Monumental Blunders
The Institutional Role of National Monuments
National monuments are attempts to embody and justify ruling ideologies, often relying on the emotive powers of myth, the innate wonders of the natural landscape, and a bedrock of aesthetic conventions to communicate infinite domain over lands, peoples, and global resources. In the US, national monuments have evolved beyond their initial usefulness as advertisements for governmental credibilty, national history, and economic systems by leaping into the nineties as great ad reps for cars, toothpaste, matresses, headphones, deodorant - just about anything!
Take Mt. Rushmore, for example. The never-completed monument was originally conceptualized as a vehicle for boosting the tourist trade in South Dakota. Built on sacred Lakota land in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, the Mt. Rushmore national monument tries to usurp the natural majesty of the Black Hills to make some distorted statement about US sovereignty over these colonized lands.
Each presidential figurehead carved onto the side of this mountain represents utopian ideals integral to the myth of a United States:
George Washington: The patriarchal 'father' of our country.
Thomas Jefferson: The slave-owning fabricator of our constitution who expanded the U.S. through the Louisiana Purchase.
Abraham Lincoln: The reluctant emancipator.
Theodore Roosevelt: The safari-trekking, cigar-chewing imperialist, friend to the Mt. Rushmore sculptor, who is responsible for the Panama Canal, thereby uniting East with West -- a 'dream' reaching back to another colonizer, Christopher Columbus.
Envisioned to rival Egypt's Great Sphinx or the shrines of Easter Island, Mt. Rushmore is still deemed by the US government and the tourist trade to be the 'shrine of democracy.' Each of the presidents' heads represented a national milestone in the US's short and imperialist history.
The canyon that's home to Mt. Rushmore was also supposed to house a great Hall of Records. The Hall was supposed to be carved into a mountain and inlaid with lapis lazuli, marble, and other semi-precious stones. The Hall was envisioned to contain important documents of importance to arrousing nationalism such as the Declaration of Independence. Other relics from ancient Greece and old Europe would also be housed here in order to establish a legitimizing link to the U.S.
The main purpose of Mt. Rushmore and the never-erected Hall of Records was to create the illusion that the US is part of a long, unbroken history. This myth intended to legitimize the US as a sovereign power while simultaneously burying the bloody reality of widespread genocide waged on the indigenous people whose land, homes and culture were ripped away from them. Denying a culture an historical past dually serves to negate a culture's present or future.
Mt. Rushmore is built on a tradition whereby domination of people and of nature are justified for the national good. This sentiment is best reflected in the words of President Andrew Jackson, who in a speech reminded us that "president's people have the inherent right and capacity to transform nature" if it is in the name of nationalism. In 1830, in support of the Indian Removal Act, and setting the perilous Trail of Tears in motions, he chirped: "Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country...one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth...what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic."
Tapping into this notion that US citizens are the chosen people, Ronald Reagan and his supporters wanted his muppet-like visage carved on to the mountainside. Apparently, Reagan was also seen as another link in an unbroken history of national sovereignty, upheld at the cost of our humanity and the environment.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War blunder, on July 4, 1991, George Bush chose to officially dedicate Mt. Rushmore as a national monument, for it was never dedicated in ceremony due to its perpetual unfinished state. Once again, the carved-up mountainside sculpture, squatting awkwardly on sacred land, served as a great visual backdrop for propagandizing the myth that the US was ushering in a New World Order.
As politically expedient as these public relations maneuvers are, Mt. Rushmore's true cultural clout and monetary worth is in its selling power for a variety of consumer products. Our most powerful sovereigns, multi-national corporations, ubiquitously use Mt. Rushmore in ads, thereby conflating nationalism with consumerism. If you live in the US, take a look around you and think how many times you've seen this image (usually altered with computer graphics and animation) plastered over television ads for cars, toothpaste and insurance.
