Is Mt. Rushmore American or unAmerican?

Zomby Woof

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Sun Mar-06-05 12:27 PM
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Poll question: Is Mt. Rushmore American or unAmerican?

As my two posts in the 'Confederate flag' thread attest, that is an issue in which I just do not get overly emotional. The flag is a symbol, and I am not terribly interested in symbols and how they are interpreted, accurately or not. Actions, not symbols, cause real harm.

So, I am interested in active desecrations and acts of hate or disrespect, and folks, the much-revered national monument known as "Mt. Rushmore" seriously qualifies on several levels as a hateful, disrespectful monument. Most certainly, a different kind of monument than most Americans view it.

The mountain which sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved those four dead white politicians onto is sacred to the Lakota Sioux. This to me is akin to carving a monument to Hitler on the Wailing Wall. But since marginalizing Native American religion and culture is as American as apple pie and cheating on your taxes, I daresay "Mt. Rushmore" is very American, indeed. Just not in the good way.

Borglum, in accordance with this very American streak, chose four of the most commonly revered dead presidents in our history up to this point (and no doubt, you have heard of the Reagan-worshippers wanting to add his wretched countenance to the façade). All four of them played a part in the genocide or marginalization of Native Americans. Consider Jefferson's vicious slander in the Declaration of Independence, or even Lincoln, whom even I am not above admiration for in many ways, ordered the suppression of many so-called "rebellions", which amounted to wholesale slaughter of tribal bands.

Then there is the irony of Theodore Roosevelt's likeness, of whose phallic ('speak softly and carry a big stick') foreign policy doubtlessly appealed to the hypernationalist Borglum, being carved into a mountainside which was part of the naturally beautiful western landscape TR spent so much of his career trying to preserve.

But if you are still not convinced by the case I have made so far, consider that the self-styled patriot who was Gutzon Borglum, went on to some prominence in the highest echelons of none other than the Ku Klux Klan. He also got started on the Confederate memorial to their most-revered generals, now carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia. The irony that Borglum revered Lincoln (and even named his son after him) is almost too much to fathom. But isn't this kind of contradiction a very American trait as well?

So I cannot get frothed-up over the Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (even as Borglum himself probably admired it). Instead, I get frothed-up at the active, willful, wholehearted desecration of Lakota Sioux sacred land (or just in itself the natural beauty of South Dakota's Black Hills, and the Georgia countryside), and the glorification of dead white men who cared not a whit for the well-being and freedom of the peoples they sought to replace. Whether the glorified were presidents, or the generals who rebelled against the so-called founding principles of three of those presidents - it is desecration on several levels. For centuries hence, this ugliness is embodied with the likenesses sculpted by way of that "marvelous engineering feat" doubling as a mediocre rock-carving.

Piss on the memory of Gutzon Borglum and his shitty mountanside sculptures, which reveal the true ugliness of America's worst flaws, in red, white, and blue bunting, so that it is palatable to the masses.