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2.24.05

Pond Scum: Mount Rushmore - Future Terrorist Target of America

By Steve Finbow

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A new exhibition opened a couple of weeks ago at the Royal Academy, “Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years 600-1600.” It is quite astonishing to find out that Tamerlane, Temur the lame, or Tamburlaine, or Timur-i-lang’s Turkic name is Timor. Oh, you get the picture. He had more names than the bastard offspring of Prince and Pamela Anderson. Anyway, Tamerlane ordered the slaughter of up to 90,000 inhabitants of Baghdad; this is equivalent to the total Iraqi deaths in both Gulf Wars. Tamerlane asked each of his soldiers to bring him two heads – a sort of al-Gharib-a-go-go. He then commanded that the heads become part of 22 towers that ringed the city – made from bricks and mortals, I suppose. At night, the warriors illuminated the towers with torches that shone through the skulls. Now, if Marilyn Manson is reading this, I beg you, don’t go speed-dialling your personal architect to work on a copy; and if Jake and Dinos Chapman are reading, ‘Yah-boo,’ old Timor beat you to it. Now, that’s some monument to power.

Six months before 9/11, on March 13th, 2001, the Taliban destroyed two images of the Buddha in Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan, using explosives, tanks, and anti-aircraft weapons. The Taliban did this believing the images to be graven and un-Islamic. During his lifetime, the Buddha – Siddhartha Gautama – forbade the making of icons; the only allowed representation was the reflection of his physog in rippling water. Arguably, the Taliban were executing the Buddha’s wishes by destroying the statues. No doubt al-Qaida believed the twin towers of the World Trade Center to be monuments to Mammon – ‘suck ya money’ rather than Shakyamuni? And that, through a circuitous route from 14th century Uzbekistan, to 6th century Nepal, brings us to 21st century America and the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Art by Nicholas Allanach

When I first saw a photograph of Mount Rushmore, I thought, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, you’re having a laugh.’ It was like looking at the Sphinx but looking at it after six 40-ounce bottles of Olde English and after the Sphinx had been hit four times by ugly lightning. They should let people climb Mount Rushmore – it would look like a lost scene from Land of the Giants. The original idea was to carve the Needles into tall figures – this would have resembled the Bamiyan Buddhas – but the granite was too thin. Congressman: ‘I know how we can get more people to visit the mountains, let’s blow them up and carve faces into them.’

Mount Rushmore got the makeover – a sort of plastic-explosive surgery. Let’s study the faces: George Washington – top honcho of all you tea-dumping moon rapists – wouldn’t it have been great if the sculptors had shown his wooden teeth shoring up the outcrop of his upper lip? Have a look, and see what you think. He looks a tad constipated to me, that or he has just emitted built-up gas and is clenching his carpentered cuspids in embarrassment. Just look at Thomas Jefferson: he’s definitely smelling something. Or is he just downright hoity-toity, with that nose in the air and far-off stare? The Washington/Jefferson pairing reminds me of the Bruce Robinson film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, or the character Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then again, Thomas Jefferson could be George Washington’s conscience. (I’ve just discovered a biography of Jefferson called The American Sphinx – spooky.) Jefferson looks like a vexed father in an Olsen twins sitcom, or one of the Moai statues on Easter Island.

I know as much as any Brit about Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy was a hunter of bears, promoter of American military power, and instigator of American interest in the Panama Canal. I know most about Roosevelt from the fantastic Elmore Leonard book Cuba Libre featuring Teddy and the Rough Riders – a Village People/Cruising-influenced cavalry regiment (I made the last bit up). I like the Teddy sculpture, he looks like he could be in Kings of Leon. Lincoln looks like an Old Testament prophet, but isn’t that a piece of banana hanging out of his beard? It could be King Kong’s petrified bulimic albino brother up there.

What would happen if we Brits were to choose four of our swan-munchers to grace a mountain in the Lake District? Well, one, it would set off a revolution amongst the cagoule-wearing, pipe-smoking, mint-cake-eating ramblers who inhabit that part of Britain. And, two, it’s bloody difficult to think of four swan-swallowers who could fill the spot. Let me have a go: Queen Victoria, who looked like she was chewing rocks; Queen Elizabeth I; Henry VIII, a small man-mountain anyway; and... er... er… My vote would be Richard I, Richard the Lion-heart. He was a sort of medieval George Bush, who spent the years 1191-1192 – more spooky – at war with the Muslims; or maybe Henry V, but replace Muslim with French (I bet George W wishes he could). Well, at least we got two chicks up on the hill, although I wouldn’t bet against Condoleezza being the fifth big-headed American blasted into the mountainside.

Right, this is even spookier; it’s Monday 21st February and I’ve just opened up my Ask Jeeves browser and been informed that it’s President's Day in the US of A – cool. Gutzon Borglum, the man who carved the figures on Mount Rushmore said, “A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.” At the time of the carvings 1927-1939, America was establishing itself as a world power and as the pre-eminent modern civilization; the carvings were equivalent to the Sphinx and pyramids of ancient Egypt. That’s why Mount Rushmore could become a target for terrorists. Think about it: a mountain blasted back to anonymity – if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, the Mohammedans will go to the mountain. Gutzon Borglum said on seeing the mountain “America will march along that skyline.” And Edgar Allen Poe wrote in his poem Tamerlane – spookier still – “We walk’d together on the crown / Of a high mountain which look’d down /Afar from its proud natural towers / Of rock and forest, on the hills – The dwindled hills!”

Hunter S. Thompson took his own life on Sunday 20th February; reports have confirmed that he shot himself in the head. I won’t try to be cheap and create an analogy to the piece above. America has lost one of its most strident, intelligent, and witty critics. Let’s find another mountain – somewhere near Woody Creek – and get Jeff Koons to carve into it the features of Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and…. um… HL Mencken? Mark Twain? I dunno, you choose. And, finally, my favourite HST line: “He got beaten like a redheaded stepchild.”

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right).  He can be contacted here.

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