The new Martin Luther King memorial on the government mall is striking, but the untoward size, in the usual and ancient tradition, turns the man into a god, to divinize the regime. See the awful Lincoln memorial, fascisti and all, and the chilling, Egyptian-scale Mt. Rushmore, for example. There is the also the usual anti-Chinese protectionism, because the sculptor was Lei Yixin from Changsha, Hunan province. One disappointed competitor, Ed Dwight, a sculptor from Denver, said “Dr King would be ‘turning over in his grave’ if he knew his memorial had been made by someone living under a Communist regime.” In fact, today’s China might be too capitalist for MLK.
1:33 pm on August 23, 2011
