Christine Flowers: The Crusade to Erase starts in Philadelphia
A crew from Mural Arts paints over the Frank Rizzo mural on Ninth Street in Philadelphia on June 7. The image of the former Philadelphia mayor was removed from the side of a building in south Philadelphia amid large protests in the city on the issue of police brutality.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
- George Orwell, "1984"
“'1984' was supposed to be a warning, not a game plan.” - Anonymous
When I saw them painting over the mural of Frank Rizzo at the Italian Market last week, I felt a lot of different emotions. Anger, mostly, at the destruction of a tribute to a man who, although imperfect, devoted his life to the city of his birth. A man who integrated the police force. Who was beloved of many in the black communities he helped keep safe from the drug scourge. A man who made enemies, and friends who’d take a bullet for him.
I felt anger, too, at the implicit attack on my mother’s heritage. In this Black Lives Matter moment, other lives and cultures are expected to take a supporting role. So Italian Americans are not supposed to complain at the erasure of a man who was intimately identified with their history, the only Italian Catholic to hold the most important seat in municipal politics.
The anger was accompanied by bemusement at the foolishness of the act, one that was as unnecessary as it was futile. Erasing Rizzo’s face, or tearing down his massive metal effigy, will not remove him from our collective institutional memory. To tell us not to remember, to look away, is a guarantee that we will seek out that memory in defiance.
But the most visceral emotion was fear, and it had very little to do with Rizzo the man. The fear that I experienced, and still experience, was tied to the increasingly successful efforts to turn George Orwell’s prophecy into our current reality.
People on the left have been quite busy these days downplaying the significance of what is happening, something that I chronicled in an earlier essay. To them, fascism can only be experienced on the right, and takes the shape and form of a president who fires tear gas into a crowd of “peaceful protesters.” The response to that essay among so many of my readers-righteous indignation-was expected.
But as Orwell expressed so well, fascism is not a partisan phenomenon, and can exist wherever and whenever a society decides to exert dominion over its citizens by usurping the one true thing that sets them apart as human: their independent minds.
It is one thing to imprison a man in a cell, chain him up, shut him away from the sunlight and the company of others. Concrete walls and iron gates can hold him in. But they cannot entrap his brain, which is tethered to his soul and makes him immortal. Look at John McCain. Five and a half years in the hell at Hanoi did not break his spirit. Neither did the physical torture to which he was subjected.
But taking hold of a man’s mind by denying him access to the truth, all of it, can turn him into something less than human. It makes him into an unthinking, unquestioning half-creature that might breathe and eat and walk and work and even love, but who is a simple cog in the wheel of the state machine. If you take away a man’s ability to think, and make independent thought a crime, you have successfully killed him, though he will continue to breathe.
When I saw the aftermath of the Rizzo mural’s destruction, a chill took over me on a very hot, fetid, Philadelphia summer day. There was a blank place where there used to be color, where there was life and history. Drained from that wall was the figure of a man who represented not only himself, but generations of Italians and their pride. That empty space was more upsetting than the graffiti on the Rizzo statue, because it was a first successful result of what I call the Crusade to Erase.
The irony is that the mural was on private property, and I’ve been told that the owner would have left it up but for the threats he started receiving. Other businesses in the Italian Market signed a letter agreeing to have the mural destroyed, and demonstrated their cowardice. But in good Orwellian style, they will insist it was an effort to honor black lives. This will be the new normal: Honor one culture by insulting another.
Now they say they are coming for Christopher Columbus, who has been caricatured as the great genocidal Satan. They are trying to teach our children that he was an evil man, crushing context, creating facts, conning the naive. Orwell knew the playbook and blueprint intimately, and wrote it down for us.
This time, though, it won’t be as easy to take out that giant historical eraser and create the blank spaces so the Thought Tyrants can write their preferred narratives, which they can then shove down our throats. If they try it, we can come back and start choosing murals and statues that they love, and use the same principle they employ to destroy them. Personally, I find the Paul Robeson mural at 45th and Chestnut to be an obscene tribute to a man who loved Stalin, embraced his evil regime and ignored the deaths and torture of millions in the gulags of Siberia. Robeson offends me. Perhaps I should start a campaign to erase him. Perhaps I should turn their weapons back on them.
I have represented asylees and refugees from totalitarian states. They understand what it is to live in countries where society, either directly through the government or by the intimidation of special interest groups, tells you what to think. They fled their own private hells to escape, to find freedom.
I am horrified to have them see those tragic histories repeat themselves here.
And so, I will not say the appropriate things. I will not apologize for a guilt I do not bear. I will not engage in pithy, socially woke slogans. I will not grovel, bend the knee or worry that my words might get me ostracized, unemployed or even killed.
I choose to follow Orwell’s warning. I hope I’ll have company.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a resident of Delaware County. Her column usually appears Sundays. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail,com.
