Is there nothing these communist left wing Marxists don’t want to cancel anymore? Now, the Statue of Liberty needs to be cancelled according to the left wing, Bezos owned Washington Post or something because the meanings have “overlapped, morphed and risen and fallen in relative importance” over the more than 130 years it has sat in New York Harbor. The article was written by some Marxist who calls himself Philip Kennicott and he claims to be an Art and architecture critic.
“This idea was very appealing to me because it is such a powerful symbol of the friendship between the French and American people,” Étienne says. “And, of course, of the ideas of liberty and freedom, which are always fragile, as we have seen a number of times recently.”
That fragility is seen not just in direct attacks such as the coordinated terrorist strikes in Paris in 2015, and the 9/11 assault on New York, but the continuing efforts by populists and demagogues in both countries to leverage issues of race and immigration against liberal democracies. Indeed, if the statue has had any kind of stable meaning over its lifetime, it is not as a symbol of liberty, but as a symbol of the misuse of liberty — as a hollow promise, unequally distributed and limited in its application to certain groups.
Workers move the statue to ship it to the United States. (© CNAM)
And so it’s not a surprise that the statue would mostly be absent in an exhibition about the iconography of Chicano artists, and missing from the visual culture of other groups whose history of immigration didn’t begin in European countries and flow through Ellis Island in New York Harbor.