Never To Be Unseen…

I’ve written before on what I call magic eye racism i.e., a form of racism so prevalent and so pervasive that until it is pointed out to you it’s virtually invisible…

…but once you see it you can never return to a time when you couldn’t see it.

It will always be there now:  Obvious.  Glaring.  In your face.

Recently a similar flash of insight hit me re Mt. Rushmore and Stone Mountain and even the now gone Great Stone Face of New Hampshire:  What’s the difference between them and gang graffiti? 

Seriously.  Answer the damn question, don’t deflect, don’t clutch your pearls.

What’s the difference between carving up somebody else’s mountain to promote the leaders of your group, and Homeboiz97 doing the same with spray cans to the front of your home?

“But we’re honoring our founders!”

What?  And Homeboiz97 aren’t?

“But we’re a great nation!”

Homeboiz97 thinks they’re a great gang -- and really, how “great” is anyone or anything that needs to erect a big grandiose monument to itself?

“But we did it legally!”

And who passed those laws?  You think Homeboiz97 wouldn’t pass their own laws if they could?

“But…but…but we’ve got God on our side!”

Have you see the number of crosses Homeboiz97 wears, or the number of votive candles they burn for their dead?

It’s graffiti, folks.

We went out and screwed up a perfectly good mountain to build a tourist trap in the most remote part of the continental United States just to show the people (and those like them) who really owned the land that we could do whatever we want whenever we want and wherever we want. 

This wasn’t like damming the Colorado or Tennessee rivers in order to control flooding and provide power so millions of people could benefit directly or indirectly from it.

Oh, no; no utilitarian purpose here.  It was built to show who was boss.

Now at this point, many in the cheap seats are saying:  “What about the Washington Monument, hun?  What about the Lincoln Memorial?  Huh?  Huh?”

Fair question, and the answer is those monuments were erected in urban areas on land set aside for such purpose, and were built literally from the ground up, not carved into pristine natural rock.

It’s the difference between Homeboiz97 buying a plot of land and building a clubhouse on it and them tagging your front door.

Which brings us to The Great Stone Face.

Most people are familiar with The Great Stone Face through a blatant piece of propagandistic hagiography of the same name by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This piece of tripe gets fobbed off for generations on unsuspecting students who are told it represents great American literature.

If it does, God save the mark…

What it really presents is as fine an example of Babbitry as one cold hope to encounter in the wild, a false parable that the worthiest person is the one who spends their life in quiet virtue ignoring the fact that the story is a giant competition to who is “best”.

Seriously, Jesus and the Buddha would both say to enter such a contest -- even passively and unwillingly -- automatically disqualifies one.

“The Great Stone Face” is a hack sales job to convince the rubes that they, in their simple, pristine, homespun, brutally unaware prejudices are far, far superior to anyone who looks beyond the cesspool of the local community.

To cop a phrase from Jim Wright, it celebrates those who possess “all the self-awareness of a dog licking its asshole in the middle of Main Street at high noon.”

The plot (such as it is) of “The Great Stone Face” is that said natural rock formation represents a prophecy in stone, anticipating the features of the person destined to be the greatest citizen New Hampshire ever produced.

And in the end, it’s just some nice guy, one of the lumpenproletariat, who is ceded the mantle.

There’s an anecdote related by a 19th  century litterateur (Shelley?  Wilde?  Memory eludes me…)  about a friend who, after finishing his bath, caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he dried off his foot and was struck by the pure, wholesome, unspoiled innocent pose he’s unconsciously assumed coming out of his bath…

…and no matter how hard or how often he tried after that, he could never recapture that moment of innocence again.

The moment he became aware of it, he lost it forever, and all his efforts to duplicate that original pose were for naught.

Same is true for “The Great Stone Face” but reality -- or God…or fate…or karma (take your pick) -- harbors a healthy sense of irony, and on May 3, 2003 the New Hampshire rock formation known as The Great Stone Face…collapsed.

Your hero ain’t coming.

Carving up somebody else’s mountain to prove you’re great is a form of nationalistic self-worship.

Claiming a bunch of rocks is a prophecy honoring one of your own is also a form of self-worship.

The Bible warns against putting faith in false idols, and the graffiti of Homeboize97 possesses one virtue not found in our other examples:  Nobody worships it.

© Buzz Dixon