The unapproachable Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was raised to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in the natural equality of all people and peoples. Then the Chinese government pulled a fast one on us and put their own perverse mark on Dr. King’s legacy. They provided $25 million to the project and in exchange were given essentially free rein on its design and construction. Hence the selection of Lei Yixin, sculptor of such luminaries as Mao Zedong, to design the memorial. Chinese granite was used for the monument, built by Chinese laborers who were only paid when they returned home. Ah, but this is mere circumstance — let us look at the monument along with a comparable statue (h/t Noah Kristula-Green):

Yes, that is MLK juxtaposed with a memorial to his polar opposite in all respects — North Korean dictator Kim il-Sung. (And this is the refined version of the King memorial. A federal panel rejected Lei’s first attempt — they quite correctly remarked that it “recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”) But the steely glare and inhuman scale stayed.

King, of all American heroes, would have hated his memorial. He never spoke of himself, never considered himself different than others, and certainly never wanted to be worshipped like a demigod. I think the image below much more accurately reflects King’s activity throughout his too-short life: