Elegiac tribute at the Statue of Liberty
The Musée d'Orsay is preparing a timely—or perhaps we should say elegiac—exhibition on the origins and significance of the Statue of Liberty in New York. It will be open to the public starting in September and coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. With the new imperial Trump, in the coming months more events may occur that further undermine the symbolism of that work, a gift from France to the young United States on its centennial, and which millions of immigrants saw as a symbol of welcome and hope from Ellis Island, where they would learn whether or not they would be allowed to enter the island.
Today, everyone who arrives in the US is immediately a potential suspect. Ellis Island was far from a pleasant place, but it has become a memorial that, as Georges Perec wrote, "belongs to all those whom intolerance and misery have driven and continue to drive from the land where they grew up." All those whom Trump now wants to expel. To whom does the Statue of Liberty belong? What freedom does it represent in this 21st century? The freedom to crush the weak, to despise the laws, to seize the territories and property of others?
To avoid confusion, the most honest thing would be to tear it down, but honest It's not a Trumpian adjective. Besides, what would we put in its place? A giant Trump, of egocentric proportions, with his mocking and threatening smile? Since no one is going to give it to him—just as they didn't give him the Nobel Peace Prize—we can't rule out him making it himself. It wouldn't be a welcome addition, of course, but rather something to intimidate foreigners and exalt the triumphalist MAGA America that masks glaring inequalities. The Statue of Liberty has suddenly become a romantic anachronism, a symbol of all that has been lost. He won't tear it down, of course. I'm intrigued to think what Trump will do to reclaim it. As for the Ellis Island museum, he could reinterpret it as a fantastical pretrial detention center.
The Paris exhibition will be titled Freedom illuminating the world. But it no longer illuminates him. The political beacons of the 21st century are police, military, and authoritarian. They are nocturnal beacons that pursue real or imagined enemies, it makes no difference. For the vulgar and fanatical Trump and his global far-right friends, the presumption of innocence is for the weak and ineffective. Rule of law? International law? Legality? Justice? Ha! There is no more talk of human rights, fraternity or equality, or even the freedom of nations. The rhetoric is imperial ultranationalism: "We are a superpower and we will behave like a superpower," they say from the White House.
In other words, global impunity, the droit du seigneur. It's not that we are regressing to the 19th century, we are going much further back, to the dark High Middle Ages: I am more powerful and, if I don't like what you do, I can enter your house, kidnap you, and take everything. No higher authority will stop him, whether it's called the UN or whatever. In medieval times, the Pope was a kind of spiritual superpower who mediated or tipped the scales. Today, no one seems capable of stopping Trump. And he knows it, of course.
The statue, the work of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and engineer Gustave Eiffel, took 10 years to erect and was inaugurated in 1886. The goal of the Musée d'Orsay is for the public to understand "the exceptional artistic decisions." Those were different times. Optimism and freedom reigned in the young nation across the Atlantic. Although even then, the Monroe Doctrine, initially conceived against European imperialism in America, had begun to take an expansionist turn toward Mexico and the Caribbean. With the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the US would begin to call itself simply America, appropriating the entire name. The name doesn't make the thing, but it gives clues.
This is what Trump is now reiterating. Always so superlative, he's now directly referring to "our hemisphere." Greenland included. His freedom is to do whatever he wants for the people of Dallas. So what do we do with the statue?
