Statues have limitations

Being an American of working-class origins, I've lived most of my life among people who say "statue of limitations" instead of "statute of limitations." That's OK. I always know what they mean, and the main purpose of language is for us to know what the person we're talking to wants to say.

I've also lived a lot of my life among statues because, for a long time, no American city could resist the temptation to erect statues of the town's founder or a famous general on the losing side of the Civil War.

That urge is slacking a little now. You see more plaques than you do statues, and if you do see a statue, it seldom looks like anyone. It's far more likely to be a glob of shiny metal or a hunk of stone that looks like the artist never even hit it one good lick with the hammer. This is a result of the some-decades-old movement once called "modern art," a movement intended to help untalented people break into the art market. It worked, too. As proof, consider Andy Warhol, who said that someday everyone would be famous for 15 minutes but whose own fame should have lasted maybe four minutes.

And if it's not globs of shiny metal or plaques, your town may well have invested in "graffiti art," which is neither graffiti nor art, and which looks endlessly, depressingly the same, in a kind of cartoonish Fat Albert as inspiration kind of way.

So, imagine my simple joy when I discovered that a 21-foot bronze statue of pop star Shakira, she of the truthful hips, is now on outdoor display in her hometown of Barranquilla, Colombia.

By the way, American patriots should not feel outdone by Colombia. There is a 26-foot statue of Marilyn Monroe outside a tourism agency in Palm Springs, California, so it's not like America is falling behind in the statue of pop stars race.

The statue shows Shakira with one hip cocked, like she's dancing, which is one of the things she does well. She sings, too.

The great sadness in statues is that, if you wait long enough, people forget who the statue is meant to honor. I once lived in a town that had a statue of a Spanish-American War soldier on the median strip at an intersection near the Chili's. Nearly every person in that town thought the statue was a World War I soldier.

So, while I'm happy for Shakira, and I'm happy for Barranquilla, I know where she's going, and her statue will go along for the ride.

Maybe their ghosts all meet when they're forgotten. Maybe William Penn and the lesser Roman emperors and forgotten gods and Civil War soldiers all get together and visit each other's statues.

"I looked just like that," says a Confederate soldier, looking at his statue. "Until ... "

"Until when?" says the Emperor Vespasian.

"Until Point Lookout," the Confederate soldier says.

And Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, rubs purring against the legs of her statue while St. Sebastian sees his statue shot full of arrows.

It's a good-sized club, the club of the memorialized and forgotten, the gods with no more magic, the statesmen with no earthly state.

"At least you're dancing," the Civil War soldier will tell Shakira in heaven. "I'm always just standing there with my gun, waiting for it to start all over."

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