Salon: Know what it says on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty? Along with hundreds of thousands of other New Yorkers, I see her almost every day during my daily commute, while the Q train crosses the Manhattan Bridge. If I remember to look up from my phone, that is. She looks a little marooned out there in the middle of the harbor, even amid the swarms of tourists, as if inside her renovated copper-clad head the Roman goddess Libertas (that’s who she’s supposed to be) is all, WTF happened and where am I? So the other week I decided to go out and have a look at her. Some people say that in the middle of the night, when everyone in New York is drunk or asleep, she puts down that torch and makes ironic air-quotes around herself instead: Here I am, the Statue of “Liberty,” ha ha.

Anyway. The famous sonnet by Emma Lazarus, which is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the statue’s pedestal, concludes with Lady Liberty (or the “Mother of Exiles,” as Lazarus calls her), telling us: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ But the moment anything goes wrong, feel free to kick their ass.” That last line doesn’t scan correctly, and it also isn’t technically included as, like, actual words. But I think we all know it’s there.

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