I pass this every day on the way to work. Each time I see it, I swell with a sense of inspiring awe and wonder...by which I mean, inside I'm screaming "WTF!" I see this and it makes me want to eat a hamburger out of sheer spite.
The best way I can think of describing this statue is: Retarded In Bronze...
This statue is here only because Americans - for some reason I can't fathom - have to find foreign "heroes." I guess it's sort of the same mentality that built the "noble savage" image of Native Americans long ago.
Looking for heroes outside our country - in itself - isn't bad, but we've become such a bunch of xenophiliacs since the 1960s that we'll take anything...and Gandhi is a perfect example. Americans like Gandhi for exactly one reason: Because they don't know sh*t about him. (See, I do have a point.)
There's absolutely no reason this Mr. Magoo looking tool should have a statue in DC. In fact, I'll go so far as to say there's some pretty good reasons that this statue should be removed:
1) His revolutionary idea of resisiting the government thru civil disobedience - yeah, he stole that from Henry David Thoreau ( and I don't see any statues of him here);
2) He did NOTHING for this country (somehow I doubt there's a Washington statue in Bombay);
3) He's wearing - essentially - a diaper (get hip to the Bronze Age dude);
4) He didn't really like "Western Civilization" (that includes the US for those who aren't in the know)...if I made the same statements about other cultures/peoples that Gandhi made, SPLC would call it hate-speech (why would any country errect a statue of a foreigner who didn't like them because of who they were? What's next? Bin Laden statue in NYC?);
5) Gandhi quote: "[Africans] are as a rule uncivilised--the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals."
6) Another Gandhi quote: ""We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do... We believe also that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race."
(In case you missed it, there's hypocrisy and stupidity in DC having a statue of an apartheid supporter.)
I say we do something useful with this statue....like melt it down and turn it into pennies. Or better yet commemorative "Eat a cow for Gandhi!" coins. read more