“THE TREE OF LIBERTY MUST BE REFRESHED FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS.”

This is what Thomas Jefferson once said in the universe of Monument Mythos: an analog horror ARG about lovecraftian monsters that come out of the American monuments that metaphorically exist in our reality and are fed with millions of innocent people every single day.

Why do we build monuments?

We build them to remember, they say; however, we actually build them to forget. Quoting the Polish sociologist Lech Nijakowski (2006), monuments do not merely commemorate the past; they actively claim territory and impose meaning. In a summary, they are built not just to commemorate the past but to commemorate and weaponize one past; their past. They mythologize and exaggerate a nationalist vision of a past that reduces history and its complexities into pride and enforce a hegemonic narrative of a chosen, liberated people.

But beneath this shiny marble pride lies a machinery of death: a great meat grinder of workers dying for their homeland, killing for their “people,” when in truth, the only ones pulling the trigger are the merchant and the banker.

Monument Mythos, and in special, the episode LIBERTYLURKER makes it grotesquely literal. The Statue of Liberty in their universe, as well as several other monuments worldwide, shelters an otherworldly lovecraftian creature named "Special Tree" that's fed with some visitors and in special was fed with entire families of Italian immigrants who arrived in New York in 1954 after fleeing poverty and seeking liberty and were diverted to Ellis Island to be fed to the monster kept by America as a promise of power.

This not only makes literal the abstraction of monuments as agents to build nationalism but also demonstrates the immigration question in the US: poor people fleeing war, persecution and misery that find a meat grinder beneath the symbol of liberty they seek.

As a footnote, I'd like to present the recent news that The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television show that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges in Ellis Island to get American citizenship. The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. This is a self-explanatory oddly laughable way of highlighting the question with the immigrants that I just went on.

The working class's degradation kink: the glorified agents of the bourgeoisie as working-class pop divas

In the episode "DEANDEMOCRACY" and throughout President Dean's term in Monument Mythos, we're shown that James Dean, a 60s famous actor that died in a car crash, actually ran for presidency and won. The episode that made him popular enough to win by a landslide was an announcement by ABC News that they'd broadcast something of national importance in the following day, which was a 30-second ad for Dean that made the entire American population, including his adversary Nixon, crazy for him.

In the following years of his term, he lobbied for a computer company responsible for ending the world and was posed as the savior of America after supposedly disabling siren broadcasts that made the population deaf and distributing hearing aids.

This highlights a present issue in not just America but any country with a strong influence of the mediatic and industrial bourgeoisie: the corruption of democratic institutions. We regularly see candidates for public power being supported by the ruling class to eventually lobby for them as presidents or congressmen.

Marx (1875) understood that what liberalism calls “democracy” is merely a temporary form of class domination; a bourgeois democracy, meant to delay the revolutionary rupture.

All of this happens while the working class fights each other and tears itself apart for the Blue, White or Red parties; as if their misery had a favorite color... Meanwhile, the real war; the one between labor and capital, stays offstage, hidden behind patriotic jingles and the glow of national monuments.

The Anomalous Economy: Historical Materialism in a World of Monsters

Throughout the series, we see that the material base of the world economy is different from ours — but not really. We see elements such as Giza Glass, a mythological kind of glass formed in the Egyptian desert and kept as a secret of the Bedouin tribes, being exploited and robbed from their homeland to behead people in order to make them slaves.

This can be interpreted as a metaphor for the insatiable need of capitalism to beastialize people with gizmos produced or originated from the Global South. Quoting President J. D. Rockefeller’s line in ROCKEFELLERREVELATION: Crowns are incapable of forming unions.

This symbolic economy of monsters and divine artifacts is, in essence, not anomalous or fictional at all; it is merely capitalism dressed in myth. Giza Glass is not glass; it is rubber, cobalt, lithium, oil. Crowns aren't beheaded slaves; they are the sweat of the alienated American middle class and African child labor sold as divine providence.

Myth as Weapon: The Aestheticization of Politics

Fascism, said Walter Benjamin, is the aestheticization of politics. In the universe of Monument Mythos, this becomes literal.

The Statue of Liberty doesn't shelter an otherworldly meat-loving creature. There isn't a big Horned Serpent lying in American territory that destroys the world circa 2022. There's no ADA, no Maize Machines and no Virginia Arnoldson. The entire narrative structure works not to expose the violence of the bourgeois state, but to decorate it — with marble, with gold, with myth, with horror wrapped in velvet.

This is the same mechanism we see in the real world, albeit in less theatrical form. In the series Severance (2022), corporate alienation is turned into a metaphysical drama: workers surgically separated from their own lives, identities split in two, truth buried in smiling HR seminars and productivity slogans.

Final Act: When the curtain falls

Monument Mythos is not just an alternate history. It is an ideological machine dressed as art — and like every monument, it asks not to be understood, but worshipped. As long as we aestheticize politics without exposing its class roots, we are feeding the Special Tree or buying Lumon's lies.

We are silencing the miners, the mothers, the children in foreign wars. We are swallowing a myth built to keep us docile marching in circles while the same hands profit from our steps. But myths can be rewritten. And monuments, when pulled down, become bricks.