re: The human urge to leave monuments behind - why does it exist and who is the champion at it

“You only live as long as last person who remembers you”

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The United States.

After the sun has bloated itself, consuming the Earth and then going out in style with a supernova, the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts will be all that is left of mankind.

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Ohh, I didn't think of that. I change my answer. frick the Soviets.

But the sun won't go supernova.

Pride.

The quest for greatness. Live greatly. Do great works. Accomplish perfection. You know, the obvious normal shite.

quote:

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Confederate monuments didn't spike in creation until the 1950s and 60s.

Gee, I wonder why that was.

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Wrong. Most monuments both Union and Confederate were put up in the 1890s and 1900s. They were put up because that generation of veterans were beginning to pass away and their descendants wanted to honor them and there was a sense of unity in the United States.

There was a spike in the 50s and 60s because of the 100 year anniversary of the war.

Before Judaism and the idea that humans might have an eternal life after bodily death on earth, there was a common idea that one lived forever as long as their name was read or spoken aloud. Thus steleae and other monuments with names on them to provide said immortality. Many wish to be remembered and to live on after bodily death.

This is really just an animal thing in general. Dogs piss all over everything as their monuments. Bears run their backs against trees. We’re territorial animals, which is why communism will never work.

Did anybody else read the title of this post as the biological urge to shite?

He had a dream to be carved as an angry white man.

Ozymandias Launch Audio in a New Window

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”