M. T. Liggett, American Folk Artist

Mullinville, Kansas

We wake up in Wichita, Kansas at 6 AM and set out for Mullinville (Population maybe 300) about 100 miles west on State Road 400.

We saw M. T. Liggett's work there seven years ago cruising across Kansas listening to a great FM rock station out of Dodge City.I've never been satisfied with the pictures I took of his work back then, so I decided to drive 500 miles out of the way and try once again.

We hit the Mullinville junction of State roads 400 and 54 and get detoured down 54. Mrs. Phred suggests immediately parking in the Mullinville truck stop, but I insist on continuing down 54 twelve miles, up county road 39 four miles and back east 8 miles on closed road 400. There we run into a total road closure. I suggest walking to Mullinville the next four miles and back in 100 degree heat, but Mrs. Phred is having none of it.

I eventually agree to unhook the Honda, do a U-turn and return 20 miles to the Mullinville truck stop. Mrs. Phred says that I always eventually do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.

We stop for breakfast at the truck stop and I ask the waitress if she knows M. T. Liggett. She says he comes in mostly for coffee. She says if he likes you he makes you a heart, if he doesn't he might make an ugly sculpture and put your name on it....she has four hearts.It's a small town. She says his doctor doesn't want him to work anymore...

I went back just now to look at my 2008 blog about M. T. Liggett. It's interesting that out of hundreds of sculptures that I seem to have selected many of the same ones...maybe those are the ones that seem very powerful to me?

This time I take 170 pictures. I try to compose them properly and use Picasa to crop them. Obviously a blog with that many pictures wouldn't work well so I pick only16...not enough...you should go and look yourself before all this original genius rusts away....this guy makes Picasso look a little unoriginal and repetitive...

"Evolution is wrong," declares another of his signs. "Only a miracle from the Almighty could have created the moronic dumbasses on the Kansas State Board of Education." - See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11212#sthash.kdUBr0R6.dpuf

"Evolution is wrong," declares another of his signs. "Only a miracle from the Almighty could have created the moronic dumbasses on the Kansas State Board of Education." - See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11212#sthash.kdUBr0R6.dpuf

There is an article on Roadside America about Mr. Liggett.

"In 1989, Liggett  began creating metal sculptures.   He uses a plasma arc cutter and an arc welder to turn old farm equipment, car parts, road signs, and any other odd bits of iron he can lay his hands on, into fantastic characters which adorn his property, on the side of Route 400 just west of town.  Most of Liggett's sculptures are brightly painted, and many have moving parts that spin and flash in the hot Kansas sun."

Hillary Clinton is, "Our Jack-Booted Eva Braun,” Mr. and Mrs. Clinton caricatures are labeled, “Pothead” and “Porkadolf”. Mrs. Clinton is done up with swastikas.

As you drive around Mullinville, you see Liggett's work everywhere....rust never sleeps...

He’s got one that equates Waco with Auschwitz. Janet Reno has her head stuffed up her butt. A right wing Republican has his thumb in the same position. Halliburton is represented by a dark pig’s head.

"Evolution is wrong," declares another of his signs. "Only a miracle from the Almighty could have created the moronic dumbasses on the Kansas State Board of Education." - See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11212#sthash.kdUBr0R6.dpuf

It’s tough to figure out Liggett’s political position. He seems equally pissed by just about everything and everyone, especially politicians.

Lots of the “totems” are devoted to M.T.’s old girlfriends, who he has immortalised in junk. You have to wonder about his relationships with neighbours. My money says he doesn’t much care much what other people think.

. "Evolution is wrong," declares another of his signs. "Only a miracle from the Almighty could have created the moronic dumbasses on the Kansas State Board of Education."
Putting aside intent, is M.T
- See more at: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11212#sthash.YV7antR2.dpuf

At times Liggett's neighbors have not been pleased with his work....however,  he has made Mullinville famous.

Lots of hearts... Here is a video about the artist....check U-tube for many more....

Stuff in the Backyard

We're proud of our gators in Florida and protect them if we can. This week they ate a woman, a German Shepard and took a big chunk out of a horse's flank. I guess it's the mating season and they get more aggressive this time of year. The twelve-footer below swims by most days. The gardeners feed him parts of their lunch....yesterday he leaped out of the water and came down on a hapless fish like a fox on a mouse burrow.

Theists are humans who believe in a God or gods. Spiritualism is the state of being concerned with the human spirit. A Venn diagram of all humans might show two overlapping circles. Some humans would be in both circles, some in one or the other and still others fall outside both circles The Universe appears to us to be a strange, complex, wondrous and ultimately incomprehensible place. How did it get here? How big is it? How many stars are there? Why do I exist? These are human questions. Our answers have increased greatly in complexity over the centuries..

Perhaps our brains lack the necessary processing power for science to provide any ultimate answers. We have only slightly evolved cognitive abilities compared with other animals on this thing we call a planet. Our brains are very tiny meat computers. We may not have the necessary intelligence to even ask the right questions, let alone understand the answers. Our DNA is only one percent different than that of chimpanzees. A chimpanzee can use boxes and sticks to reach high bananas. A chimp would be stumped at the problem of ordering delivery of bananas from Whole Foods over the Internet. Understanding own existence is probably further from our own limited abilities than we are from the talents of the smartest chimps.

Our very existence seems incredibly improbable. We are each the product of one sperm and one egg out of billions of sperm produced by a father and tens of thousands of eggs from our mother.. That run of astounding luck goes back in an unbroken chain perhaps 4 billion years. Luck seems to define life. What are the odds of a habitable environment on a rock just the right distance from the right type of star? Many humans find comforting answers to their questions about existence in theism. That is understandable and deserves our respect in all its many forms. Buddha the Great Spirit? Plausible.

A sergeant asked me for my religious preference 55 years ago so that he could make my first set of dog-tags. I told him I was an Existentialist. He asked me to spell it. Existentialists believe that the nature of man is essentially plastic, and that humans are capable of fantastic extremes of good and evil. A human can choose to be a Doctor Mengele in a concentration camp, a Mother Teresa in a hospital in Africa or a volunteer in an Ebola ward. Existentialists believe that human have the freedom to make choices about their behaviour. They believe that honesty and authenticity are of paramount importance and that each human should strive to live a life that reflects credit on human existence.

Precepts of good and evil come from the Judeo-Christian tradition for many Existentialists. Some Existentialists are theists and some are not. There are good and bad, practicing and non-practicing Existentialists. Martin Heidegger was a leading Existential German philosopher who later became a Nazi. So it goes.