legacy of half nose and cups - lesson for the future?

Looking out from the saluting Battery in Valetta, Malta there is an amazing view and it is a lovely place to examine the oldest part of the city across the harbour.  I spent the day walking around the ramparts examining statues.  By definition they are there as a kind of legacy.  Erected in memory of an event/person/triumph.  However keeping one’s legacy is a tricky business.  Often history is reviewed and re-written the heroes turn out to be villains and vice versa.  Having a big ass statue you’d think would lend itself to a kind of immortality solid against the barrage of the passage of time.  But when revolutions happen statues are often the first to be hauled down.

So these structures embody more than we may at first sight think.  The public is a fickle beast bowing down to leaders and then in a flash hauling their images into the mud. 

There are degrees of course to such things.  Apart from political expressions/regime change etc there is also the sheer stupid vandalism of the ignorant.  I include, in that bracket, the destruction of The Buddhas of Bamiyan.  These were two monumental statues carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan at an altitude of 2,500 meters (8,202 ft). Built roughly 1500 years ago they were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban after the government declared that they were idols.  You have to just hold your head and groan at times!

In Malta the vandalism is small scale and vaguely amusing at times.  Note this impressive statue has a MacDonald’s cup carefully positioned.

Nearby the statue of another prone figure has been more abused with the statues nose half removed and his head marked with black pen graffiti.

I suspect we erect such things to claim a legacy and those who damage them are trying to make their own cheap mark in history.  A similar but more extreme mindset is found in those who assassinate the famous to earn their place in Wikipedia.  It has ever been so, small minds with aspirations of greatness.  In their ignorance they often leave behind a legacy of their own mindless destructive urges.  As if the world needs more visual reminders of those both high and low that have nothing to celebrate but the violation of person and place. 

The statues that are worth building are the ones that remind us of the loss of life that war brings or those that highlight persecution and real injustice.  They remind us of just how diabolical we humans can be.  A valuable lesson from history that should fuel our desire for a better future.