s virtually impossible. Madison is the birthplace of the Iron Brigade, mustered at Camp Randall to fight Johnny Reb and reduced to a mound of heroic corpses and a handful of cripples at Antietam Creek and Gettysburg. Madison is where you can poke down every back street and dead end and not find one tribute to Southern aristocracy. The boulevard from the Capitol to Lake Monona is named for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nevertheless, the crowd was both pissed and ahistorical. Nowhere within their range was there anything Confederate to destroy in the name of… er, who? The megaphone guy. 

But wait! Look! Statues! 

They’ve been busting up statues in Richmond and Charleston. Why should Madison be left out? Heeding this imperative, a self-chosen delegation of random idealists, exacting extemporaneous vengeance for the arrest of what’s-his-name, tore down the “Forward” statue, a graceful figure originally cast in 1893 to represent the state motto and the struggle for women’s suffrage. “Forward” ended up with her nose pressed to the pavement on Mifflin Street. 

Flush with victory, the dauntless defenders of Megaphone Johnson charged past the Capitol and commenced to uproot the statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg and dump the militaristic son of a bitch into the lake. 

Woo-hoo! But who he?

An immigrant from Norway, Heg was an ardent abolitionist who joined the 15th Wisconsin Volunteers to fight the Confederacy. Injured at Perryville, he led troops in the Battle of Stone River with such valor that he earned the command of a brigade in the Army of the Cumberland. In the horrific Battle of Chickamauga in 1863 (see Ambrose Bierce), he was hit by a rifle ball in the gut. He took three days to die. 

Hans Christian Heg was a selfless young man who gave his life to the proposition that all men are created equal. That’s why he got a statue. Now, his empty pedestal apparently symbolizes the proposition that, if you can memorize a three-word slogan, it’s okay to scare the shit out of a lot of strangers in a restaurant. 

George Floyd was a nice guy and loving father who gave his life in the same cause as Colonel Heg and Abe Lincoln. He deserves a statue, but only if it heralds the vast changes in American society that were postponed indefinitely after the deaths of Heg and Lincoln. Otherwise, it will just be a bronze effigy, signifying nothing, spoiling to be dragged off its pedestal by the ignorant of the future.