There has been some talk lately about changing Mississippi’s representation at Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Each state contributes two statues of its choosing from among its favorite sons and daughters.
That idea of swapping out Mississippi’s statues emerged, innocently enough, after a Mississippian who had recently visited the Capitol noted that our state’s honorees — Jefferson Davis and J.Z. George — represented to the world Mississippi’s role in the Civil War and the Era of Jim Crow. The visitor suggested it was time for a change.
Although both men were U.S. senators (Davis also served as secretary of war during the Pierce administration), they are better known for their roles in a dark period of our state’s history. Davis was the first president of the Confederacy while George was the principal architect of the state’s 1890 Constitution, a document that approved state-sanctioned racial discrimination and became a model for Jim Crow laws that swept the South and made black Americans second-class citizens for the next 60 years or so.
Any changes of statues would have to be approved by the state legislature and even though our legislators still can’t make up their minds about our state flag and its Confederate imagery, there is some interest among lawmakers in taking up the matter. Heck, at this point the legislators would welcome debate on just about anything that doesn’t involving that great gaping sinkhole that is our state budget. Distractions? Please and thank you!
So the question turns to which two Mississippians we should choose.
Among those suggested are William Faulkner, B.B. King, William Winter, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Stennis, Medgar Evers and many others.
Realistically the people on this list should be competing for one spot, because there is one Mississippian who should have a lock on one of the statues: Elvis Presley
As noted by a comment printed in Thursday’s Dispatch, researchers at M.I.T. have determined that Elvis is the most popular cultural figure of the 20th Century and is 10th on the all-time list dating to 4,000 B.C.
That list contains folks like Mozart, Michelangelo, Bach, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Raphael (not the Ninja Turtle, the painter) and Imhotep, the architect of Egypt’s Great Pyramids or, as Ben Carson refers to them, “The Great Grain Storage Units.”
Even that ranking, I suspect, does not do Elvis justice.
Let’s face it, Imhotep, at No. 9 and just ahead of Elvis on the list, was pretty much a one-trick pony. He was good at triangles. Not impressed.
As for the other musicians, none of them would have made it on American Bandstand.
Dick Clark: “And that was Beethoven’s Fifth! How would you rate it, Cindy?”
Pony-tailed girl in poodle skirt: “I don’t know, Mr. Clark. It had a nice beat, but you couldn’t really dance to it. I’d give it a 3.”
The painters? All brilliant, I admit. But did any of them produce the greatest painting of them all — that is to say “Dogs Playing Poker?” Nope. That was the work of Cassius Coolidge of New York, truly an under-appreciated giant.
So the choice should be obvious.
Let’s face it, nobody would walk across the street to see J.Z. George. Jay Z maybe, but not J.Z. George. I can’t imagine Jeff Davis packs ’em in, either.
Elvis? I suspect within a month, visitors would have won a groove in the tile around his statue.
As many of you know, I grew up in Tupelo, where Elvis was born. Each summer, the town had a little program commemorating the anniversary of his death, and as a teenager my buddies and I would attend the outdoor ceremony, not for the tribute, but to watch hundreds of fair-skinned Japanese and British tourists turn lobster red under the searing sun of a Mississippi August day.
Put an Elvis statue in the Capitol Building, charge $5 bucks a head to pose by it, and we could fund the Border Wall in six months. Everybody wins!
Given our state’s budget situation — we are down to, I think, four highway patrolmen, two social workers and a game warden — there is also an economic factor that favors Elvis as well.
Instead of the expense of commissioning a sculptor, the state could probably convince the city of Tupelo to donate one of the 472 Elvis statutes that currently dot the city landscape.
So this should be a settled matter.
I don’t know who the “other” statue should honor, but there is one clear choice.
Elvis is at the very top of the Cultural Grain Storage Unit.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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