South Dakota Attitude

And what makes all these South Dakota riffraff think that they have anything that I would want? Am I not just as much a U.S. citizen as any of these high school dropout losers from the most pathetically freezing cold, justly forgotten state of the 50 even if I do live in a sunnier place? South Dakota really is the middle of nowhere and there is nothing there of interest to me, especially as I have never been there and do not remember anyone worth mentioning who ever came from that place to teach me any lessons that I would need to get from them. Basically, South Dakota is on the bottom of the list in terms of being a place to live or having anything to see except maybe Mount Rushmore, and are those faces carved on the cliff the semblance of any South Dakota native? No, obviously not. Those are the great U.S. presidents of the founding of our country whose origins were in the states farther east of the Black Hills of South Dakota, obviously. Yes, the sculptor was Danish but born and raised in the U.S., not some provincial village in Denmark. He was trained in Paris, not in what would have been at the time some provincial backwater arts school of the U.S. But is the artist's face carved on the granite promontory? No, obviously not. No, the true artist would not be so megalomaniacal as to think that the art is all about him. Obviously, the art is saying something about a message that is larger than one artist. The true artist did not even live to see the completion of his work in 1941, having died earlier that year. The true artist knew that the story was something greater, more universally true, than just about him. Artists come and go, they have their seasons in the sun and then they fade away or are fired and sent packing or whatever happens to them because we tired of their whining, grandstanding ways. Their art may live on a while longer or it may not but either way, it was a product of its time, a time that is fast receding into the distant past and out of recent memory.