A marble bust of former Vice President Dick Cheney was unveiled is the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Thursday morning. Attending Cheney for the ceremony were his dark acolytes, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. Roy Blunt from Cheney’s home state of Monsanto and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Lynne Cheney, First Balrog and Concubine of the former leader, shared the purported honor of revealing his grim likeness with their foul spawn, daughter Liz.
Speaking at the event was sculptor William Behrends who described his choice of marble as the medium for representation of Mr. Cheney:
“Marble is magisterial, sepulchral, funereal; it gives no license for levity, much like the former Vice President himself. Moreover, it is a cold material. It is like unto a petrified soul or a distant, protohuman entity who once, long ago, stumbled into a glacial crevasse and was, in time, forgotten – only to slough off the ice millennia later to putrefy and befoul an alpine lake. But it is the whiteness . . . the whiteness of the stone . . . that so perfectly conjures the pure, bloodless hate of all life that quickens the spark of Richard Bruce Cheney. In the Western canon, whiteness recalls the radiance of the fallen Morningstar, the right-hand servant of His Grand Benevolence, our Lord Most High. Morningstar was God’s Vice President, if you will! Today we recall him as Satan-Lucifer – The Morningstar After the Fall.
“Was it not Satan-Lucifer who spat in the face of Love in a soulless quest for personal power? Was it not Satan who walked away from his Noble Lieutenancy to grasp at ungranted authority over mankind while shouting in the face of all that is just that he would rather ‘Rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?'”
Gesturing to Vice President Cheney, Behrends concluded “I put it to you: What other material could so closely encompass the totality of this man’s vacant, truthless meaning to our nation than the blank deafness of stone? The blinding whiteness of an interrogation lamp? What better tribute to Vice President Cheney’s utter disconcern for the hundreds-of-thousands of lives he so coldly, so calculatingly, cast into the pits of loss than a blind visage and an eternally unrepentant, endlessly heartless, impassive glare carved into lifeless dolomite and limestone?
“There are no answers in this sculpture, only a yawning chasm of ‘why?’ As it is with marble, so it is with the man. To look at either is to puzzle upon what Hannah Arendt once referred to as the ‘banality of evil’ compressed into a vaguely human form. If some sense of that emotion comes across to the viewer, then I feel I have carried the weight of the artist’s hard lintel. If not, then I have failed in my quest, but not in my vision.”
Throughout the event, Cheney was seen to furtively scratch at sores upon his wrists and neck. Once, very abruptly, an eight-foot-long, forked- and prehensile tongue darted out of his mouth to snatch what appeared to be a winged cockroach in mid-flight, though there was some speculation that it may have been a Republican staff-member upon whom the former Vice President is rumored to feed. The action seemed more of an unpremeditated twitch than a conscious motion. One member of the press was overheard commenting to a colleague, in hushed tones, that the tongue thing was “a totally classic Cheney move.”
Following the unveiling, and after a brief photo-op, the Vice President was asked for his opinion of the marble countenance, to which Cheney managed his customary sneer, saying only that he is glad he will “glower contemptuously over American ideals for centuries to come.”
When a reporter from the Chicago Tribune attempted to follow-up on the Vice President’s response, Cheney laughed derisively, then exhaled a cloud of ashes before disappearing from sight, leaving only an odor of sulfur to dissipate around the base of the sculpture and then through the Capitol Rotunda itself.
The Capitol Building is open for prearranged tours from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday except for Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Inauguration Day. For more information, visit the Capitol Building website at: www.visitthecapitol.gov.
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