Lady Liberty's message endures

Jay Kuten

WHEN I come home to Whanganui after a time away, I'm immediately struck again by the simple beauty of the long stretch of land from Mt Tongariro to the river mouth and its wanderings between. Then there's the feeling of ease when we finally touch down and are anticipating shortly getting home and to a familiar bed.

The only mildly discordant note comes from those strange erections at the first roundabout beyond the airport, installed by a former mayor, Michael Laws.

Such structures are almost always laden with political meaning. For the life of me, I could never decipher ours except that they resemble those giant scimitars Saddam Hussein planted at the entrance to Baghdad.

What you see first in the way of man-made structures ought to have meaning and, hopefully, one of invitation.

In New York harbour, in the days when people travelled by boat, their first sight was of the colossal Statue of Liberty. She was my first sight when I came as a little boy refugee immigrant to America: big, beautiful, powerful and welcoming. It was some time before I read about her history, after a trip to Paris and the view of her diminutive twin standing in the middle of the river. Before that trip, the only detail confirmation of the statue's welcoming intent were in the lines inscribed on her from a poem by Emma Lazarus, "Give me your tired and your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Before the political implications of that poem as the clarion call to the waves of immigration that transformed the agrarian society that was America before the Civil War to the industrial powerhouse she later became, I was interested in the practical engineering of the statue. What made possible the ultimate construction of a copper-clad colossus of 95 metres was the genius of its interior design by the same man that built a great tower in Paris that bears his name, Eiffel. His interior iron cross-bracing made possible the statue's ability to both hold up the 220,000 pounds of copper in its surface but also enabled the statue to move slightly in the winds that come up from the Atlantic Ocean to the Hudson River.

The statue was originally a gift from France. Its designer, Bartholdi, was imbued with political spirit when he first proposed the statue after the Civil War, as a universal symbol of freedom in recognition of the liberation of the slaves.

Not only has the statue changed physically in response to weather and ageing, more like a living thing than something stolidly immutable, but so have her politics. Along with her physical kinetics, the political shadow she was designed to cast changed also. By the time she was ready to be placed on her pedestal, it was hoped she would inspire the French to call for democracy against the repressive regime of Napoleon III.

Her beckoning to the wave of European immigrants came later, along with the Lazarus poem. It's no surprise, then, that the lady with the golden lamp should figure in the politics of this presidential election.

In their third debate, Hillary Clinton effectively closed a circle of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric combined with his misogyny and alleged predatory conduct towards women. Given the age and generous proportions of Ms Liberty (she was said to have been modelled on Bartholdi's mother), Hillary supposed that Trump would have -- or by his actions, had already -- acted to denigrate the statue by his standards of crude sexist comparison and rate her a "four". It was a clever, calculated ploy, throwing in to question his taste and obliquely his patriotism or belief in the American ideals. Not undeserved.

For this immigrant (me) the statue's always been an eleven plus. Her beauty is also on the inside, lest anyone elected today forget.

�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.