Battle with idols

Anonymized story

The first time I ran into racism at school in the Latvian language lesson. The textbook offered a heartbreaking story adapted from an unknown source. Black unemployed brought his daughter to the store to buy her shoes with her last money. The first pair turned out to be small, and the second was not allowed to try on, because, the heartless white seller explained, other buyers will not buy shoes that touched the black leg. It was not clear from the text where the action was taking place, but it is unlikely that in Riga, where then there were not one of the three hundred Afrolates who had been there later. The fate of the Brown of the black woman sunk into my heart, because she had to be retold close to the text, not forgetting about the diplomas and long vowels. It is not surprising that it ended in re -expression, but, even preparing for it all summer, I could not find out who had to enrich Latvian literature with this very crazy opus.

However, he was not too different from everyone else, who brought both the Soviet and the post -Soviet power to one plot: "And you have blacks hung up." Perhaps that is why we came to America with a guilt complex, which was shorter than Dovlatov.

“Entering the office,” he wrote, “I greet with the white guard, and I also bow to black.”

About the same in Russia, they treated the Jews, when, apologizing in advance, afraid to offend, but unable to endure, they asked: “Excuse me, what nation will you be?”

With blacks, of course, it is still more complicated, because we have less experience, including linguistic. Somehow we agreed on the clumsy borrowing of the “African American”, but, yielding to the political correct term, every time I think, as if Pushkin would be surprised at this definition.

Today, these minor problems seem to be idyll. How, in fact, everything that was yesterday: the black president, who was chosen by Belaya America two times, and the Oprah Winfrey, the main TV star, who, incidentally, taught the whole country to read Anna Karenina, and 40% of African-Americans in the army, including multi-gas generals, and even my old friend who emigrated from St. Petersburg, who is now three more charming Grandmots are not naked.

I know that such a list resembles the practice of Soviet newspapers, who justified anti -Semitism with ostentatious Jews, exposing them in the window of internationalism. But this African American Board of Honor was enough for me to count: everything was going in the right direction.

I was not right already because white and black America lives even together, but apart.

I was convinced of this when I came to visit the latter - for a violent service in the Negro Church, where Satan was on a tasty stained glass with other white. Having defended it entirely, I, as I was told by satisfied parishioners, who took me to visit my God, became my own, in any case, that Sunday.

We do not know much about each other. And we will not find out soon, because, dividing the public space, we still live in a private and intimate and intimate reinforcement: at home, and at school, and on vacation.

However, what does Cervantes, which was mutilated in San Francisco? And Columbus, whose statue on Columbus Square in New York is guarded by the national guards sent by the governor? And my beloved President Theodor Roosevelt, who was on duty at the entrance to the New York Museum of Natural History for 80 years, which he himself filled with exhibits?

To understand the underlying causes of attacks on stone people in all cities of the West, we must recall the origins of global civilization.

It became possible not because the earth is round, but because it is civilization. Fragile and aggressive immediately, it creates itself at the expense of others - there is nothing more of. Today it is customary to mourn her victims and to get scores with the perpetrators.

At first they were the most obvious-hundreds of monuments to the Generals of the Yuzhany of the Civil War, which the whole country was once proud of. The national memory paid tribute to the heroes on both sides, especially since they often visited classmates and fellow soldiers, veterans of former wars. America did not put the loser of general to the wall, but appointed him by the president of the University of Virginia.

Moreover, the victorious victims intercepted the pre-war myth of the pre-war south from the defeated myth, which became what the Pushkin Golden Age serves us. The average American is still judging by this lost paradise by the most popular film in the history of Hollywood - “Raised by the Wind”, which will now be shown with a repentant comment.

It is believed that the south lost the war, but won the world. Now the time has come for a revenge: they demolish monuments, erase the names, break the confederatic flags. South of the 21st century pays the bills of XIX. Probably, this can be understood - it is not for me to judge, someone else's war.

But what does itement here, I will ask again, Cervantes, which was a slave itself. Why was his monument smeared with scarlet, in the color of blood with paint?

Probably, for those who did this, he is one of the white dead men who created the very civilization that took too many to the side of the road.

Another thing is that without Cervantes there would be no “Don Quixote”, and the whole evolution of the novel would have gone differently and is hardly the best way. The same can be said about everyone who is being persecuted today. Whatever they were guilty (President Jefferson had 60 slaves), we do not love them for this and remember because they were all indispensable. Columbus, obsessed with incorrect geographical calculations, discovered a new light, the existence of which even he himself did not believe. The very bronze Roosevelt on the horse, accompanied by an Indian and African, retained the virgin nature of America for us, enclosing it in national parks.

I am especially sorry for Churchill, who also got it, but already in London. That's what we are all obligated without exception. Do not be his firm determination to resist fascism in those fateful years when Hitler and Stalin were divided into Europe, nothing would prevent the first to attack the second much earlier, not worrying about the war on two fronts.

Even worse, historians say that without Churchill, Nazi Germany would have enough resources and time, so that they, and not the Americans, would create an atomic bomb.

On what scales can the feat of the lonely resistance of the London blitz and the stubborn commitment of Churchill of the British Empire can weigh?

To demolish monuments means leaving a story without a face, giving it, as the Marxists wanted, to the mercy of a soulless need to change formations. Who, one wonders, will like to live in such an impersonal world?

And then I remembered Dzerzhinsky.

There were few days in my life happier when the crowd dumped the idol from the Lubyanka. It was a sweet revenge for his grandfather shot by the Chekists, for the twice mutilated life of his father, for friends who became informers, for the selected country of my language.

In this huge monument, everything was concentrated for which I hated the regime that set him. And I rejoiced at the decisiveness of people who managed to dump the monster, who brought the moths to the whole nation. With my mind, I understood that this Felix was not alive, and not even dead, but an iron, not a real person, but his image. But that day I did not care - evil joined the symbol and foolishly - just so that it was possible to deal with it.

“This affects this,” Comrade Skulptor told me, “the magical nature of our primitive art.”

People have always sculpted the gods, and each monument is an idol who is responsible for the original - both life and death.

I am not at all going to justify those who demolish monuments today. I just want to remember how I felt sorry that I was not among them on that historical day, on the memory of which I got a piece of cement, picked up by friends from a pedestal.

New York