The recent, laughable, but not unexpected announcement about the orange coprolite’s wish to have his handsome face carved onto Mt. Rushmore – yeah, I know: where are they going to find that much orange paint? – reminded me of a favorite poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley titled “Ozymandias.”
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Colossal wreck”: what a perfect description, not only of that horrible POS in the White House, but also of the condition in which he’ll have left our country once Biden-Harris and the Democratic Senate take over. That colossal wreck will remain Trump’s legacy. Before he’s escorted out of office, though, I can picture him standing, perhaps on top of Lincoln’s head, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, hands on his hips, shouting to the world, “My name is Trump, president of presidents. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Yeah, Donny, we have been looking upon them, and they ain’t pretty.
If, heaven forfend, Trump’s hideous face should ever desecrate the Mt.Rushmore monument, let’s hope that unsightly stone visage of his crumbles to the ground in short order, just as Ozymandias’ monument eventually did in the desert. “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,” with its “sneer of cold command,” at the bottom of Mt. Rushmore.
A footnote in the book (Poetry Out Loud, edited by Robert Alden Rubin) from which I retrieved Shelley’s poem, reads as follows:
“The sculptor sought to deride the emotions of lesser humans in his eternal tribute, but it appears as if Time gets the last laugh.”
And we will be laughing along with Time once Trump has left the building.