In the fame-game, the more your statue gets pulled down the more important you must have been, and the more famous you become again -- as a de-platformed statue.
Historic figures were given statue-status ("standing") because contemporaries or descendants wanted to com-memorate ("remember together") their heroes.
You'd think remembering together would be something any group would be free to do, in a free society. We're also free to forget, but paradoxically the more publicity the statue-destruction causes, the less forgotten a historic figure will be. John A. Macdonald has more in the Victoria BC news this week than he has for years -- given the scarcity of History classes in today's schools.
Indeed, if a statue hasn't been pushed over or had paint thrown on it, the person it represented, were s/he alive to know it, might feel quite rejected. Enemies confer significance; only the most banal non-doer never made any. There's something to be said though for anonymity, and probably more than a few of the commemorated wish they'd never become so famous. (see John A. Macdonald's imagined reaction to his statue-removal here: https://satiroceneage.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-john-macdonald-thinks-about.html )
Some of those newly reviled by ideologues would probably be happy to Rest In Peace (obscurity) but they're paradoxically being revived. When they lower your memorial stone they raise your profile. Maybe the long-forgotten deceased are guffawing in their graves. Others might think, like the poet Alexander Pope:
Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, day and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lay
We could think of statue-tackle sport this way:
Manufacturing new consent,
new ideologies have their say,
other figures from the past today
are the ones raised high, to stand (to "stare")
from an unaccustomed height
These icons make a gaudy sight
but don't take them for granite,
they too will stand on feet of clay
and topple like last year's heroes,
media darlings and falling starlets ...
The new leading men are placed on sand
as shifty as the ground of Ozymand
(NOT by Alexander Pope)
SBJ
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