EDITOR’S COLUMN: Labor Day with Lenin

If you’re one of those good, white liberals who can’t stomach the thought of statues of Confederate figures remaining erect one moment longer, I urge you strongly to visit Seattle — the place Alaskans go for things like sunshine and even routine medical procedures.

While there, take a trip to the Fremont district. This paragon of gentrification is home to campuses for Google, Amazon, the giant head of a troll carved straight from the rock under an overpass, and a huge, and I mean huge, bronze sculpture of Vladimir Lenin. This image is not the loveable, scholarly Lenin we’re used to seeing images of; Fremont’s is a younger Vlad topped by a tam and leaning forward with all the righteous indignation of the mad-as-hell working man who’s not going to take it anymore.

If this is your first time in Fremont, your first reaction to seeing this monstrosity had better be, “What the hell is that?”

My first visit was last weekend to attend the wedding of my cousin, who last month won a competitive Democratic primary for one of two at large seats on the 9-person Seattle City Council.

Whichever Republican winds up on the ballot against her in November doesn’t figure to have any shot at all. Her biggest challenge in the general figures to come from the left and one or more independent, unabashedly socialist candidates. The thought of Teresa Mosqueda having to defend her progressive bona fides is more than a bit bizarre to me, so bizarre that I couldn’t help but wonder if I hadn’t walked into some political vortex, embodied right here in Fremont where the patriarch of the Bolshevik Revolution lurches, across the intersection from Google offices. In between and all around, hipsters and techies bike their way to brunch in all the idyllic splendor that comes to mind when you hear the term ‘white people problems.’

Fremont wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time it was the neighborhood of the blue collar working man, which makes your first assumption upon seeing the statue that it’s a way for the people who gentrified Fremont to beat themselves up for their colonialism. Maybe it’s an homage of sorts to the neighborhood’s former identity they trampled in the name of modernity and rising property values. Maybe it’s a scapegoat to bear the brunt of their sins, a lightning rod to protect them from any sacred judgment.

Maybe it’s the plot twist in a Twilight Zone episode where the characters truly try to rid themselves of capitalism and consumerism, but in an ironic, hellish twist just wind up wealthier and happier the more they try not to be.

Eventually you bring yourself to read the placard that accompanies the statue, and the story of how Lenin wound up in the heart of Seattle turns out to be rather more accidental and arbitrary.

To sum up the story all-too-quickly: An American serviceman in Slovakia after the fall of the Soviet Empire finds this toppled sculpture in the mud and finds a way to bring it back to his hometown of Seattle. The gentleman also has dreams of opening a Slovakian restaurant in the area and the debts he incurs in pursuing these two passions becomes so massive that by the time he dies in a car accident in 1994, his estate is left in tatters. To save this piece of historical art, the city jumps in and essentially takes the piece off the family’s hands, though the family still maintained ownership of it. Initially a sign was draped across Vlad’s chest saying ‘$150,000 O.B.O.’ Over the years a number of bidders have come in as high as $300,000 most expressing a desire to melt the thing down with all the burning righteousness of people today wishing to do the same to all Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson edifices in the South.

The family said ‘no’ to each of those offers, and today it stands, right across the street from Red Star Tacos, this giant, bronze elephant in the room.

What’s as interesting as the sculpture itself is the story told on the placard. Its tone is so full of adjectives driving home an incessant condemnation of the subject as a bloody dictator who launched an oppressive system of communism that was finally beaten back by the forces of capitalism and — here I quote — ‘whimsy.’

My takeaway was that art isn’t forged, art happens. Good art doesn’t try to be provocative; good art just is.

The story of Lenin in Fremont is one of those magical coincidences, and given our current apoplexy over Confederate images, standing in its presence is powerful.

Whenever there’s outcry to remove Confederate images, conservatives often counter by saying, ‘welp, then we might as well take down statues of Washington and Jefferson, too, because, after all, they owned slaves.’

It’s odd that conservatives, who always profess adherence to objectivism and resistance to moral relativism, don’t see the hypocrisy in making such relativistic arguments, but

many of real left-wing nuts — the kind my cousin will likely have to contend with in November — take the bait every time.

‘Yes! Tear them all down!’ they cry, and where we find ourselves is an irrational impasse. Where we find ourselves is Charlottesville.

What if there’s a third way?

What if instead of erasing the memory of slavery and the civil war as expressed in art, we instead make more art?

Granted, those statues in the South didn’t show up in the accidental way Fremont’s Lenin did, but, as the placard tells it, the Slovakian artist who sculpted it was the one who painted Lenin’s hand blood red as a sort of subliminal protest he could finesse past the Soviet authorities.

Rather than tear down existing statues, why not fortify them with stories that tell the truth about the treason and racism behind the history of the Confederacy and commission more pieces in the vicinity that tell the complete story, all the way up to the present?

And if you must vandalize these pieces of art — and they are art simply by the provocation they engender — why not take a page from the Lenin of Fremont and paint the hands of Confederate heroes blood red?

Or, make like activists did Labor Day weekend, draping the statue in a sheet with the words ‘Dear Mr. President Stop. + Listen’. It’s a little vague and confusing, but constructive destruction all the same.

More art is always the right answer. Never less.