The default example for destroying cultural heritage sites is always the Taliban's destruction of Bamiyan's buddhist statues, but never Mount Rushmore.
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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.
When you view Mount Rushmore against the background of the sacred Black Hills site which it desecrated, you realize how hideous and pathetic it is. Truly a vulgar monstrosity.
Even before I saw the full black hills, I still disliked mt Rushmore. It was always looked so kitschy and tacky. Learning more about it only increased my hatred towards it.
I saw it in person once, under protest, and mostly what I took away was it looked so small and pathetic which just made it even tackier than I expected
I know these milennials who took a long road trip to see it...in the year of our lord 2023. i was so flabbergasted that anyone would do that on purpose. Like you get how many weeks of vacation and you do...that.
Well, certain groups really really think keeping things “white”is important😒couldn’t do w/ it “darkening” from natural processes & weathering🙄🤮https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/news/carving-preservation-operations.htm
I remember an article of "things you only see photographs of but don't realise how tiny or big they are" and started laughing at how pathetic Mt Rushmore is in context, looks like a key carving on one of those millennial trees.
It’s honestly kind of amazing how small it is. Like all the pictures of it show it up close and huge, and then you pull back and it’s just like this picture frame someone hung on the wall, and the wallpaper is so much more interesting.
easily the most underwhelming supposedly majestic thing I've ever seen. it was, "oh...wow, the pictures really do it justice." it looked exactly as dumb in real life as it does in pictures.
Custer State Park is way more of a magnificent site to behold. You could definitely do so many things around Rapid City and never see Mt. Rushmore and be just fine. There is so much beauty in that area.
It's so perfectly American. Defacing native land and barely a quarter finished at that because we couldn't even committ the money and care to finish it.
It’s the thing I’ve noticed about white American culture. It’s never about building something beautiful, even if misguided or tacky like what some other counties do. It’s all about shitting where somebody else lives and claiming it makes it yours now.
From what I know most Sioux also think this is a travesty, and it's basically just a way for a white family to get rich off Crazy Horse's name at this point.
we were driving to see it but when we caught sight of it we realized that it wasn't gonna look any bigger up close, and parking wasn't cheap. so we just bailed. no regrets. also the area around it was (at the time) an absolute tourist trap shithole, and not in a good way
We drive through that area a few years ago on a summer vacation. The drive we took to get there was absolutely gorgeous. The monument itself was decidedly underwhelming.
I vaguely remember going to a laser light show (set to Pink Floyd?) there and yeah, nice spot but "hey those guys suck" is kind of the background vibe of the whole place
It's an entire re-homed plantation, adjacent a duck boat ride, and the pipes, and a train ride, as attractions. They're rally's regularly. My family has land miles away, owned for over 150yrs. There is nothing nice about the history.
That thing ain't about history. The fact that it continues to exist, not only tolerated but even excused, makes it a monument to how awful people are right now, today.
The KKK fired Borglum over a financial dispute, removed all his work, and ran him out of the state when he wouldn't turn his designs over to them, but he was their original hire for the project.
It would be a shame if someone rolled up with a functional 19th century cannon in the back of their pickup truck and did a bit of old fashioned target practice on that heinous bas relief…
We visited stone mountain on our honeymoon, there was an A4 size piece in the museum on the KKK link and then at night there was a laser light show on the memorial culminating in the horses galloping and the words 'the south will rise again'.
There's a fucked-up thread connecting the two, as well - Gutzon Borglum, the designer of "Mt. Rushmore", was the guy the KKK initially hired to do Stone Mountain before a financial dispute led to him being fired and essentially run out of the state.
This Klansmsn sent him a positive letter, ended up being a convicted white rapist and murderer who was more corrupt and awful than the supposed minorities that he hated https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Stephenson
I went as a kid during a family trip, and aside from the mountain itself there was a fairly pleasant little amusement park (or something along those lines) around the place. As an "art" piece the size makes it pretty impressive, so I get the whys of them building around it.
(But just for the record I liked the stop over in Gettysburg more as we were heading back north. Less miserable, less loud, less self-congratulatory in a way that bothered even child-me.)
This led me down a mid morning rabbit hole explaining how white “journalists” would fabricate stories of blacks raping whites to promote more extrajudicial lynchings 😡
I completely agree with you. It's so small and ugly compared to the natural beauty around it. I'd never seen this angle and it completely changes the context and importance of it. Old dead white men bullshit is littered all over the globe.
Cripes, no wonder it's never photographed in any way but looking almost straight up their noses. It's the only way to make it look impressive instead of a blight on the landscape. (Physical, instead of the moral blight it also is.)
I've always wondered what was the criteria for selecting these specific 4 presidents. Maybe it's obvious to Americans, but to me it seems a bit random.
One was our first president, one wrote the Declaration of Independence, one stewarded us through the American Civil War and freed slaves like the ones the first two owned, and the other… liked national parks a lot?
Teddy R. almost died in Brazil during his amazonic trip and is notorious in Latin America for his "big stick" doctrine. Not fun to be in the business end of said stick.
i've been there, truly one of the most underwhelming things i've ever seen. if you've watched like National Treasure it makes the whole thing look massive, but seeing it irl it's just a tiny little sculpture on a large hill/mountain
Is all that gravel beneath it just the chunks they removed to carve out the faces, and just left it there, or is that part of the natural landscape and just looks a bit off..?
While there's something to be said for redressing the balance, using the same methods to do so (i.e. disfiguring Black Hills) is not without controversy. In addition, some object that Crazy Horse deliberately resisted having his image recorded.
You would have thought they would clean it up and plant some trees, but they looked at it and were like nah this is perfect, let's leave it like this for 100 years
the government pulled funding for it after they got this far and refused to pay for further work or cleanup. it's a big reason why Crazy Horse refuses to take government money, they don't want them to have the ability to yank it
Not to mention, it's one that wasn't even cleaned up after. All those rocks at the base? Literally the discarded rumble from when it was originally chiselled. They never moved it. Quite literally a monument of garbage.
Visited with my folks when I was 7; we stood for the evening program where they pipe ~45 mins of American mythologizing through the PA in the dark and finish by hitting the mountain with floodlights, but it’d been pissing down the whole time so the dry patches under the noses looked like snot.
My wife went as a kid, and has talked about going with our kids I think simply because she went. I've never been, and have zero desire to see it. Would rather spend more time in Yellowstone. Black Hills would be cool, but Rushmore--meh.
as someone who lives close to Mount Rushmore currently, I can testify that any naturally formed mountain, valley, creek, and hill are going to be more interesting, inspiring, and motivating than a stolen rock that was blown up to look like four old men from the past.
It's worth looking at the state of the mountain before it was carved. That vast ugly scree slope below the faces is composed of debris from the carving. They didn't even bother to clean up the site.
I both kinda want to see it but like... I'd like it to be a part of a educational tour that talks about what the site means in reality rather than patriotic bs
TBH it is much less impressive or cool in person than photos. It looks ugly and small against the mountain. Truly a “why did they put this here” moment.
Yeah I don't want to see it because I think it'll be impressive (I personally would be more impressed by seeing the original mountain anyways) but just because I'd want to learn more about what it *should* mean and absorb what we as a nation did instead.
Never fails to humor me that Theodore Roosevelt is considered a conservationist given that he went on a 2 year expedition to Eastern Africa to personally lead the killing of over 10, 000 wildlife species-lions, elephants, rhinos...but OK, I guess. Since it's "over there"
Hopefully one day there'll be people who have enough distance from the whole American enterprise to see how small, tacky, and unworthy of the place it occupied it was
I feel like we don’t see this take enough, tbh. The only positive thing to say about it is it’s SO unimpressive in person it makes most other human-made sites on Earth much MORE impressive, bc you expect them to be totally chintzy, too. IOW, it meant I was just blown away by the St. Louis Arch.
The areas beautiful. Some of my favorite camping areas. But fucking tourist trap if you don’t know where to go. But ya, its location is specific and can’t be understood outside of the context of the so called Great Sioux War. Gold mines done worse probably though (less symbolic though)
In the UK we are driving a railway tunnel for HS2 though the Jurassic Lias with no attempts to find or preserve the fossil heritage there. It’s the same rocks that Mary Anning made her discoveries in but further north.
The Buddhas were carved in much the same way as Mt Rushmore though. I’d bet there were people 1400 years ago who felt the cliffs were sacred and they also shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
It should be included. Though it might also be a mix of the televised destruction of said statues by a group of extremists a lot of the US population would consider as dangerous and scary (imo they def are) and "against our freedom" so emotions can be transfered in a way that a symbol of US-white
hegemony wouldnt.
This destruction of native heritage indended to make us hegemony visible towards the inhabitants of the land & make the powerful feel good about their conquest- acknowledging that might make ppl uncomfortable.
the buddhas are removed enough to stop that discomfort from popping up
That's the problem about religious fundamentalists, only their religious imagery is the right one & they'll destroy or appropriate the other's to praise their gods.
Yeah, I'm not religious or even very spiritual at all, and the first time I was there I got out of the car and immediately thought, "The land hates us here." So we got back in the car and went to Wall Drug instead.
The plowing under of the various platform mounds and towns of the Lower Onk Akimel Valley (now Phoenix) is up there too. Along with the houses on the mountains.
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https://bsky.app/profile/sarahabdallah.bsky.social/post/3lcblu7sres2a
"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.
(Dear NPS: This is NOT an invitation to go back and finish it.)
Besides, as Brazilian maybe I'm not able to figure out how invasive this must have been for the local indigenous traditions.
But certainly must have been.
Some day we should destroy it
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-south-dakota-kristi-noem-25bfcb43be782fda020d6a759d7c6ead
- Lord Dunsany, "The Fall of Babbulkund"
It’s such an arrogant sculpture.
On multiple occasions.
"Nice"? Meh
It's an entire re-homed plantation, adjacent a duck boat ride, and the pipes, and a train ride, as attractions. They're rally's regularly. My family has land miles away, owned for over 150yrs. There is nothing nice about the history.
https://stonemountainpark.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Stephenson
Republicans will straight up lynch you
Democrats will trick you into thinking theyll do anything and then take your money.
That is just wild
https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/blog/john-temple-graves-and-the-southern-race-problem/
Makes you want to apologize forever, even though your parents weren’t even born when it started.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/teddy-roosevelt-deadly-amazon-expecition-180981807/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial#Opposition
But GOD is it ugly and disgusting
Iunno maybe that's just the American HS brainwashing still talking
So sick of white men’s arrogance and feigned privilege.
just taking space aggressively without giving a shit about anyone else. truly a fitting symbol. sadly a fitting symbol
(In passing, one might have thought the conservationist TR would have had better taste than to sign off on this)
absolutely garbage in person on top of desecrating Black Hills
Was this photo taken by you? Or someone else?
This destruction of native heritage indended to make us hegemony visible towards the inhabitants of the land & make the powerful feel good about their conquest- acknowledging that might make ppl uncomfortable.
the buddhas are removed enough to stop that discomfort from popping up
i find it curious since there are so many christian countries that are increasingly theocratic (the us of a being at the forefront)
This could have been avoided but for a Republican Conservofascist President.
Disgusts me every time.