The Television Antenna and Bust of a Founding Father

I drove past a homeless encampment. Domiciles that defied description flashed before my eyes. Some were like centaurs in that they were half of something and half of something else. Such as: half tent, half truck; half RV, half shipping crate; half plywood shack, half tepee; half tarp, half dog house. You get the idea.

Something attached to the roof of one of the domiciles caught my attention. I did a double take. It was a rooftop television antenna, a real behemoth, something akin to a rack of 12-point buck. Pure analog from the 1970s that beamed in Walter Cronkite and Charlie's Angels. How it came to be installed there, well...no matter. The better question is why install a non-functioning television antenna atop a domicile in a homeless encampment.

The same question might be asked of why install an electric light fixture over the door of a decrepit RV in an encampment when there is no power to the RV and there never will be.

Consider the antenna:

Was it visual art of some kind?

Was it performance art of some kind?

Was it insanity?

Was it the result of drug abuse?

Was it cultural commentary?

Was it nostalgia?

Was it hope of some kind?

Was it nothing?

Some months after seeing the television antenna and still thinking about it every time I saw an ancient antenna still atop a roof, I was walking through a different homeless encampment when something 20 feet away, resting on the hood of a bombed-out sedan, arrested my attention. I stopped and looked.

It was a small bronze sculpture, football-size, a bust, that I could only see at profile. It had the unmistakable presence of a Founding Father (the wig, you know?) but I couldn't nail him down. Washington? Jefferson? Franklin? Adams? I thought about walking up for a confirmation, but demurred.

How in the world had the sculpture come to rest where it rested? Most likely, a resident of the encampment had seen the forlorn Founding Father on a nearby sidewalk with a sign resting near it that said FREE and rescued our hero from a landfill. One can only presume the sculpture's previous owner had decided that the display of a slave holding Founding Father in the living room or office just didn't square with the new progressive zeitgeist is, whatever that is. Progressives don't even know.

Still, I wondered why the display on the hood of a bombed-out sedan in a homeless encampment?

Consider the sculpture:

Was it mere decoration?

Was it a political statement?

Was it something used for target practice?

What would the Founding Father have thought of his likeness in juxtaposition to the staggering squalor of this encampment?

What would the Founding Father have thought of the nation he helped create?

Did the residents of the encampment prop up sculpture in a lawn chair and mock converse with it around the fire while getting fucked up on malt liquor or meth or both at the same time?

Did they pass around the Founding Father the fire like the feral kids on the island did with the conch in Lord of Flies?

Is the display of the sculpture the sonic equivalent of Miles Davis' “So What?” (I'm listening to that tune as I write this.)

Such sights defy rational explanation. There is something mightily non-linear going on with them, something in the sub conscious, almost like a dream, a nightmare, or something entirely new and rippling to the interior of some Americans' lives. It cannot be solely attributed to mental illness and derangement by vicious drugs and any politician or any advocate or any policy expert who believes that isn't thinking hard enough and not asking the right questions.