On any given beach, there are many cool people. Look, it’s Thad and the rest of the popular kids, tossing a football and gallivanting in all-American splendor! Ducked beneath a boardwalk are a smattering of punks smoking a joint and glaring darkly at the families from the suburbs. Down toward the water, a cool parent is entertaining a dozen or so kids with various games involving splashing each other, and somewhere there’s probably an old guy riding a beach cruiser or using a metal detector or something. These are all cool people!
But no one at the beach is cooler than the mysterious duo named Larry and Tom, who created this lifelike sand sculpture of New Jersey Governor and Republican detritus Chris Christie lounging on the beach.
It is, of course, a replica of the damning photos of Christie lounging with his family over the weekend on a beach that had been otherwise closed to the public. This would just be a normal-enough tableau of governmental exceptionalism, but it was elevated to the realm of scandal by Christie’s basement-scraping 15 percent approval rating, his lame-duck status, and the fact that he mortgaged his credibility in the Republican party to buy a Cabinet seat in the Trump administration, which obviously did not materialize. Hence, the don’t-give-a-fuck weekend on the beach. Hence, the sand sculpture. The image is too perfect.
NBC 4 Washington reports that the sculpture’s mononymous creators spent some four hours constructing the monument to Christie’s impending irrelevance, which, like his political career itself, was doomed to swiftly melt into the ocean as the wind picks it apart.