Arc de T-What ???

While I was driving to work with my wife a couple weeks ago, she showed me a picture on her phone of the president holding what appeared to my bad eyes to be two white Lego Blocks stuck together. The caption on the picture was "Arc de Trump?". 

On closer inspection, he was holding a teeny tiny model of what appeared to be some kind of arch, complete with an ever so adorable miniature sculpture on top. The caption mentioned that he wanted to build a monumental arch in Washington D.C.

You can see the photo in this New York Times article.

It immediately reminded me of the Stonehenge Scene from the farcical movie "This is Spinal Tap." If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check it out here. 

Naturally I thought the whole thing was a joke, maybe something ripped from the pages of the satirical tabloid The Onion. 

But of course, it wasn't a joke, it turns out he really wants to build a triumphal arch in Washington.

This one would ostensibly commemorate the 250th anniversary, (or Semiquincentennial if you prefer) of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which will take place this coming July fourth. It's funny because I remember very well the Bicentennial which took place on July 4, 1976. Mostly I remember the anticipation of the event which lasted about two years. The actual day as I recall, was an awful letdown as one would expect after such a buildup.

The funny thing is that with all the hullabaloo about the 1976 Bicentennial, no one back then apparently thought to build an official monument to the event. In stark contrast, there's barely been a mention of the upcoming Semiquincentennial. One would think that a quarter of a millennium is at least as impressive as a fifth of a millennium. 

Maybe it's too hard to pronounce Semiquincentennial.

But the Semiquincentennial hasn't been lost on this president who plans to throw a big shindig topped off by a major Ultimate Fighting Championship event, perhaps on the White House lawn on the big day. 

That apparently is not a joke either.

Perhaps his big, beautiful ballroom will be ready by then, fingers crossed.

They say that building the arch, or anything for that matter in Washington has to go through a gauntlet of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo before being approved to proceed. 

"You have to look at the environmental impact of anything as well as all of these concerns about the aesthetics and the engineering so it usually takes several years to go through a process of designing a new memorial," said Dr Christine Henry, director of the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

According to an article from the BBC:

"New commemorations typically need congressional approval as part of a 24-step plan developed by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which approves designs along with the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). "

Well blah blah blah...

That won't be an obstacle for this president as his M.O. has always been it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Come to think of it, "sorry" is not a part of his vocabulary so he simply won't ask for permission, then leave out the asking for forgiveness part. 

The architectural firm Harrison Design is responsible for the preliminary design of the arch. A partner in the firm, Nicolas Leo Charbonneau, posted online a watercolor rendering of the proposed arch and the site it is slated for while commenting: "America needs a triumphal arch!" 

Well, maybe Mr. Charbonneau doesn't get around much anymore, but America already has a number of triumphal arches. New York City alone has two. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, commemorates the veterans of the Civil War. Perhaps more famous, and definitely more restrained is the Washington Arch in Greenwich Village which stands at the foot of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. That one was built to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the centennial of the inauguration of George Washington.

Now I don't have anything against monumental arches. These two which I'm intimately familiar with, are great works of art, well loved, iconic landmarks in their respective settings. And as all architectural landmarks, they speak volumes about the time in which they were created, not to mention the lives they've lived since.

Over the decades, I've thought a lot about monuments, what they mean, how they function, and how that function changes over the passage of time. I've written about that subject extensively in this blog.

If you type "Monument" in the search field in the upper left corner of this page, many of them will come up. 

I've also written specifically about the monuments of Washington D.C. including how they reflect the time they were built more than the time they represent.

The current president has famously decreed through executive order that the design of Federal Architecture in the nation's capital should be restricted to "particularly traditional and classical architecture" with classical, i.e.: reflecting the architecture of Ancient Greece and Rome, being the preferred style. 

According to the order, it is those styles that "visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions", just as the Founding Fathers, namely Washington and Jefferson intended. 

But when you think of it, it's a tenuous connection at best. Yes, ancient Athens had its democracy, and ancient Rome had its republic, but both were supplanted, in Athens by foreign conquest, and in Rome, by the foundation of the Empire.

The buildings we associate most with Athens and Rome and have emulated in our own buildings, namely the Parthenon in Athens (think the Lincoln Memorial), and the Pantheon in Rome (think the Jefferson Memorial), did not function as government buildings themselves but rather as religious temples. 

As such, this "connection" we have with this architecture, great as it is, and our system of government, is superficial. 

The triumphal arch has a far darker provenance. The Arch of Titus in Rome is said to be the paradigm of all such arches. It sits just outside of the Colosseum, another glorious monument with a hideous past. The Arch of Titus was built to celebrate the Roman Siege of Jerusalem in 69 CE, which marked the destruction of that city, and the Second Temple, an event that continues to be mourned in our time on the solemn day of Tisha b'Av by the Jewish people.

We live in a magnificent 1928 apartment building built in the Spanish Baroque Revival style. Every year we participate in an event called "Open House Chicago" , where the public is invited to visit the interiors of buildings that are generally closed to the public. I often help give tours of our building. The highlight of the tour is our swimming pool, adorned by a beautiful tile floor which is original to the building. Scattered among the one-inch tiles of various colors are tiles containing ancient symbols such as Celtic crosses and medallions representing other traditions. Among those medallions, are swastikas. On every tour I make sure to point these out to our guests, so they don't stumble upon them on their own. I bring up the difficult subject by saying you can tell the floor is original to the 1928 building because you certainly wouldn't find a swastika as a decorative element much after that. 

That's of course because this ancient symbol of good fortune and other virtues that has existed in many different cultures for millennia, was appropriated by the Nazis sometime in the nineteen twenties as a symbol of their movement, back when they were still a fringe group with little notoriety, at least here in the States.

Today that symbol has only one very powerful, very negative meaning to the majority of the world, and many of the folks visiting our building cannot accept its presence, even though they seem to understand that the spirit of the symbol was radically altered since our building was built.

I bring that up because the trauma experienced by the entire planet directly caused by the events surrounding the two World Wars not to mention the wars themselves, changed virtually everything about the way we view our world, including our built environment. 

That's why we don't build triumphal arches anymore.

Just like trying to pull off the swastika as a symbol of anything other than hatred and racism, it's truly a hard sell in our day to claim that triumphal arches represent virtues we hold dear like independence, liberty and democracy. Above all, they represent war. Even at their finest like the two New York examples I gave above, triumphal arches may not glorify war, but they certainly romanticize it. That was not out of the ordinary in the time they were created over one hundred years ago, look at the art and the literature from that period, but it certainly is today.

After two World Wars, the Holocaust, the deaths of up to one hundred million people (in both wars), most of them civilians, and the development and the implementation of a weapon that has the potential of wiping out life on our planet, most reasonable people today have no taste for romanticizing war, especially people who lived through them.

At best, wonderful as they may be, these arches speak to another era and as such, are wildly anachronistic in our day, much like the steam locomotive.

But for me, there is an even more salient reason why this idea of the president's is asinine. 

The approximately one square mile which includes the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, connected by the Memorial Bridge spanning the Potomac River, comes as close to sacred ground as anything in our country.

Our nation does not have an official monument to our greatest tragedy, the Civil War, which claimed more American lives than any other war. We don't need one. That magnificent yet restrained bridge (the work of the estimable New York firm McKim, Meade and White) represents both literally and figuratively, the connection between the indelible symbols of both sides of that conflict, Washington D.C., the capital of the Union, and Virginia whose state capital Richmond, was the capital of the Confederacy. The Lincoln Memorial, our greatest national monument in honor of our greatest president stands on one side of the bridge. Just on the other side of the Potomac (a stone's throw if you're George Washington), standing atop a hill that is now part of Arlington National Cemetery, is the former home of General Robert E. Lee, the overall Commander of the Confederate States Army.

On the wall of the Lincoln Memorial, to the left of the iconic Daniel Chester French portrait sculpture of the slain president, are inscribed the words of his Second Inaugural Address, delivered on the eve of the end of that terrible conflict. Abraham Lincoln did not stand on the steps of the Capitol Building and gloat about the imminent glorious victory of the side under his leadership. Instead, he concluded his speech with these words of healing: 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

That bridge connecting the North and the South, is perhaps our greatest unsung monument, an everlasting symbol of that healing, the revival of the "united" part of the United States.

Memorial Bridge from Washington looking toward Virginia.

And this current president wants to slap his big, anachronistic pile right in front of it. 

It is perhaps fitting that as a man who prefers building walls to bridges, he wants to mess with our most important bridge.

Two weeks ago, in more than 2,500 events organized around the country, an estimated seven million American participated in "No Kings" marches, protesting what they see as this president's ever increasing autocratic tendencies. 

To the president's sycophantic supporters including his Press Secretary, these protestors, which included several folks from my mother's retirement home in Evanston, Illinois, were "America hating Hamas supporting, communist terrorists." I guess I'll need to be more careful when I'm around those septa, octa, and nonagenarian terrorist neighbors of my mom. 

These "communist terrorists" claim they were simply upholding the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which in no uncertain terms demanded that our destiny be in the hands of we the people, not a king.

The president himself was more reserved in his comments about the protests. He said that he was not a king, nor did he intend to be one. 

Unfortunately, his actions speak louder than his words.

Which I guess shouldn't be surprising for a man who to be generous, is often careless with the truth.

Yet at the event where he revealed his plans to build the arch, he said something that was probably the most honest thing he ever said in his life.

When asked by a reporter who this monumental arch was really for, our president responded simply:

"Me."