When Joe the Georgian gets here, we will dance, dance, dance.
Al Stewart: Last Days Of The Century.
Oh, for goodness sakes. What’s the flippin’ big deal about Trump putting his name on the Kennedy Center?
I mean, Kennedy was so last century.
He didn’t even post on social media.
(To be fair, Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet.)
Trump, on the other hand is so today. So happening.
So….well…so us.
We put him where he is. Twice. And he richly deserves every tribute we simpering sycophants can render.
So here’s my modest proposal to pay tribute to our most immodest titan.
He deserves a statue. Towering heroically over the Trump-Whatsisname Center.
A statue of titanic proportions.
One that shows off his enormous, um, hands.
And his invincible right ear.
Hey! Orange is the new bronze, right?
A fitting tribute
And how appropriate. America’s most celebrated performance pol. Looming over America’s once-most celebrated performance center.
How better to memorialize these last days of America’s last century?
Wait! What? Are you kidding Cunningham?
No, I’m serious. And for a very pragmatic reason.
When Trump is finally dragged from the world stage…
As he surely will be.
And when his statue is finally pulled to the ground…
As it surely will be.
The towering titan will…must!…suffer the same fate as the Stalin statue that once cast a shadow over the Bolshoi.
Several years ago, while visiting Russia, I saw some pretty impressive stuff.
The Hermitage. The Kremlin. A Volga so polluted that it literally glowed in the dark.
How to memorialize a monster
But the most impressive thing of all was a statue of Joe The Georgian – Stalin himself – in a leafy park in the very shadows of the Kremlin.
Joe had a broken nose. The result of his earlier, unceremonious toppling after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993.
Ah, but there was to be a second act for our Uncle Joe.
He was eventually put on display, shattered snoze and all, in Moscow’s Art Muzeon Park.
But Joe wasn’t resurrected in all his former glory.
Arrayed around him were hundreds of grotesque stone heads: A sober reminder of the millions of victims who reluctantly aided his relentless march to the top.
And not far away was a similar rendering of Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, as well as any number of other, lesser, co-conspirators.
As I later wrote in a column for The Sun, Lenin was “surrounded by a phalanx of grotesque figures — some kneeling, some writhing in pain, some with empty eyes and twisted mouths.”
“Collectively, they resemble nothing so much as demons of the fiery hell” Joe, Lenin and the rest have “surely been consigned to.”
Said resurrected villains accompanied by the disclaimer: “This work is historically and culturally significant, being the memorial construction of the Soviet era, on the themes of politics and ideology.”
Hence my modest proposal to pay fitting tribute to our own immensely immodest titan.
When the time comes to fess up
Dear America: We played a dirty, dirty trick. On our children. On our grandchildren. Hell, on the entire world!
The very least we can do when our jingoistic vision of Pax Americana collapses under our own hubris…as it surely will..
…is erect a fitting monument of atonement to our MAGA madness.
Like Uncle Joe, our Great Orange Authoritarian deserves to be memorialized in some leafy D.C. park.
Maybe in the shadows of the White House.
And of course, surrounded by his victims.
The children who starved after he cruelly ended USAID.
The migrant families ripped apart by his storm troopers.
The Palestinians slaughtered by his unholy alliance with Netanyahu.
The victims of his capricious air strikes here, there and everywhere.
We owe at least that much to our children. To our grandchildren. Hell, to the world.
The Russians are nothing if not pragmatic,” I wrote in that 2017 Sun column. “And in Muzeon they can teach Americans something about how to memorialize people and events that many of us would just as soon forget.”
But we must never forget what we have wrought, America. No matter how humiliating, how embarrassing, how shameful our last days of the American century history will prove to be.
****
Ron’s disclaimer: It is now Jan. 7. Since the turn of the new year my Freegnv blogging has slowed to a snail’s pace. This is perhaps because I woke up in 2026 feeling depressed and without hope. As though the country I was born into, fought for and loved had become an unrecognizable, alien landscape. That nothing I could say, do or write, could possibly make any difference. But to believe that is to basically surrender to the forces of our collective madness. To lay down and die. And so I must resist, even into my final years. I must write. I must blog. Because I must believe that this country of my birth is still worth fighting for. Hence my own modest contribution to the fight must continue.
FreeGNV 