OP-ED: The Capitol, once beautiful, can be again
Just before the July Fourth holiday, Atlantic magazine online ran a short article entitled “The Capitol City is a mess” in which the writer, Matt Viser, commented on the many eyesores awaiting visitors to Washington, D.C., as the nation celebrated its 250th birthday.
According to Viser, the White House was a “construction site” with a “gaping hole where” the East Wing “once stood.” The White House lawn and the Ellipse south of the executive mansion were “completely torn up,” looking to Viser “like a demolition derby took place.”
(Instead of that, of course, in June, on his birthday, the president of the United States staged an outdoor professional fight on the White House lawn, replete with an eight-sided steel cage and seating for thousands of spectators.)
Across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Viser continued, historic Lafayette Square, with its famously disputed statue of Gen. Jackson on horseback, was fenced off to visitors.
“Much of Lafayette Square has been surrounded by fencing for most of the year,” Viser noted, “with crowds still gathering to get the best possible view (of the White House) they can, though it’s not a good one.”
The writer also took a look at “the murky shade of green” of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, and the fact that the pool was “surrounded by fencing and ominous signs that read DANGER EXPLOSIVES.”
And on it went, from the draped and deposed Kennedy Center to the pile of East Wing discards on a nearby municipal golf course, which remains under threat of a resort-style, five-star makeover.
The person responsible for all this spoilage, of course, is President Trump. Messy minds create, well, messes.
Disarray is the president’s calling card, as evident in his treatment of Washington, D.C., as it is in his attitude toward gas and grocery prices, immigration enforcement, Iran, NATO, and a host of other matters. On Thursday evening, Trump returned to his losing 2020 election. A loss is not a loss in the president’s book. It’s another opportunity for making a mess of things. In this instance, democracy itself.
Oldies are goodies. Jeb Bush’s criticism of Trump during the 2015-16 Republican primary season is coming in sharper and clearer all the time. Bush used the word “chaos” to describe Trump. “He’d be the chaos president,” Bush said.
And so he is.
“Washington is a wonderful city,” wrote the popular historian, Pittsburgh’s own David McCullough, in 1992. “The scale seems right. I like all the white marble and green trees, the ideals celebrated by the great monuments and memorials…. In many ways it is our most civilized city.
“It accommodates its river, accommodates trees and grass, makes room for nature as other cities don’t. There are parks everywhere.”
“…What I’m drawn to and moved by is historical Washington, or rather the presence of history almost everywhere one turns. It is hard to imagine anyone with a sense of history not being moved. No city in the country keeps and commemorates history as this one does.
” Washington insists that we remember…. “
The White House in many ways is the vital center of the city and of the nation.
McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman depicts the plain citizen of Independence, Missouri, returning to Washington following his unexpected victory in the election of 1948. From Union Station to the White House, the city was flooded with celebrants hailing Truman’s accomplishment. The crowd literally engulfed the White House.
There is a photograph taken the night of Dec. 7, 1941, of citizens on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk in front of the White House, their noses pressed against the fencing, while in the mansion the president of the United States was thinking over the consequences of that day’s Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Americans are drawn to the White House. I remember viewing the grounds and mansion from high atop a nearby hotel dining room, a magnificent view, and of strolling past the East Wing on a golden evening in late summer, the air fragrant and bursting with life.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.