‘Weighted via underground anchor and balanced on a careful mechanism, ‘The Teeter Toppler’ is the statue of a man whose creator understood what it means to seem unlikeable. Handsome and sneering, dressed in a style that indicates influence but isn’t particularly beholden to a single decade, the subject looks as though he’s won a victory that seemed inevitable and a plaque at his feet indicates just what this victory entailed.
This plaque changes.
The artist, or someone with the same sense of humor, switches between plaques that detail fictional, but highly believable, events and philosophies that would cause partisan strife and, when the political divide becomes great, one mob or another marches to ‘The Teeter Toppler’ to pull it down. The forementioned mechanism provides some satisfying resistance to an average mob but eventually allows the statue to be pulled horizontal. The forementioned anchor causes it to rise again, making this something of a practice statue- something of a punching bag- for the modern angry crowd.
A fence was recently erected around ‘The Teeter Toppler,’ the government response to an event in which a man was crushed to death under the statue. He had been the sole counter-protestor at a toppling in which the plaque indicated the statue memorialized those Nazis who ‘turned things around’ and ‘really did us a solid’ in their contributions to the first atomic bomb. ‘The Teeter Toppler’ came down so swiftly, it’s said, that the mechanism underneath brought it up too quickly and failed to stop it from swinging back to the ground in the opposite direction, extinguishing the not-all-Nazis crowd with a single blow.
The fence is largely ignored and the mechanism that holds it steady seems to be degrading. It creaks and tilts and hardly puts up a fight. There is a movement, now, to save ‘The Teeter Toppler,’ effectively fixing it into place. A counter-movement asserts this goes against the very meaning of the thing.
And so the plaques are no longer necessary. And so they no longer appear.
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
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