Monuments embody invented pasts that crack under present pressures

Evidence

One June 9, 2020, protestors chopped off the head of the Columbus statue in Boston, and in the coming days, sought to demystify the history of lies that it stood atop. Columbus, like the rows of statues raised across the country, embodied an “invented past.” A past, in the words of James Baldwin, an American founding father who has yet to have a statue erected in his honor, “cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1104

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bounds the term ‘invented past’ with Baldwin’s image of clay in a drought.
• XREF: connects to: Societies become historical by reinterpreting the past as memorial, not merely by having one; Mainstream rock festivals now function as necrophiliac museums of past forms — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 791