Hey everyone today on the podcast something a little bit different I'm going to release the audio version of American Monument

Some of you have already seen this documentary, but I know many of you are working class and you don't really have a lot of time and

you can get a lot of the same information by just listening now it's a lot better when you can see

who's speaking and some of the B-roll and some of the events that are being described or talked about, but

you can still hear the information that people who were

interviewed give in this important documentary and it's been on YouTube now for, I believe, at least six months, maybe a little longer than that.

But I never released it on a podcast. So here is, without further ado, American Monument.

Monuments have been important for not just centuries, but millennia. It is the way that human beings make permanent

something that's important to us because people forget. Monuments are the

ultimate example of a way that you can mark something or someone as important.

We have to understand how central it is to our cultural memory.

Cultural memory is something that some people are trying to erase, that's incredibly dangerous.

If you don't really understand history or you don't know history, you're at a tremendous disadvantage on a number of levels.

Art and particularly monuments are a way that we remember.

When somebody decides, I don't like that, let's tear it down, I think it

ought to be a really, really high bar before we tear down something, even if we

don't like it, because it's good to remember things in some

cases particularly because we don't like it or because it's complicated.

So when people start actually tearing down valuable, beautiful, expensive, ancient or venerable

monuments, it's a bad sign in the culture that says that we don't value history, we want to rewrite history.

You have people who don't really have a historical sense trying to tell you what they think is the only thing that matters.

So by wiping away this stuff, they give you no reference points.

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