How Bizarre And Sordid Is This Monument Bullshit?

From Smithsonian Magazine:

The son of polygamist Mormons from Idaho, Borglum had no ties to the Confederacy, but he had white supremacist leanings. In letters he fretted about a “mongrel horde” overrunning the “Nordic” purity of the West, and once said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10.” Above all, he was an opportunist. He aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan, an organization reborn—it had faded after the Civil War—in a torch-light ceremony atop Stone Mountain in 1915. While there isn’t proof that Borglum officially joined the Klan, which helped fund the project, “he nonetheless became deeply involved in Klan politics,” John Taliaferro writes in Great White Fathers, his 2002 history of Mount Rushmore.

Borglum’s decision to work with the Klan wasn’t even a sound business proposition. By the mid-1920s, infighting left the group in disarray and fundraising for the Stone Mountain memorial stalled. Around then, the South Dakota historian behind the Mount Rushmore initiative approached Borglum—an overture that enraged Borglum’s Atlanta backers, who fired him on February 25, 1925. He took an ax to his models for the shrine, and with a posse of locals on his heels, fled to North Carolina.

The Stone Mountain sponsors sandblasted Borglum’s work and hired a new artist, Henry Augustus Lukeman, to execute the memorial, only adding to Borglum’s bitterness. “Every able man in America refused it, and thank God, every Christian,” Borglum later said of Lukeman. “They got a Jew.” (A third sculptor, Walker Kirtland Hancock, completed the memorial in 1972.)

Note the irony of the neo-Confederates sandblasting a "monument".  Not to mention that the racist Borglum turned out to be a Jew-baiter as well. 

I'll note that while the Smithonian article brings out what a sleaze he was, the general tone is more ironic than condemning.  I think it ties in well with Trumps use of the atrocity in South Dakota, his and Borglum's motives in using it are identical.

From supporting the Klan to memorializing Lincoln: What are we to make of that trajectory? Anyone who creates an immensely popular sculpture by dynamiting 450,000 tons of stone from the Black Hills deserves recognition. Taliaferro says we like to think of America as the land of the self-made success, but the “flip side of that coin,” he says, “is that it’s our very selfishness—enlightened, perhaps, but primal in its drive for self-advancement—that is the building block of our red-white-and-blue civilization.” And no one represents that paradox better than Gutzon Borglum.

I'm not inclined to recognize that act as anything but a desecration of a natural wonder held sacred by people from whom it was stolen when gold by white gangsters was unfortunately found there.  It should be as infamous as the Confederate monuments or those which were removed when the Nazis were deposed or Mussolini or the likes of the Ceausescu gangsters. 

It would be ironic if in reaction to Trump's Republican-fascist chicken pox party there last night if it became associated with killing off lots of his supporters.  Though they'll probably spread it to many innocent and even responsible people.   Typhoid Trumpy.