The Ew Colossus

“I could not care less about immigration,” says Xeno Pyle, a conceptual artist working out of his mother’s garage in North Park, “though I suppose some people could look at my installation ‘That’s No Lady’ and suppose otherwise. The Statue of Liberty — symbol of America’s promise to losers everywhere that if they can’t make it where they were born, they can maybe get a second shot at life here — now brought low by our government’s actions at our southern border. A simplistic reading, to be sure, but not entirely without cause.”

“Still,” insists Pyle, “my interest is not in the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ mentioned in Emma Lazarus’ Petrarchan sonnet ‘The New Colossus,’ which, as every schoolboy knows, is the poem she wrote praising the Statue in an effort to raise money for the construction of its pedestal. No, my concern is the ‘wretched refuse’ of the ‘teeming shore’ mentioned in the poem’s next line. In 2017, a burst pipe led to 28 million gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana river and up the American coastline. And the collector pipe that ruptured on December 11 has already surpassed that. Tucker Carlson took a lot of heat recently for saying that foreigners made our country dirtier. But we’ve got the closed beaches to prove it, and ‘That’s No Lady’ is intended to bear witness to what happens when you allow wretched refuse to flow unchecked over your borders.”