So the President of the United States, a man whose every utterance seems calculated to make Voltaire weep with joy, has ordered repairs to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. The crusty old pond, a symbol of Washington's imperial grandeur, is to be scrubbed and patched. The British civil service, I am told, is monitoring this with the sort of earnest confusion usually reserved for a three-year-old trying to operate a steam engine.
Meanwhile, the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic have reacted with the predictable combination of awe and contempt. How dare he fix a puddle? How dare he not fix a hundred other things?
The man, they say, is a vandal and a clown. But I say this: the puddle is the thing. The puddle, the monument, the well-tended lawn.
It is the little things that prop up the great empires. The Victorians understood this. They polished their brass and swept their streets, not from some finicky obsession, but because they knew that the moment you let your symbols decay, the substance follows.
The Roman Forum fell into disrepair long before the Barbarians arrived. The British Empire began to fray when the colonial administrators stopped caring about the condition of their public gardens. So Trump, in his ham-fisted, obnoxious way, has stumbled upon a profound truth.
The Reflecting Pool is a mirror of the national soul. If it is cracked, the nation is cracked. The suit-wearing technocrats in Whitehall and Westminster, who spend their days fussing over spreadsheets and 'infrastructure spending' as if it were a spreadsheet, refuse to see this.
They think you can measure a country with GDP figures and employment reports. They are wrong. A country is a collection of stories and symbols.
A clean Reflecting Pool is a story of competence and pride. A broken one tells a tale of decay and indifference. The Whitehall mandarins who monitor US infrastructure spending with the obsessive detail of a medieval scribe are missing the point.
The pool is not infrastructure. It is a metaphor. And Trump, for all his crudeness, is a master of metaphor.
His America, the one he seeks to build, is a restoration of the old, the grand, the slightly ridiculous but deeply meaningful. Meanwhile, our own leaders in Britain have allowed the Serpentine to silt up, metaphorically speaking. They have allowed the national story to become a tangle of bureaucratic jargon and diversity quotas.
They have lost the thread. The Reflecting Pool repair is a clarion call. A warning.
If the Americans can bother to fix a puddle, why can't we? Or does that question hit too close to home? Let us not pretend this is about water depth or masonry.
It is about the will to preserve a civilisation. The Romans had aqueducts, and they built monuments. The Victorians had empire, and they built fountains.
We have the internet and endless meetings. The pool is being fixed. The question is whether the spirit behind it can be fixed too.
And if not, then be grateful for the puddle. It may be the last thing worth preserving.
