Rock Head

For the Fourth of July, Joe Biden offered a message of reconciliation and hope for the future of this nation, recently scarred by COVID-19 and tumult over racial injustice  And then there was Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore.

Trump's speech was a declaration of war against those who would take down Confederate monuments and present a more accurate history of the United States where more women and more people of color are presented was easily most hateful presidential speech of all time.  The historian Henry Steele Commanger once insisted that Ronald Reagan's 1983 anti-Soviet "Evil Empire" speech was the worst presidential speech ever.  Nonsense. Trump's speech Friday night beats Reagan's by a wide margin.  I could only get through a minute of it.

If there's anything positive to be said about the Mount Rushmore event (and I'm stretching it here), it's that the fireworks there didn't start a forest fire or crack any rock in the mountains.  But the fact that people attended the event in great proximity without any protective wear probably means there will be another COVID spike across the country when they go home.

But the most obscene thing about Trump's speech is that he made it at Mount Rushmore, and not for the reason you might think.  See, Mount Rushmore is a part of Native American land, and when the Sioux Nation told Trump not to come for a political rally disguised as a patriotic event, he ignored them.  Protests by the Sioux did nothing to change any minds, but it did enlighten people as to how the area was stolen from the Sioux for oil exploration because treaties promising the Sioux the land were broken (which the Supreme Court recognized in a 1980 decision) and how the indigenous people have been so unfairly wronged.  And it inevitably led to the reconsideration of Mount Rushmore itself - the heads of four white male Presidents carved in to a sacred Sioux mountain for the sake of creating a tourist attraction in South Dakota.  Of the four Presidents, only Theodore Roosevelt had any direct connection to the Dakotas, so the idea of putting the likenesses of leaders of a country younger than the Sioux Nation - and the other original indigenous nations of this continent - suddenly seems far more than merely offensive.  

And Mount Rushmore has not only been criticized for cultural reasons. The late literary scholar Paul Fussell made a very persuasive artistic case against it, comparing it to the Statue of Liberty, which he called kitschy for baring a torch that actually lights up.  "The show off-size and irrelevance of J.G. Borglum's Mount Rushmore, the coarse neo-Egyptian hypertrophy of the whole of operation, make that achievement an easy runner-up to the vulgarities of the Miss Liberty," Fussell wrote.  "Besides constituting a tribute to gigantism - if you can't have quality, get quantity - Borglum's Folly, in its unimaginative representationalism, also celebrates philistine artistic retrogression and reaction. Seen from whatever distance, these four immense heads deliver a message popular with the culturally aggrieved and uneducated: 'Down With Modernism!' It's a native version of Soviet Realism, aimed similarly at our peasant class."

I think we saw that peasant class at Trump's rally.

Anyway, Mount Rushmore is now being called into question. What should be done with it?  Should we destroy it?  Shall we keep it but present it in a different context? Should we stop maintaining it and let it fade away?  One thing we won't likely do is add another face to it.

Least of all the one on the right.