Left Fights 250th Anniversary American Monument

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For 125 years, a monument was supposed to rise on what is now a traffic circle by Arlington National Cemetery. Now, President Trump has proposed a 250 foot tall ‘Independence Arch’ (one year for every year of America’s existence) to mark the nation’s 250th birthday.

Democrats however have rallied in defense of the traffic circle in the name of the Confederacy.

After President Trump’s reelection, the demolitionist party that had cheered the toppling of monuments, the vandalism of the statues of Columbus, Lincoln and Francis Scott Key, suddenly became born-again preservationists, clutching their pearls over the White House ballroom, the Kennedy Center renovations and now the even more suddenly sacred traffic circle.

Calling for the preservation of a traffic circle, one that doesn’t even have BLM stenciled on it, is an uphill battle, especially since the ‘preservationists’ suddenly interested in it had never expressed any prior interest in the particular traffic circle. It’s not that they really care about the traffic circle, but that they don’t want a triumphal patriotic arch taking its place.

And so the same movement that had been tearing down Confederate statues has been reduced to arguing that putting up a patriotic arch would be wrong because, in the immortal words of the Washington Post, it “could obstruct views of Arlington House, the former Lee estate that sits on a hillside in Arlington National Cemetery.” That’s the same estate that the newspaper was campaigning to rename a mere four years ago because its very existence was offensive.

Now, when campaigning against the Independence Arch, the Post complains that “a large arch would significantly alter past lawmakers’ and architects’ ambitions for Arlington Memorial Bridge, which was intended as a bridge between the North and the South in the wake of the Civil War and to connect memorials for President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”

That might be a better point if the radical faction doing the complaining hadn’t been running around tearing down and renaming Confederate monuments and sites only to turn around and plead for the historic importance of them to stop President Trump from building a memorial  arch.

The original intent of the Lee Estate, or more blandly, Arlington House, commemorating national reconciliation, was overturned after the BLM era and the estate exists to talk about slavery, targeting not only Lee, but George Washington’s family. (Washington had no children, but he adopted his wife Martha’s children as his own and the family named a number of their children ‘George.)

If the Washington Post and its born-again preservationists had been concerned about the integrity of the original intent of bridging North and South, and honoring Lee for his work for peace between both sides, it had years to protest. Not only didn’t it protest, it backed it.

The objections to The Independence Arch are no more about Lee than they are about the traffic circle. The opposition is not about what is there now, but what they don’t want to see there.

The Independence Arch is not offensive because it interferes with ‘sightlines’ (everything built around the ‘Mall’ interferes with sightlines, but that didn’t stop them from cluttering it up with genuinely ugly works like the MLK Memorial in which an oddly white and Asian version of the civil rights leader sternly glares down at people out of a rock.

The Smithsonian’s modern contributions to D.C. architecture include hideous nightmares come to life like the Hirshhorn Museum (picture a horrible combination between an office building and a giant vanilla cake) and the American Indian Museum (a horrid Science Fiction dystopia come to life) which completely clash with the city’s traditional architecture and yet were praised by the same ‘experts’ and ‘scholars’ booing the proposed Independence Arch.

Unlike so much of what has been built in D.C. in the past 50 years, the Arch of Independence would actually fit the traditional look. It’s not another of the brutalist and modernist monstrosities.

Build something asymmetrical, disproportionate and hostile to form and proportion, that fits into D.C. like a pig in a pageant, and trendy architects, critics and other professional enemies of beauty will flock to lavish praise for its subversive daring, but something like the Ronald Reagan Building, which actually fit into D.C., was the subject of endless ridicule and criticism.

Traditionalism in art and politics is hated, and the proposed Independence Arch brings together both. It suggests that the function of monuments is soaring ambition and vision, rather than a grim view of life as an impossible aberration in a universe that makes no sense.

Worse still, Independence Arch is a paean to American glory, and completely at odds with the feverish ‘recontextualization’ that has befallen every monument at least a century old, that insists visitors view it through Howard Zinn’s misanthropic version of American history as a testament to the racism, capitalism, sexism, and other ills they say were America’s original sins.

The Independence Arch suggests that America’s birthday is something to take pride in, not mourn, that the United States is great and that we are great by being part of it, that patriotism is meaningful, rather than despicable, and that what we build should also be meaningful. All of this is a direct reversal of every political, artistic, academic and cultural trend in generations.

Opponents of the Independence Arch would much rather that it remain a traffic circle to perhaps one day be supplemented by a fitting statue of a drag queen or an ayatollah, but certainly not some gold and marble arch that celebrates Americanism as our ultimate unifying identity.

In a city where there are museums for seemingly every single group, patriotic monuments have long gone out of style. There have been some decent memorializations of individuals, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and even of past wars, the WWIII memorial, but little that speaks to the union of our past and present ambitions.

That is why the Independence Arch is needed. Its message is not simply about the past, but the future, it tells us not, like so many of the city’s memorials, what we have lost, but what we can do. Anyone can mourn, but not everyone can build. The Left is happy to leave us our cemeteries, but what it wants to take away from us are our pride and our hope.