MOUNT RUSHMORE? MORE LIKE MOUNT RUSHMOPE 💀🇺🇸
Hold up. Y’all aren’t gonna believe what I just saw. I was scrolling TikTok at 3am, eating cold pizza, minding my own business, when a video pops up that literally made me drop my phone. 📱💥
Mount Rushmore. You know, that big rock with the four dead presidents staring into the void? Yeah, that one. Apparently, it’s been slowly turning into a meme IRL and nobody told me. 👀
Let’s break this down because I’m losing my mind.
First of all, did you know that Mount Rushmore is literally a mountain that’s just… falling apart? Like, it’s not built to last forever. The rock has cracks. Big ones. The National Park Service has to send dudes with caulk guns to fill in the gaps every year. CAULK GUNS. For the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Imagine being a president and your legacy is maintained by someone in a hard hat squeezing rubber into your forehead. 💀
And you know what else? The whole thing was supposed to look different. The original plan was to carve the presidents all the way down to their waists. WAISTS. Like imagine a four-story marble torso sticking out of South Dakota. That would’ve been the sickest roadside attraction ever. But nope, they ran out of money and just stopped. So now we got four floating heads. No bodies. Just vibes. 😭
Oh, and the guy who started it? Doane Robinson. He wanted to carve famous Western heroes like Lewis and Clark and Buffalo Bill. But then another dude, Gutzon Borglum, was like “nah let’s do presidents, but also let’s blow up the mountain with dynamite.” And that’s literally what they did. They used dynamite to blast away rock. Like these men did not have OSHA, they had a vision and a bang stick. 💣
Speaking of chaos, did you know the Native American tribes consider the entire Black Hills region sacred? And then this giant white guy shows up with dynamite and carves four white guys into their holy mountain. Yeah, that’s not a good look. The whole thing is built on land that was stolen from the Lakota people after the Treaty of Fort Laramie was violated. The energy is giving “main character syndrome” on a geological scale. 🏔️💔
But wait, it gets worse. The carving itself is literally dangerous. Like, people have died. Workers dangled from ropes with jackhammers. One guy fell and his body was never found. They just kept building. That’s real “no risk, no reward” energy but also “we’re definitely getting sued in heaven” energy. 😰
And the maintenance? Every 10 years, they do a “micro-crack” inspection. They literally climb the noses of the presidents to check for damage. Imagine being that person. “Hey boss, I’m gonna go squeeze into George Washington’s nostril today.” No thank you. 🙅♂️
Also, the heads are not even in the right order. Like, if you look at them left to right, it goes Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln. But that’s not chronological. Washington was first, Jefferson third, Roosevelt 26th, Lincoln 16th. So it’s basically a chaotic playlist with no shuffle button. 🎵
And let’s talk about Teddy Roosevelt’s face. He’s literally the most extra president. He had a pet hyena, a pet badger, and once got shot in the chest and still gave a speech for 90 minutes. His face on Rushmore looks like he’s about to challenge you to a duel over a bad Yelp review. 🦡💥
Now here’s the real tea: Mount Rushmore is slowly being eroded by nature. Wind, rain, ice, all of it. Scientists say the faces will be unrecognizable in about 500,000 years. That’s not long in mountain time. So basically, we’re just watching a slow-motion extinction event for a tourist trap. 📉
But you know what’s even funnier? There’s a Hall of Records behind the heads. Like a hidden vault with the text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and some other documents. It’s like a time capsule for aliens. Imagine aliens landing in 50,000 years and finding a giant stone face and a vault with “We the People.” They’re gonna think we were a civilization of philosophers and then they’ll see our TikTok dances and be like “nope, they were just bored.” 👽📜
Anyway, the point is Mount Rushmore is not just a monument. It’s a fever dream of American ambition, stolen land, dynamite, and really questionable design choices. It’s the physical embodiment of “we did it because we could, not because we should.” 🇺🇸✨
So next time you see a video of Mount Rushmore, remember: those four heads are held together by caulk, bad decisions, and the ghost of a guy with a dynamite fetish. And honestly? That’s the most American thing ever. 💀🤝💥
Final Thoughts
Here’s a personal take in the voice of a seasoned journalist:
After decades of covering monuments that shape our national identity, I’ve come to see Mount Rushmore not as a mere tourist attraction, but as a profound, contradictory mirror held up to America itself. It’s a breathtaking feat of artistry and ambition, yet one carved into sacred Indigenous land—a silent tension between heroic ideals and the brutal history that made them possible. In the end, Rushmore remains a monument not just to four presidents, but to our own enduring struggle to reconcile who we say we are with who we have been.