In the iconography of the Enlightenment and the American Republic, the symbol of Lady Liberty stands out as the Defender of Freedom
I recently had the opportunity to visit the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to view a rare showing of the etchings by the famous Spanish artist Francisco Goya, the romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th and 20th-century painters.
His series of etchings called The Disasters of War has always caught my fascination as being particularly poignant, especially when I first saw the images during the Vietnam War. Even more so now. Yet seeing the originals up close in person was even more exciting. The one that stood out to me among the many was the image of a woman standing on top of a pile of bodies of the fallen. She is still firing a large canon, titled What Courage. I began to wonder about this image contrasted by all the other pictures of the violence of war only later to come across the image of a woman being mourned with the title Truth Has Died and the companion piece Will She Rise Again
Thinking about this, I remembered the famous French painting by Eugene Delacroix of the bare-breasted woman on the barricades holding the flag of the French Republic, called Liberty Leading the People, in the July 30 revolution that toppled King Charles X. It hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.
My point is that in Western culture, strong women have come to symbolize Liberty, Freedom and Justice of the Enlightenment, which was the foundational philosophy behind our Declaration of Independence and American constitutional democracy. So much so that the Statue of Liberty has become one of the truly iconic images of America along with her sister, the goddess of justice blindfolded and holding the scales in one hand and a sword in the other. This image comes to us from the origin of Lady Justice or Justitia the goddess of justice within Roman mythology. Emperor Augustus introduced Justitia and thus the deity was the youngest in the Roman pantheon.
It has been adopted by almost every Western democracy over the last three centuries. So, the images of Liberty and Justice have been floating around consciousness for over two centuries here in the United States of America. And it was always about defending liberty and freedom against tyrannies. Now I find it symbolically significant if not culturally ironic that a strong independent woman is now leading American patriots against the threat of a Trumpian tyranny. That is the bottom line to this coming election, when you wipe away all the lies, fabrications, and disinformation of the MAGA Republicans. This is, as Kamala Harris has rightly tagged it, a battle for your freedoms against a tyrannical madman.
This is, in fact, a civil war at this point because of the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s continued refusal to accept the results and the peaceful transfer of power. Even after all these months and the lost court cases, he persists. This is truly madness of the highest order and it now has come time for reason to rule over the absurdities of MAGA conspiracies and outright fabrications with a candidate that can effectively speak truth to populist Christian Nationalists.
The fabulist claims that America is and was founded on Christian values is a complete lie and there are entire books that refute the whole bit about Christianity being at the center of either the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. Placing the biblical God above the law is antithetical to the very thinking of the founding fathers, their beliefs in the rights of man, and the inalienable rights of sovereign citizens to determine their form of government. Read The Founding Myth, Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American by Andrew L. Seidel. In his book, he concludes the letters and other documents written by the founders he studied, “Regardless of their personal religious beliefs, the founders chose to safeguard liberty by ‘building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
What we have today is not only an attack on the wall of separation by the white Christian Nationalists, and the Supreme Court, but the elevation of the orange man as some kind of savior of fundamentalist beliefs. As it was explained to me the other day, populist nationalism is in direct opposition to the beliefs of America’s founders. The pro-Trumpian nationalists are not American patriots, they are simply an insurrection, oftentimes waving Confederate flags — the one thing they get right about who they truly are.
Kamala Harris now comes to this battle for freedom standing on the barricades waving the flag of our republic. If that image doesn’t inspire you then I don’t know what will.