According to a NewsSkunk informant embedded with Liberalville law enforcement, Mayor Assisi and administration officials plan to blame the haphazard desecration of statues around the Liberalville area on automatonophobia.
Automatonophobia, the fear of human-like figures such as statues, mannequins, and robots, can cause excessive stress and anxiety in people afflicted with the phobia. Liberalville officials plan to posit that extremist elements of this affected group have lain in waiting for an opportunity to rid Liberalville of its statues. That opportunity arrived with the recent rioting, protests, and looting.
Liberalville officials have been actively seeking a culprit to name for the statue violence since public sentiment changed and began to turn against the desecrators. Initially, Mayor Assisi and officials were eager to appease protesters by ordering the removal of statues of Confederate Civil War figures from American military history displays. This move did not sate protestors who began destroying all Civil War-related statues, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, statues honoring Black regiments who fought for the Union Army, and a memorial to fallen Union soldiers, most of whom were white and died fighting a war that freed Blacks from slavery. When asked to categorize individual statue destructions as righteous indignation, historical ignorance, or vandalism, Assisi gave an incoherent rambling discourse on nuance. He vehemently disagreed with a reporter’s observation that all statues of white people, whether pre-or-post slavery, had either been removed, attacked, or threatened. He noted the statues of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin remained unmolested.
From a political standpoint, the statue destructions put Assisi in a tough position. Assisi sided with protestors on the removal of the Confederate generals, using the opportunity to give speeches where he could be filmed wiping away tears as he relived imagined scenes in his head from two centuries ago. When the same anti-Confederate protestors curiously destroyed statues of Union leaders, thus apparently protesting both sides of the war, Assisi pivoted, calling the anti-racism protestors “anti-war.” This comment prompted a visceral scolding from African-American activist leader Alonzo Ellison, calling for Assisi to resign immediately and the removal of all statues of former slaveholders. Ellison and his followers assembled to tear down a statue of George Washington. They devolved into infighting when a NewsSkunk tweet flashed over cell phones excerpting Ancestry.com data. This data traced Ellison’s family heritage to a plantation owner who was a Free Black and owned dozens of slaves, several of whom were related to Ellison’s rabble-rousers. Ellison, who minutes before was leading chants to “Defund the Police,” was mobbed instantly, locked himself in his shaking van, and frantically called 9-1-1.
With all the chaos swirling around statues, 19th-century mores, historical revisionism and reexamination, and current racial justice issues, Mayor Assisi began looking for an exit from the conversation. The automatonophobia explanation provided him just that opportunity. Assisi is reluctant to criticize racial justice groups, Socialists, Communists, Fascists with non-Fascists group names, anarchists, looters, vandals, Ivy League graduates with Ivy League student debts but high school job skills, arsonists, racial apologists, and nihilists, not because he agrees with them, but because they constitute his voting base.
Despite not having arrested a single individual under the influence of automatonophobia, Assisi held a press conference announcing an executive order declaring automatonophobia a disability, preventing police from arresting those exhibiting automatonophobia-like symptoms, reallocating funding from other needed mental disorder programs, and asking Liberalville residents to have empathy for those affected with the phobia.
When word reached a mob in the process of taking down the Washington statue, protesters paused, now worried about being branded mentally ill. They left unfinished, only having chipped off Washington’s nose and hacking off his two arms. Liberalville Museum of American History curators estimate these actions increased the value of the statue fivefold.
