{"id":176069,"date":"2020-09-12T18:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-12T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/12\/very-fine-people-doing-their-job\/"},"modified":"2020-09-12T18:11:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-12T23:11:00","slug":"very-fine-people-doing-their-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/12\/very-fine-people-doing-their-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Very Fine People Doing Their Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am referring, of course, to the construction workers and engineers who have just removed a Confederate memorial statue from in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They are doing God’s work:<\/p>\n

Engineers in Charlottesville, Virginia worked to remove a 900lb Confederate statue on Saturday, a moment of symbolic reckoning in the university town that was rocked by a white supremacist march<\/a> in August 2017. <\/p>\n

The statue taken down<\/a> was not that of Robert E Lee, which extremists said they were defending in clashes which led to the murder of a counter-protester<\/a>. Instead, Charlottesville removed a bronze figure of a Confederate soldier, known as \u201cAt Ready\u201d, that has stood for 111 years outside the Albemarle county courthouse. <\/p>\n

Around 100 people cheered from behind barricades as bronze plaques were taken off the sides of the monument and a cannon was removed, the Washington Post reported.<\/a> Police stood by. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Donald Trump provoked outrage in 2017 when he said there were \u201cvery fine people<\/i><\/b>\u201d on both sides of clashes in which Heather Heyer, 32<\/a>, was killed when an extremist drove his car into a crowd. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Albemarle is the first locality to use a process for removing statues that was approved by the state\u2019s general assembly. But activists have said they are disappointed that \u201cAt the Ready\u201d will be re-erected elsewhere. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel like it\u2019s just basically toxic waste disposal in another community,\u201d Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor at the University of Virginia<\/a>, told the Post. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine<\/i>) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am referring, of course, to the construction workers and engineers who have just removed a Confederate memorial statue from in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse. They are doing God’s work: Engineers in Charlottesville, Virginia worked to remove a 900lb Confederate statue on Saturday, a moment of symbolic reckoning in the university town that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[506,389,374,398],"class_list":["post-176069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bigotry","tag-history","tag-politics","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}