America’s foremost heroes are cowboys, soldiers, and innovators. They imposed order on the Wild West. They showed courage on countless battlefields and saved civilization in the Second World War. Armed with a vision for the future and their own two hands, they overpowered a dark and forbidding wilderness to create our modern world. We memorialize their great deeds because strong men inspire strong reactions.
In 1841, Americans were aghast when sculptor Horatio Greenough unveiled the naked splendor of his 12-ton Enthroned Washington, a marble tribute to the Nation’s father and first president. Wearing sandals and only a toga draped over his lap, the sculpture of George Washington caused a stir among members of Congress, who were unable to look past Washington’s exposed nipples, washboard abs, and belly button to see the magic infused into his Zeus-like image. They moved the monument from the Capitol rotunda to the Capitol grounds, where it withstood the wind and rain for 65 years before finding a permanent home within the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Ross Calvin believes times have changed. He wants to install a 350-foot statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan, on top of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. Like the scandalized critics of Horatio Greenough, Calvin’s detractors are numerous. They call his Great Colossus of Prometheus a mix of phallicism and fascism. They claim his vision is too grandiose, too audacious, too difficult to achieve. They have counter-proposed a statue dedicated to Lady Justice as a substitute for Calvin’s monument to chauvinism. But the Denver-based crypto entrepreneur believes President Trump’s America is ready for a powerful, public expression of beauty—one that will serve as a bright, blazing beacon to our latent creative spirit, and stimulate a new generation to dare greatly.
“For the last 100 years, we’ve been living in highly mythological times,” Calvin says in a sprawling interview over several days. “The public has had its creativity so beaten out of them we can barely see it.” He takes inspiration from the story of Prometheus, who took fire from the gods and gave it to mankind so they could survive and flourish in their own civilization. “Prometheus makes man persevering, creative, truth-seeking and forward-moving,” Calvin says. He sees Prometheus as a symbol of America’s regenerative destiny.
Calvin is a rarity in today’s world. He is unapologetically patriotic, provocative, and, like the leading heroes in American history, constantly searching for new frontiers. He grew up playing the piano but insisted on learning the instrument by composing and practicing his own music rather than the work of someone else. Imprinting everything we do with a “powerful, chauvinistic confidence” is the heart of the American project, he says. If we fail to uphold this duty, we forfeit our destiny to the “worldviews of the Chinese Communist Party and bureaucrats in the European Union.” What follows is part three of our conversation. Here are parts one and two.
Your Great Colossus of Prometheus is a pipe dream driven by the whim of one man, Ross Calvin, hellbent on planting his "Lad Licentious" on top of a national park, fixing a monumental eyesore onto the iconic skyline of San Francisco. Defend yourself.
This type of grandiosity is a virtue and modest by comparison to greater men who have achieved far greater things. We know instinctively that the statue’s message calls forth something else which makes us uncomfortable and afraid, so we cower by shooting the messenger. Prometheus represents the fundamental power one recognizes when he looks up at the sky and finds it empty, empty of gods, and knows the full existential weight and responsibility falls on his shoulders. When there is no sky to look up to, it is within us that the universe must be born. The stark, vivid immediacy to find oneself alone in the cosmos is of incredible, brilliant freedom. He sees himself as living within the future. And he knows it falls to him to imprint on this lonely world a sense of meaning. This is the true heart of American Manifest Destiny. It is our job to make this spirit come to life in stone and bronze and futuristic metals. To call it forward out of the hearts of every onlooker.
And so, you will destroy the historic Alcatraz Island along your way, is that what you want?
The current premises of Alcatraz is sacred to nobody. Its dilapidated ruins interest no one, and it would be language fraud to glorify the current state of Alcatraz under the rubric of a “national park.” The site is visited by only about 7 percent of annual tourist traffic to San Francisco—93 percent of tourists ignore Alcatraz.
You claim that a propaganda complex – supported by the political Left and Right – has covered our eyes and plugged our ears for decades, stuffing the cultural void with smug, branded, machine-made artifacts that inspire no one. Explain how this works.
From the Left there is a putrid, sickly warm milk effect on art. There is a foppish tenor to the managerial worldview of the propaganda producer which reflexively fears grit and self-owned determination—a need for all the universe to be a soft-spoken mother. The propaganda complex fundamentally serves effeminate fops living in the ambrosia bosom of the state.
Outside of Maoism of 2020, there is not yet a jackboot approach to desecration of art. There is a reflexive soft cancellation instead. Expressions of dynamism and heroic potency in art are immediately suspect, and the creation of anything serious, powerful, or heroic is labeled as “fascist.” There is a deep, unconsidered anxiety about all forms of confidence. All work must be deliberately understated and stripped of force in order to gain acceptance in the Davos-styled establishment circuit. Only the egalitarian aesthetic slop bucket of formless mass, devoid of hierarchical arrangement and technical skill does not trigger. Even discipline in execution and mastery is an anathema to the equality mongers – they do not fall into the standardized semantics of the Davos-mindset. These tropes and mental artifacts recirculate into “what everyone agrees.” All of these qualities are foreclosed in a subconscious collusive allegiance to establishment left.
Take Hollywood, for example, which was the engine of cultural and religious narrative for a century—it’s synonymous with philistinism. Movie studios famously have such large capital accounts that the only productions their business model allows them to make our giant-budget, safe-bet regurgitations: the Marvel series and endless big budget remakes. In music studios it's the same problem where the mathematically measurable IQ of music across the spectrum has plummeted. No longer are they capable of producing a Sting or a Bruce Springsteen or a Pink Floyd or a Jimi Hendrix, self-contained original artists who, yes, produce their own material for generations. These media corporations are essentially hostile to the humanities, fine arts, culture, and spiritual development.
And the Right has been no less feeble in its efforts to create or sponsor real art that shocks and inspires. Is that your conclusion or do you believe there will be a renaissance?
I believe the Right often sees traditional aesthetics as a kind of bunker under which to hide from space invaders. And it's not a verdict on the beauty of classical aesthetics in the least. It is that the RETVRN faction is not asserting anything of its own. Instead, it's hoping the gravitas of history will carry the day without the responsibility to enroll Americans into anything in particular. And they are political statements almost in their entirety actually. Original artists have their own ethos that is pre-political. Even though this faction is more political than original artists tend to be, they are utterly lazy about identifying the actual cultural and political problems at stake in the country and our civilization.
The president’s executive order to turn all federal buildings into a classical style, for example, is completely desirable but also milquetoast and feeble when it comes to the magnitude of California's, and therefore America’s, cultural challenges. Likewise, suggestions I’ve gotten for a statue of Jesus or Justice show no appreciation for how long the war has already progressed and how far away the battlefield really is. The traditional aesthetics for Right wing art mirror the useless, scripted failure to motivate of a Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney—they are platitudes.
In my opinion, authentic art should be superordinate over politics. But obviously it still has to resonate enough with the patronage to find support. For art to be truly political, patronage networks must have a great deal of political refinement as well. On the Right this refinement is lacking even if the erudition around the subject of classical liberalism and its mirror in neoclassical aesthetics is quite developed. The era of Vance, Hegseth and Gabbard might mark the step-shift moment in political refinement to support art not cadenced by the platitudes of the baby boomer gerontocracy. Combined with Gen Z nationalism, this next 15 years could be the years of greatest vitality in “Right wing political art” in a century, but it won’t look like anything that has come before and likely will not seem Right wing at all.
You want the artist to be a hero of natural selection who uses his superior creative force to topple the politically-manipulated, statist establishment. How will you, Ross Calvin, accomplish this task by reigniting the flame of manifest destiny in the Great Colossus of Prometheus?
This project will be a beacon to popularize a way of thinking about one’s latent, natural creative power—a framework, a lexicon, a mythology and accompanying aesthetics for this can impress on individuals something deep they will not forget. I believe the more complete formation of this psyche is antidote to the slave morality which besets our culture. While it might be modest and inchoate in the beginning, it compounds quickly because great works of beauty created with a pathos toward and admiration for all Americans, made in the public trust, supersede the inferiority of politics. This monument is dedicated to the flame of triumphant beauty in the heart of every American.
Who gave you permission to launch this project? Did the president?
If you want to be a leading American, nobody on the planet can give you permission.
In my life experience, humans largely act in “Epimethean” ways. They defer to others. Almost nothing is the product of a board or a team. Team members defer to the principal. American culture is less this way than all others, but is far from free of this behavior, and in my experience, it has gotten worse over the last 20 years. The ability for multiple principals to act autonomously in development of the same goal is a definitive feature of Western culture. We are losing this.
More critically, our most powerful cultural monuments aren’t statues, republican institutions, or the artifact of money. They are the psychospiritual and mythopoetic power of our youth. I believe this is our highest technology, the most fearsome implement in the arsenal of the West. Our enemies (Zeus-worshiping Bolsheviks) obviously want us to decommission it. They will shoot the messenger all day: “Ross Calvin is some guy with an eyesore vanity project, etc.”
But I also think the coming age of the rediscovery of this arsenal will be a profound time of rightful celebration. This sense of optimism and forward moving confidence is what we’ve forgotten in our culture. Rather than a defining natural property of Man, today we treat it like hubris. We are superstitious against our own agency. They don’t want you to understand. They want you to believe that you have to ask their permission in order to claim your humanity. Martin Luther tore that down. Michelangelo tore that down. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine tore that down. Bach tore that down. Jesus tore that down. Plato tore that down.
And Prometheus tore that down …
Yes.
And as to the greatness of Man’s nature, you can’t tear this down.
John J. Waters is author of the postwar novel River City One (Simon and Schuster, 2023). Adam Ellwanger is a professor at University of Houston – Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. Follow him at @1HereticalTruth on X.
