Re: Lady Liberty

On Mar 19, 2025 at 8:06:47 AM PDT, "moviePig" <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 3/18/2025 7:05 PM, Rhino wrote:

 On 2025-03-18 5:59 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

 Well, the French are demanding we give them back the Statue of Liberty
 because
 we have borders and enforce them now, which means we no longer value
 liberty.
 Or something. So the week is starting off great.
 
 I don’t want to give the Statue of Liberty to France, but I do think
 we should
 remove that dumb poem about the ‘huddled masses’ that leftists love to
 cite
 when arguing that America, alone among nations, should have no
 borders, and
 send that over to the Caliphate of France. They can attach it to the
 Eiffel
 Tower or something. America is not an international homeless shelter.
 
 

 Even Emma Lazarus' Wikipedia article describes her as an "activist", a
 term surely unknown in her own time, but presumably indicating their
 approval of her politics, even though she was a Jew from a wealthy New
 York family. This would make the Wikipedia editors enthusiastic about a
 capitalist and a Jew, which is a bit unusual these days....
 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus
 
 As for the statue itself, it would be hilarious to send the French a
 slightly altered Statue of Liberty, one with Liberty holding a hand up
 instead of a torch, with the middle finger of that hand pointed skyward.
 Of course the cost of doing that would be very substantial so I propose
 sending them a photo of the Statue of Liberty, photoshopped in the
 manner I suggested.

 
Umm... I think it was the poem itself, rather than the poet's
background, that captured our imagination and aspiration, even if on
some level we understood that the real world always has a say.  Kind of
a shame to see it ridiculed.

I think it's more of a shame to have seen it turned into official public
policy by the last administration. The nation is not run by sonnet.