A True American Monument to Trumpian Times Chief Justice John Roberts Auditions for a Spot on Mount Rushmore 2.0 By Lawrence Weschler

A True American Monument to Trumpian Times
Chief Justice John Roberts Auditions for a Spot on Mount Rushmore 2.0
By Lawrence Weschler
The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizeable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument. Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original, if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it, which they certainly didn’t the first time around.
After all, back in the late 1920s, less than three decades and not 70 miles from the site of the ultimate treachery of the Wounded Knee massacre, that original undertaking to carve the faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt into the side of Mount Rushmore barreled heedlessly along, oblivious to Native American concerns. In the process, it desecrated one of the Sioux’s holiest sites (the stark cliff face the Lakota ironically called the Six Grandfathers) in order to celebrate the leaders of the very nation that had stolen their land and then so savagely repressed them.
Click here to read more of this dispatch. https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176721/tomgram%3A_lawrence_weschler%2C_a_new_mount_rushmore_for_a_world_on_the_brink/#more