It is incongruous that Donald Trump, who advertises his disdain for things European, wants to give us something that no one in his or her right mind wants: a knockoff of France’s Arc de Triomphe. Which is bad enough.
Worse, he wants to situate it on a Washington site where it will clutter one of the world’s great urban vistas. He would place it on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge, below the Custis-Lee mansion, which sits on high ground in what became Arlington National Cemetery.
In this house, George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington through her first marriage, saw his daughter marry Lt. Robert E. Lee in 1831, 31 years before his Army of Northern Virginia tried to dismember the nation. By connecting the national capital with Virginia, whose capital was the Confederacy’s capital, Memorial Bridge symbolizes national unity.
Given Trump’s gargantuan exercises of executive discretion regarding great matters of state, it might seem quaint to wonder why he cannot be stopped from treating Washington as his chew toy. This would be unworthy of our nation if he had exquisite taste. The fact that he revels in being a vulgarian takes a toll on the nation’s soul.
Urban aesthetics can be conducive to urbanity, of which there is never enough. G.K. Chesterton said Times Square would be a wonderful sight “to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.” Its garishness has a kind of democratic beauty, a chaos of advertising for foods and entertainments that appeal to the lowest common denominators in each of us.
Trump’s Oval Office, stuffed to overflowing with gold bric-a-brac, might be beautiful to someone who is colorblind. Or to connoisseurs of high-end Gilded Age brothels. It would be nice if he would confine his ornamenting fidgets to Mar-a-Lago, about which we can say what a wit said of the State Department: It is like tundra — anything done to it would improve it. The Oval Office can be, as it were, visually fumigated quickly for the next occupant. Getting rid of an Arc de Trump would be resisted by curators of Trump’s legacy.
Trump has the terrible strength peculiar to people who are incapable of embarrassment, and cannot fathom that they look ridiculous. Recently, however, Republicans in the House of Representatives, hitherto impeccably obedient to him, seem to have become healthily embarrassed about their subservience. There have been silent insurrections.
The New York Sun reads Congress’s spending bills so that the rest of us do not need to. It reports that the annual spending bill funding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts refers to this venue by that name. If you can hardly believe this impertinence, check the bill’s page 371.
The Trump administration said in December that the Center’s board voted to authorize what he hastened to do: He slapped his name above Kennedy’s on the building. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, explained that this honors “the unbelievable work” Trump did in “saving the building.” Leavitt has Flaubert’s flair for le mot juste: “unbelievable.”
The military authorization bill passed by Congress and signed by the president last month refers to the “Department of Defense,” not the “Department of War,” as the current commander in chief likes to call it. Is Congress, by this act of lèse-majesté, claiming a right to name the departments it creates? What next? Will Congress involve itself in what the Defense Department does, such as waging war?
What evidently will not come next is the “Melania Trump Opera House” at the Kennedy Center. Last year, the Sun reports, some congressional Republicans, seeking fresh forms of obeisance, introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill to rename the Opera House. Amazingly, the amendment did not make it to Melania’s husband’s desk.
The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon in 1806, after his victory in the immense 1805 battle of Austerlitz, to celebrate France’s military glories, and himself. At Austerlitz, which was then in Moravia but now is in the Czech Republic, Napoleon’s 68,000 troops defeated almost 90,000 Russians and Austrians.
Perhaps the Arc de Trump, its gold paint glistening when bathed by sunsets, will celebrate, in addition to its namesake, the triumph of U.S. forces in the Battle of Nuuk. With a population of less than 20,000, and boasting that its rush hour traffic lasts 15 minutes, Nuuk is the capital of, and largest city in, Greenland.
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