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.
