Tag: heroes

Ecce Homo Philadelphiensis

Jonathan Wilson

We’ve had friends visiting from Munich for a few days. This weekend, I offered them an improvised historical walking tour of central Philadelphia.

We wended our way through Independence Square, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Fairmount Park, and my beloved Rittenhouse Square. We stopped there for cheesesteaks—from a street cart, the way Betsy Ross intended—and ate them while listening to buskers and political protesters. At various points, our guests seemed especially interested in Philadelphia’s public monuments, particularly our battalion of statues.

As we headed back toward the car, we passed yet another cluster of Founding Fathers iconography: tributes to Thomas Jefferson, this time seemingly out of nowhere.

Conversation ensued. I think it had been brewing for a while.

Let me tell you, it really focuses the mind when a German observes that your society seems unusually susceptible to hero-worship.

The Washington Monument at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (public domain)

The Imagination Sets the Terms

Jonathan Wilson

Ta-Nehisi Coates in a new interview:

I think we as political writers — and this is one of the reasons why I’ve been making comic books and other things — we can argue with people up one side, and down the other. You confront them with facts, and they’ll just look away. They’ll completely look away.

Because our politics occurs within the imagination of the citizen. If I don’t believe that black people are human, it really doesn’t matter what you say to me about policy. So the question is: How do we decide who gets to be human and who doesn’t? How do we decide who our heroes are, and who our heroes aren’t? All of that is tied together in the stories we tell ourselves. …

Willie Horton, the welfare queen. These things are dangerous because of their impact on policy. But they’re also dangerous because of how they make black people look in the white American imagination. And in some cases, in their own imaginations. Because it’s the imagination that sets the terms for what’s possible in terms of policy. And so popular culture matters. It’s a part of it too.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, interviewed by Eric Levitz in “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is an Optimist Now,” New York, March 18, 2019