The recent controversy over proposals in DC to rename or at least further contextualize (in regard to racism) monuments to political leaders led me to read a brief opinion piece by my recent “rabbi” Charles Krauthammer about Thomas Jefferson that is subtitled “The Sublime Oxymoron.” The Jefferson Memorial is one of the more surprising sites named in proposals the DC government made about renaming or contextualizing.
In this essay first published in 2000, Krauthammer says the complexity of Jefferson “begins, of course, with the central contradiction: prophet of freedom, owner of slaves” but also notes that the writer of the Declaration of Independence deplored in a journal entry that his signature document had a clause condemning African slavery removed at the insistence of Georgia and South Carolina. Jefferson was also conflicted in his writing on policy toward Native Americans, observing in a letter that “after the injuries we have done to them, they cannot love us.” Jefferson nonetheless took a realpolitik approach to Native American policy.
As an oxymoronical character, Jefferson “could not only hold two contradictory ideas in his head, he could also act on both,” Krauthammer claims. The ancient Greek rhetorical term oxymoron is important to my book’s analysis of Irish bulls; it is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, such as “a thunderous silence.”
My broad-brush opinion about revisiting memorials to historical figures with questionable records is that each person has to be considered as a complexity; all of us are. As Hamlet said of his deceased father, “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”