Robert E Lee

I wish America was on the same time as us. I keep seeing a Donald Trump press conference or tweet before I go to bed and end up having an awful night's sleep filled with horrific dreams.  Last night I dreamt that I was running a seafood restaurant called Old King Creole and I hate fish. My dreams, luckily, aren't as horrific as the reality.

Like everyone else I watched the images coming out of Charlottesville slack-jawed. It seemed like something that should be only seen in the pages of a history book or dystopian novel but there it was, in real life. White (mainly) men, marching, angry, frothing at the mouth, carrying torches, flags emblazoned with swastikas  and chanting "Jews will not replace us,"or "Blood and Soil." Donald Trump blamed the violence on many sides but to us watching at home it looked very one sided.  We saw some people in the crowd fight back but we knew that the car that killed Heather Heyer was driven by someone on the same side as those shouting, "We want our country back." (None of them were Native Americans, surprisingly).

From the beginning of the coverage, I was confused, "What are these people protesting for?" I asked the Long Suffering Husband, "Haven't they got everything anyway?"
The LSH patiently tried to explain their point of view because he always likes to be fair. He thought that they could see things that people not like them were getting to balance stuff out and they were jealous.  I shouted at him.  He said that he didn't agree with them and flounced off upstairs muttering, "I don't know why I bother to talk to you if you're going to be like that. Why ask me a question?"

I wasn't angry at him. Not really.  But I didn't want anyone to make excuses for them.  I did want to understand though and I don't.

President Trump said that they had a permit to protest and I wondered why they would be given such permission.  It seems that  it's all the fault of Robert E Lee.

They were protesting that a statue was going to be taken down.

That seems a reasonable thing to protest about.

"You had people who were very fine on both sides," said the President. I expect some very fine people did decide to protest the tearing down of a statue. I can imagine, as a protector of the arts, doing it myself but if I then found myself in a crowd of people chanting the slogans we heard, I very much doubt I'd stay.

So, who was Robert E Lee and why remove his statue?

He was my orthodontist when I was eleven. I particularly remember his name because my parents snickered, "I can't believe his parents would have called him that."
"You'd think that he'd at least take the E out."
I asked who Robert E Lee was and they gasped, "Don't you know?  What do they teach you at school?" and I was too ashamed to asked more.
I blustered, "Oh, of course, I'd forgotten."
I convinced myself that I knew.
"Robert E Lee Robert E Lee Robert E Lee Robert E Lee," I chanted over and over in my head and an image of a steam train appeared.  (Try it)

I knew, with absolute certainty that Robert E Lee was a steam train that had tried to beat a speed record. I mixed the stories of Stephenson's Rocket and the fatal attempt at a water record in the Bluebird to come up with a story about a steam train that had failed. I knew it had to have been a failure because of the way my parents laughed.

The statue can't have been of a steam train because no one gets that passionate about an inanimate object so it must have been of my orthodontist and I can understand why they want to take it down.  He was a terrible orthodontist.  I had four teeth taken out and it was his job to close the gaps, getting rid of the wonky tooth, caused by overcrowding.  I still have four gaps and the wonky tooth (although I am quite attached to all of them), so I think he must have been a huge failure. Why they ever put it up in the first place, though, is a mystery. It would almost be as silly as erecting a statue in honour of a general on the losing side of a battle 62 years later.