Go Retire Psychiatrist

Sena and I have been talking lately about how we would reimagine the Mt. Rushmore monument in South Dakota. We’ve never gone to South Dakota to see it.

We discussed supplanting the current former U.S. Presidents with various other leaders like Helen Keller, Dr. Jonas Salk, Mahatma Ghandi. We had trouble coming up with a fourth.

And a couple of nights ago I was watching TV and saw a couple of shows I’d never seen before. One of them was the 1973 movie, “Soylent Green” and I think the other was a 2020 production called “Seven Wonders of America,” in which I saw only part of the segment on the history of the Mt. Rushmore.

Right away, I know some readers will wonder what possible connection is there between “Soylent Green” and Mt. Rushmore. I think it might be just the spectacle of the complex corruption of New York (and by extension, America) into a dystopian society with a few leaders at the top and “we the people” at the bottom of the food chain—literally. And there is a comparison of Mt. Rushmore to the once mighty but now crumbling ancient pyramids in Egypt.

I could start with a quick and dirty history of the Mt. Rushmore project, which was originally the idea of a S. Dakota historian, Doane Robinson, who, in the 1920s, wanted to shore up the state’s economy by emphasizing tourism because of the flagging agricultural situation.

Robinson had the idea of giant sculptures although they were not U.S. Presidents. He suggested Red Cloud, Custer, Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea. Later, he hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had a more political vision and came up with the idea of carving of American presidents’ heads into Mt. Rushmore.

Borglum’s vison was more along the lines of the Egyptian pyramids, in other words, empire building. The massive sculptures were to send the same message to visitors as the pyramids did. America is a great empire.

There were some problems with getting the land from the Lakota Indians, who say it was stolen. The U.S. Supreme Court evidently agreed. The U.S. offered to pay them millions of dollars for it, but the Lakota didn’t want the money. They wanted the land. It doesn’t sound like the matter is settled.

And Borglum’s vision of the mighty empire project proceeded in fits and starts, depending on government funding, which came—in fits and starts.

The product, “Soylent Green,” is the end result of a great empire’s leaders taking everything from the people and feeding them what you could call animal crackers.

I still can’t think of a fourth sculpture, which reminds me of a line from the movie “Beetlejuice” when Delia Deetz says:

“Why are there only three sculptures? There were four sculptures here. Where’s the fourth? Where’s the fourth sculpture?”

Maybe this is a good place for Shelley’s sonnet:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

–Percy Bysshe Shelley