The result is a mishmash that looks a bit like King is attached to a giant door that has been pushed out of a rather meager hillock. The seams joining the 41 blocks of granite that make up the stone and the 118 blocks that make up the two sides of the mountain give both sculptural elements a somewhat flimsy, cobbled-together feel, as if they were intended for a roadside attraction, not a monument on the nation’s most symbolically rich ground.

You could see this coming for years, and it was clear during the approvals process that plenty of people on the oversight committees were feeling queasy about the design. There were worries about the size of the King statue, and the rather brusque, arms-folded stance in which he is memorialized. Efforts to tweak the design didn’t confront the central problem: the idea of representing King, the stone and the mountain literally. An imaginative landscape architect could have translated the mountain and stone concept into something more abstract. But once it was decided that there had to be a monumental, lifelike image of King, the concept and its literal execution were both doomed to failure.

The memorial could be vastly improved simply by removing the statue. Or by following King’s original metaphor and hewing it down to something smaller and more abstract. When Franklin Roosevelt, King’s next-door neighbor on the Tidal Basin, was asked how he would like to be memorialized, he supposedly responded that he’d like a plain block of stone, about the size of his desk, without ornament of any kind. That sounds like a perfect Stone of Hope, and all it would take is a few hours with a jackhammer to find one inside this unfortunate statue.

Even so, the plaza, the grounds and the quotations on the wall (easy bromides about peace, nonviolence, love, justice and righteousness from the King canon) are neither offensive nor intrusive. The canopy of green that will one day enshroud much of the memorial has limited its impact and disruption. If thought of as a slightly oversize front door, even the Mountain of Despair is not particularly problematic. From beginning to end, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial has been about a sanitized, feel-good fiction of King, and that seems to have produced a memorial that is mostly harmless and neighborly. If the problem of the statue is addressed, this newest addition to the national clutter will eventually fade into Washington’s marble background of benches, bollards and inspirational blather. And the duty of honoring King can be performed where it ought to be, at the ballot box.