Without any history or documents worthy of reverence, what common values will bind Americans together?
History’s first recorded iconoclast was Avraham Avinu, who destroyed the idols of his father. Avraham’s purpose was positive — he was not just destroying but educating. When his father Terach asked him what had happened to the idols, the Midrash tells us, Avraham replied innocently that the big one (in whose hand he had placed a stick) beat the smaller ones.
Checkmate. To deny that possibility required admitting how ridiculous it was to worship objects of inanimate stone fashioned by man.
The furies of modern iconoclasm have been loosed in both America and Europe, as long-standing statues are pulled from their pedestals and smashed by mobs, and to much less salutary effect. Once loosed, those furies will not be soon put back into the bottle. The renaming of a few Southern army bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Denning — after long-forgotten and mediocre Confederate generals will not suffice for the howling mobs.
They have their sights on far bigger targets: Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, the American founding fathers. Even a statute of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who forced the surrender of the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, was pulled down in San Francisco, along with that of the greatest Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes, who was himself enslaved by Barbary pirates for five years.
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