Yes, I realize it’s now a couple weeks after the President’s Day observation for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, but this little observation was merely arrived at because of it, but is a general enough observation that I can share it, now, and still (barely!) pin it to that day with a modicum of relevance. I hope….
So that weekend I prepared a slideshow on the computer for my kids of George and Abe and their monuments and birthplaces and suchlike, and a rather obvious thing suddenly took on a slightly newer aspect as I was slogging through images.
Clearly we know that the DC monuments intentionally refer to classical motifs, and we know that such architectural “form-dropping” (u-hem) is intended to indicate a heightened sense of the importance of the subjects of the monuments.
Well my only vaguely slightly new angle on this blatant subject is that even over above and beyond that, I’d now go so far as to say that between the dome of the US Captiol building, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, that those three structures intentionally reference, respectively, the Catholic Church of Rome (and by extension, and on the terms the Church would like, the Roman Empire), the fabled Phaoroes of Egypt and Classical Greece.
In other words, each structure in DC literally says to the world, as representations to that world of American identity, success and power:
I contain and depart from … the Catholic Church/Roman Empire…the God-Kings of Egypt…the OG Democracy of Anthenian Greece.
This is not necessarily shocking news, but I think it can stand up to analysis, and further, that it says something clear about just how bold the holders of the reins of top-level decision-making are in their fundamental view of what this country’s about.
Fatherhood Poetic 