As King the man recedes into history, he is becoming just another famous “olden days” figure in the dead-celebrity pantheon, to be animated on The Boondocks or slotted into a Sarah Silverman stand-up routine (“Guess what, Martin Luther King? I had a f***ing dream, too….So maybe you’re not so f***ing special, Martin Loser King.”)

Earlier this year, when a Laguna Beach surf shop marked Martin Luther King Day with a sale offering “20% off all black products,” the stunt made international headlines. The store issued one of those “We didn’t mean to offend anyone” apologies, but the shop thought nothing of taking out such an ad in the first place.

Why, even mocking a statue of Saint Martin of Selma would have been taboo in my 1970s childhood. However, the new monument has exposed a vein of pent-up iconoclasm.

For one thing, the commission was awarded not to an African-American artist, but to Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, best-known for his towering “Social Realist” statues of Chairman Mao.

“So,” Steve Sailer observed, “the USA ends up with a Maoist colossus between the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial, with MLK looking like he’s about to dispatch to the pig farms any bourgeois revisionists who doubt that backyard steel mills are a great idea.”

Indeed, the United States Commission of Fine Arts complained that the finished work “recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

Others “even remarked that Dr King appears slightly Asian in Mr. Lei’s rendering”—“Chinegro,” in fact—prompting one writer to “recall the episode of M*A*S*H in which Frank Burns and Hot Lips Houlihan commissioned a bust of Col. Sherman Potter. The Korean sculptor’s rendition resembled…the Korean sculptor.”

One wag temporarily hijacked the monument’s Wikipedia entry and typed in:

By having the memorial made in China, the designers also hoped to set a tone of irony. After all, the man who stood in front of the tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square was never seen again. So of course it made perfect sense to send millions of dollars in work to a repressive regime that would have imprisoned Dr. King the second he began preaching his philosophy there. The Chinese also held up their end of the bargain by creating an image of Dr. King that suggests he is a somewhat squat, partially Asian man who may or may not be wearing a Mao jacket.

Then again, one could argue that King’s Marxist sympathies make communist China the perfect source for the sculpture.

One thing’s for certain: Some celebrations on the Mall are messier than others. Compare Obama’s garbage-strewn inauguration to Glenn Beck’s squeaky-clean Tea Party rally. When the statue is finally unveiled, I’m betting National Park Service employees will rack up plenty of overtime.

When it comes to Martin Luther King, complains Sarah Silverman, “People only talk about the good things. They don’t mention—he was a litterbug.”