WASHINGTON D.C. In a development that has sent shockwaves through the capital's collective consciousness, the National Mall's Reflecting Pool has been discovered to be suffering from a rather alarming case of neglect. The pool, a gleaming symbol of American ambition and architectural chutzpah, was recently given a fresh coat of paint. Yes, paint. Because when you're America, you don't just clean your national monuments. You slap a new hue on them like a desperate estate agent flogging a condemned property.
The revelation came when a tourist from Iowa, one Chuck Barnsworth, attempted to photograph his reflection and instead captured the visage of a man whose dreams had been dashed upon the rocks of reality. 'It was like looking into the soul of a nation that had given up,' Barnsworth told this correspondent, who had already consumed three gins and was thus perfectly qualified to judge the emotional state of a complete stranger.
The pool, you see, has not actually been filled with water for some time. It has been filled with a substance that resembles water only in its ability to remain stubbornly horizontal. This substance is, in fact, a high-gloss paint designed to convey the illusion of depth. It is a metaphor, really. For America. We are a nation of illusions, a land where the surface is all that matters, and the depth is merely a suggestion.
'I thought I saw a duck,' said Mildred Cleghorn, a retiree from Ohio. 'But it was just a painted duck. A decoy. A lie in the shape of a duck.' She then burst into tears, which at least provided some actual moisture for the painted pool to reflect.
Park officials were quick to defend the decision. 'The paint is a cost-effective measure,' explained a spokesman, whose mouth moved but whose eyes betrayed the hollow emptiness of a man whose soul had been traded for a government pension. 'It requires no maintenance. It will never evaporate. It will never need to be cleaned. It is the pool of the future.'
But the public is not so easily mollified. There are calls for a full investigation. A petition has been started. Someone has suggested a march on Washington, although the irony of marching on a city whose central water feature is a painted lie has not been lost on anyone.
This is not an isolated incident, of course. Across the nation, our symbols are being maintained with the brio of a landlord who knows you have nowhere else to go. The Liberty Bell has been re-chromed. The Statue of Liberty is now a plaster replica, the original having been sold to a private collector in Dubai. And the Grand Canyon? It's a hologram projected from a disused nuclear bunker.
But the painted pool seems to have struck a nerve. Perhaps it is because water is the one thing we all need, the one thing that cannot be faked. Or perhaps it is because, in a world of alternative facts and deep fakes, we cling to the hope that at least our national monuments are real. They are not. They are painted, and they are lying to us.
As I stared into the abyss of the painted pool, I felt a strange kinship with it. We are both surfaces. We both reflect what is placed before us. And we are both, ultimately, frauds. I raised my glass of gin to the pool. It did not clink back. It just paintedly reflected my own desolate image. And for a moment, I was not a journalist but a man staring into the soul of a nation that had given up on itself. And that, dear readers, is the true horror.
