Replace Jefferson Davis with Johnny Joestar in Kentucky State Capitol Rotunda
With the statue of Jefferson Davis permanently removed from the rotunda of the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort there’s now prime real estate available next to ol’ Honest Abe Lincoln.
Who then should replace Davis and be immortalized in these grand halls of democracy?
The choice is obvious: horse racing prodigy Johnny Joestar.
Who is Johnny Joestar you ask? He’s a Kentucky boy born in 1872 and raised in Danville, he’s the son of an aristocratic horse breeder and trainer, and he won the Kentucky Derby at the young age of 16.
As a horse racing star, young Johnny Joestar’s hubris grew far too large and in a tragic incident he was shot in the spine by a young boy, paralyzing Joestar from the waist down.
He lost all his friends and respect he had earned as a jockey, and no one came to visit him while he was hospitalized.
But Johnny Joestar was a fighter. In spite of his paraplegia, he rode yet again in the Steel Ball Run, a long-distance horse race that started in San Diego, CA and ended in New York City.
Facing extreme trials and tribulations, Joestar’s journey during the Steel Ball Run makes him stronger, more confident and a completely transformed person.
He also gained the supernatural ability, what’s known as a Stand, to create spatial wormholes and create infinite rotational energy that defies the laws of gravity; he gains this power by assimilating with the corpse parts of a saint, heavily implied to be Jesus Christ, that are scattered throughout the United States; the real reason behind the Steel Ball Run is so the 23rd President of the United States Funny Valentine can gather all the corpse parts for himself to gain great power and further the interests of the U.S.
But Joestar defeats the president by trapping him in an infinite rotation and despite Valentine’s ability to freely travel across parallel worlds and interact with different versions of himself, the president remains stuck in the rotation in those other worlds too.
Johnny stops the rotation as the president sweet talks him saying he’ll bring back Johnny’s friend Gyro Zeppeli, which the president killed like five minutes ago, from another world if Johnny lets him escape and gather the remaining corpse parts. The president is a liar and pulls a gun on Johnny but Johnny ultimately shoots him first with his fingernail bullets (which is also an ability he has) and Valentine dies.
Johnny Joestar lost the Steel Ball Run but saved the world from maleficent forces who wanted to use the corpse of Jesus Christ for evil.
Now if you’ve made it this far and aren’t totally convinced that Johnny Joestar isn’t the best person to replace Jefferson Davis in the hollowed halls of the Kentucky Capitol then I just don’t know what to tell you.
You may have qualms, of course, with the fact that Johnny Joestar is a fictional character in the long-running JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series, created by Japanese manga author and illustrator Hirohiko Araki, but to that I say Joestar is no more or less fictional than the story that’s been crafted of Jefferson Davis.
For those unaware, Jefferson Davis was born in Fairview, Kentucky, grew up in Mississippi, and he was president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865.
I’m not here to argue whether the Confederacy seceded from the U.S. because of “state’s rights” (i.e. the right to own slaves) (also they seceded to preserve slavery) or the complicity of the Northern states in slavery (they made lots of money off it), but rather the fact that Jefferson Davis was cool enough with slavery to become the president of the states that wanted to keep it.
In a 2000 Baltimore Sun book review of "Jefferson Davis, American,” reviewer Ray Jenkins writes, “In the temple of Southern mythology, Jefferson Davis ranks only behind Robert E. Lee on the scale of gods.”
One doesn’t have to look much further to back that up than the Wikipedia entry “List of memorials to Jefferson Davis” to get a glimpse of how many statues, schools, roads and other miscellaneous honors have been made in Davis’ name. And Confederate statues were never about preserving the history of the Civil War either.
Davis is one of several key players posthumously adapted into The Lost Cause, a false interpretation of the Civil War that seeks to paint the Confederacy in the best possible terms and obscure the history of the war in the process. From the Lost Cause the romanticization of the "Old South" is born creating a nostalgic, rose-tinted view of the South that largely removes slavery from the picture.
Davis’ 1881 publication of “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” was a two-volume defense of the Southern cause and acted largely as apologetic text for the causes (i.e. slavery) that led to and justified the Civil War.
Gaines Foster, professor of history at Louisiana State University, wrote in “Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913” that Davis’ volume Rise and Fall “displayed no ambivalence whatsoever, but instead offered an unrelenting, and seemingly unending, defense of the South.”
He argued the righteousness and legality of secession under a constitution that preserved state sovereignty and maintained that the North had forced the southern states to exercise their sovereignty. He considered slavery a property right and denied that it had been a cause of the war.
The mythology surrounding Davis of him being a hardboiled general or patriotic American just falls flat. Oh and he owned slaves too and said it was “in the interests of blacks to be slaves…”
You know who never owned slaves or fought to keep people enslaved? That’s right: this guy, Johnny Joestar.
Placed in the rotunda in 1936 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Davis was lauded in his plaque as a hero and patriot. The version of Jefferson Davis that stood in the Kentucky Capitol rotunda for 84 years was nothing more than a fictionalized version of the actual man.
So then I humbly ask you why not let a better, kinder, actual fictionalized man who protected the corpse of (assumably) Jesus Christ from evil to be memorialized?
Erect a statue of Johnny Joestar in the Kentucky State Capitol, you cowards.