January 24 - Statues

They are putting up a statue of Mario Lemieux at the new arena in Pittsburgh.  Listen, I love Mario and I think he deserves a statue.  But I am not sure I believe in putting up statues to living people.  It seems to me we should wait for a person's demise to deem them statue worthy, so we can assess the entire life, not just a piece of it.

In D.C. there is an informal rule that you never name buildings after a living person.  The Repubs broke the rule.  First, they renamed National Airport as Reagan National Airport.  (I never call it that.)  I think there were a few reasons for it.  One idea was that he had Alzheimer's disease and it was like he was dead.  Another was that  they wanted him to know how much they appreciated him before he died. They also named a huge government building after him and it was all downhill from there.

 There are places named after several living Bushes, the Kennedys, of course, Robert Byrd had no problem with things being named after him, or even the king of pork, and now deceased, John Murtha, who liked to name things after himself.

But for me, that honor needs to be reserved for the departed who we admire and love.

If you really want to get into controversy, they are planning a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower and the proposal is to have a statue of him as a boy.  People are absolutely fuming including his family!  He was a four star general and a president and he will be depicted as a Kansas boy.  The artists who are creating the memorial have their reasons--it shows his humble beginnings and what he came from.  But come on.  If he deserves a statue, make it one of the man we admire, not some younger self that has no connection to our memories.  And isn't memories what it is all about?

Does this mean we need to have a statue of Mario Lemieux playing pee wee hockey?  Sounds ridiculous right.  So too for Eisenhower.