Yikes - a bit of an uproar (justified) over a statue

UPDATED: 03/11/2006 8:00PM From BBC News:

Churchill sculpture sparks uproar
A mental health charity has defended a statue it commissioned of Sir Winston Churchill in a straitjacket.

The statue has been criticised as "absurd and pathetic" by his grandson, Tory MP Nicholas Soames.

Charity Rethink commissioned the 9ft high sculpture, unveiled in Norwich, to highlight the stigma of mental health.

Rethink said the image of Churchill - who suffered bouts of depression - was designed to "portray a more positive image of people with mental illness".

Rethink director of campaigns Paul Corry said Churchill was often used by professional counsellors when talking about depression.

"We did not intend the statue to be offensive in any way," he added.

Christ on a corn dog -- these people work in the fields of mental health. They are supposed to know about what makes people tick and what might deeply offend someone. To top it off, this strata of society is bending over backwards to appease a bunch of medieval terrorists who are actively waging their war on Western society but they trivialize one of the greatest leaders they ever had and the one key person who rescued Great Britain from fascism a mere 60 years ago. Churchill did have debilitating problems with depression -- in his diaries, he writes about his 'little black dog' that followed him around. Anyone researching his life will know about this. To make it a mater of public spectacle shows a stunning lack of common sense and feelings. Those looking to see the content of character need look no further, there is none with these upper-class twits such as MP Ian Gibson in the photo above who said: "critics have 'misinterpreted' the statue". No, critics know exactly what the statue says and they are too polite to do to you what you just did to Churchill. UPDATE: Jen just articulated what was bothering me about this statue. It is a big lie writ large for everyone to see and for them to ultimately draw the wrong conclusion. Churchill suffered from depression but he was never incapacitated by it and he was never institutionalized, never placed in a straightjacket. By contrast, this statue is an honest one: Churchill's contemporary in the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered from Polio at 39 and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. His policies brought America out of the great depression of the 1930's and he was instrumental in getting large amounts of war material to England while we were still officially neutral. When Japan struck Perl Harbor in 1941, Roosevelt ramped up America's economy even further and the rest is history. This attempt of manipulating the historical record by depicting Winston Churchill as someone who was institutionalized and confined to a straitjacket is despicable. I would love to spend about 40 minutes with the low-life that thought up this piece of trash. And people think that Piss Christ is bad art, this puts Andres Serrano on par with Michaelangelo.