Who will stand on Bristol’s free pedestal?
The British have debated for decades over who should occupy the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square, showing a perhaps uncharacteristic reticence in the Vatican mode of waiting a few centuries before canonisation. Who knows, perhaps we might get lumbered with a statue of Saint Jimmy Saville? Now Bristol has a free spot.
It sounds like the disposition of the late Massah Colston has now been resolved. He will not be sleeping wit’ da fishes as a tourist attraction for divers in Northern Europe’s increasingly tropical waters, but he will be consigned to a museum as a study in history rather than dominating a street in its celebration. This leaves a plinth free, I believe.
There are many figures we could choose to celebrate. My own heroes are Churchill, Gandhi and Mandela. Bristol University already had a Mandela Bar, as I remember, but a figure more fitting to the age of BLM and Me Too is not easily thought of. Churchill hardly needs more recognition, as the English never seem to get over the war. The “Dambusters” and “Great Escape” are Christmas standards, and even the mop-headed quarterwit at the country’s helm aspires, albeit without much serious hope, of being his avatar in our time. And in the days of BLM even Churchill is rightly controversial.
Gandhi would seem a shoe-in, but there is his role in apartheid South Africa. The tension with the Mandela Bar would seem irresolvable.
Of my heroes, therefore, Mandela would seem the best suited to Bristol. However, my heroes are not everyone’s. I would like, therefore, to float a fourth candidate. This man is not a political figure as such, but he is one of Britain’s most loved, universally recognisable and has endured a great deal before rising to the top as a person of colour. No, not Obama, although he’d be a good Fifth Element in this amalgam. But this list is already too long to remain exclusively male, so Michelle might be the better addition.
The man, sorry, that I propose is greeted ecstatically when he appears in Britain, and was visibly taken aback at first, as he was not led to expect such a reaction in his own country. As such, he has not moved mountains to make Britain a more tolerant or less racist place. His sheer popularity, however, indicates that it has already taken its own steps, and is a country where one in four marriages is already mixed and, despite Brexit, racism provokes open disgust in many quarters. And in our star-addled culture, he’s a mushroom-cloud laying motherfucker, motherfucker.
The figure I propose is Samuel L. Jackson.
