‘Don’t meet on the level of commonplace’

    

The Independent

The soul hath its senses, like the body, that may be cultivated, enlarged, refined, as itself grows in stature and proportion; and he who cannot appreciate a fine painting or statue, a noble poem, a sweet harmony, a heroic thought, or a disinterested action, or to whom the wisdom of philosophy is but foolishness and babble, and the loftiest truths of less importance than the price of stocks or cotton, or the elevation of baseness to office, merely lives on the level of commonplace, and fitly prides himself upon that inferiority of the soul’s senses, which is the inferiority and imperfect development of the soul itself.

   

Albert Pike

“Perfect Master”

Morals and Dogma

1871

And a fine statue, of eleven feet of bronze atop a 16-foot granite pedestal, it is—particularly now after a restoration that has it looking new.

That rejuvenation was required, in case you didn’t know, because the memorial was vandalized, toppled, and burned five years ago by a pack of feral “racial justice protesters.”

The “news media,” here and abroad, have swamped us in recent hours with their mantra on the statue’s return last Saturday. NBC, BBC, NPR, New York Times, Fox, The Hill, The Washington Post (naturally), and many others want you to know that Bad Orange Man has reinstalled the Confederate general’s statue in our nation’s capital.

This memorial has nothing to do with the Confederacy, the Civil War, slavery, or anything beside its intended purpose of conveying the appreciation and admiration of Scottish Rite Freemasons for Pike, the conservator of that Rite at mid nineteenth century.

It’s always been a matter for debate. Before it was erected the first time—on October 23, 1901–U.S. Army veterans objected, saying it was an insult to all who fought for the righteous cause of the North. Somehow they neglected to vandalize, tear down, and burn the statue.

Still preoccupied with the Confederacy? Maybe President Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, can calm you: “With malice toward none with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I haven’t seen any comment from the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction where, at least on this aspect of Pike, it’s “Albert who?”