The MAGA effort to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr has been a miserable flop, as a sculptor in New York learned the hard way. Sergio Furnari says he spent $100,000 to build a life-size statue of Kirk, only to find that nobody wants it.
That figure seems inflated – the statue is made of steel and resin, not bronze, and the figure he cited included the supposed value of his labor – but what struck me was the the tepid reception from the public. The online fundraising campaign he set up, aiming to raise $150,000, had raised $1,400 through last Thursday. The major donors he hoped for haven’t materialized. He said a lot people told him they will piss on the statue when he sets it up in Times Square, as he plans to do in September.
I’m guessing Furnari, like so many right-wingers, is a victim of social media algorithms that feed MAGAts a steady diet of alternate reality. He thought Kirk was some sainted figure he could make bank on. IRL most people have long since moved on, and the right-wing canonization campaign has come a cropper. People who were fired for pointing out that Kirk was a blatant racist have won six- and seven-figure settlements for violations of their First Amendment rights. And online, the kidz have turned Kirk into a punchline.
Furnari didn’t get the reaction They Might Be Giants described in “The Statue Got Me High” from their 1992 album “Apollo 18.” John Linnell (the skinny one) wrote the lyrics, which tell a simple story:
There’s a guy who has this encounter with a statue of some kind, and it makes his head explode. So that’s really all there is to the lyrics of the song. The song is not about hard drugs, and it’s not taking an advocacy position either. It’s just describing this particular experience which no one has ever had.
Linnell later said it was based on Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” but “I didn’t know it at the time.” In the opera, the title character not only talks to a statue – a grave decoration for a man he killed in a duel – he invites it to dinner, and the statue accepts.
