These are hard times for monuments. Confederate statues have been coming down. Renaming places and institutions identified with racists and traitors has become a blazing controversy. The current occupant of the White House is, as one would expect, opposed to relabeling military installations that bear names of persons who took up arms against the United States.
Christopher Columbus has been a target for years. Revisionist history depicts him not as an heroic discoverer of America but as a brutal imperialist who initiated the near extinction of indigenous populations.
The current-day attacks on monuments to imperialists and racists include the Pioneer statues at the University of Oregon. The Pioneer was pulled off its pedestal and dragged to the entrance of the U of O administration building. The companion Pioneer Mother statue, seated in repose at a serene corner of the campus, was also pulled down.
Here in Portland, the unrest precipitated by the murder of George Floyd and the demonstrations for Black Lives Matter have been hijacked on many nights by white kids calling themselves the Youth Liberation Front. Their mission appears to be property damage and confrontations with law enforcement. They took the bait of the federal secret-police deployment and responded exactly how Department of Homeland Security wanted, providing exciting videos for newscasts.
For a hundred and twenty years a stately elk, cast-in-bronze, has kept sentinel in the middle of Portland’s Main Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenues downtown. The elk stands on a plinth that rises from a basin and its fountain. The Multnomah County Justice Center and the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, prime targets of the nightly mayhem, are each across the street from the elk.
The elk statue has been a nightly target for vandals, its basin the site of bonfires. When the city removed the statue for its preservation, rioters continued to set blazes in the fountain and regularly cover it with fresh graffiti. The city has since removed the fountain and basin. All that remain is a small mound of gravel.
Elk have committed no known acts of racism.
