Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Only democracy can give us the opportunity to think freely about dictatorship

This is a column about statues. Now that I got your attention with that arrogant title, I can tell you the spark to write it, has much humbler origins. It starts with my son’s study abroad in central Europe. Because I lived for two years in Budapest, he asked me what to see in that great city. Whatever the Hungarians got wrong since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transformation of those former Soviet bloc countries, they did one thing very right. They were clever in dealing with their socialist realist art, in particular their statues.