It Don't Matter To Me

It took seven weeks, but the Trump administration finally did something I actually agree with.

It forced the city of Washington, D.C. to dismantle and remove Black Lives Matter Plaza just north of the White House.

I'm sure I know why Trump wants that public art removed.  You, assuming you've followed my blog for awhile, know why I am glad to see it removed.  Because it's not public art.  It's a piece of overdone messaging.

For those who haven't followed my blog for awhile, let me explain.  Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the painting of the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in big yellow letters on two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest just north of Lafayette Square in response to Trump clearing out with heavy-handed force peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The two blocks were named "Black Lives Matter Plaza" and the big yellow letters were eventually made permanent, with a few cobblestones and bollards installed to make it look like a real plaza.

From the perspective of wanting to use public art to make a statement about police brutality, the whole idea of Black Lives Matter Plaza was asinine.  Painting a slogan in huge letters on a public street is an act of heavy-handed gigantism, the effect having all the subtlety of a fist in the jaw to make sure observers Get It.  The letters themselves are so gargantuan and oversized that they're best visible from a helicopter.  Maybe Mayor Bowser wanted to get Trump's attention when he was airborne in Marine One, but the effect of this stunt sort of lost its resonance when Joe Biden became President and the message Mayor Bowser was sending was an act of preaching to the converted.  The method of messaging overshadowed the message, much like Trump's reaction to the protesters a few days earlier overshadowed the message of law and order that Trump was trying to convey . . . and contradicted it.

And can we agree that the "plaza" itself was ugly?  The design of the plaza that resulted was a civic joke,  the cobblestones and rows of bollards  looking awkward and charmless.  Far from being a real plaza, the name suggesting a pedestrian space, the street was still accessible to motor vehicles.  In addition to being ugly, it was also redundant, as, as noted here before, Lafayette Square - a real plaza - stands between the southern terminus of Sixteenth Street Northwest and the White House.  And finally, there's the name itself.  Black Lives Matter Plaza is named for a slogan.  A good slogan, a meaningful slogan, but a slogan just the same.  I mean, of course, the great plazas of the world - Trafalgar Square, the Place Vendome, the Piazza San Marco . . . Black Lives Matter Plaza.  Not as dumb-sounding as the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, but you get the idea.

Of course the PC crowd is all upset about this.  The CEO of the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters called the dismantling of Black Lives Matter Plaza "historically obscene."  It's obscene to dismantle a "plaza" that existed for less than half a decade?  That's not exactly the same as preserving a house Harriet Tubman once stayed in.  Other defenders of the plaza claim that an important message is being erased.  Uh, can I see you in my office, ladies and gents?  You still have the message.  No one is preventing you from saying the message out loud or continuing the Black Lives Matter movement in other ways.  But painting BLACK LIVES MATTER is big letters on two blocks of a street and naming it Black Lives Matter Plaza - I've said it before, and I'll say it again - does not solve anything.  It just makes people feel better.

Oh yeah, when the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality first started in the mid-2010s, there was the suggestion that their slogan should be "Black Lives Matter, Too," the addition of that fourth word meant to suggest that black Americans were a part of our society rather than a people separate from it. The idea was rejected.  Yeah, that worked out, didn't it?

Mayor Bowser said that the two blocks of the former Black Lives Matter Plaza will be replaced with new murals.  Good, hopefully, they'll be more colorful, more universal, and also more creative that painting giant letters from a cookie-cutter traffic-control font.