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Statues of limitations: why do we get so worked up over larger-than-life likenesses of heroes and icons? Because they're less about stone and bronze than what we're made of.

Article Excerpt
Sometime this summer, pedestrians near the intersection of Sixth Street and Congress Avenue in Austin will come upon a huge bronze of a berserk woman firing a cannon. No, she's not trying to blow away the Goddess of Liberty perched on the Capitol dome, though that's not altogether a bad idea. The bronze will commemorate an Austin innkeeper named Angelina Eberly, who, on that very spot in 1842, set it off, as they say, to warn her fellow citizens that a band of Texas Rangers was stealing the government archives. The Rangers were sent by that rascal Sam Houston, who believed that the capital of the young republic should be in his namesake city rather than the isolated village on the Western frontier that had recently changed its name from Waterloo. Angelina missed the Rangers but blew a hole in the General Land Office building and roused the populace, who chased down the thieves and recovered the archives. Her bold action is the reason that Austin is the state capital instead of a wide spot on the banks of the Colorado. Even so, a statue of Angelina isn't every Austinite's idea of a proper public monument. When a photograph of the model created by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, some readers complained of the generous proportions of her bosoms. One irate caller said, "Angelina is no hoochie mama!"

Why all the fuss? Ask the folks in San Marcos who are in a snit because a statue of the legendary Texas Ranger Jack Hays has him wielding a pistol. This was no doubt the sculptor's point: The old Indian fighter is celebrated for proving...

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