News reaches my desk that American workmen, in a fit of exuberance or perhaps sheer malice, have desecrated the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. They have painted it. Yes, painted. Not restored, not conserved, but slathered in a cerulean blue so garish it would make a Victorian parlour-maid blush. Heritage experts on this side of the Atlantic are, as the vulgar headline puts it, ‘appalled’. But I am more than appalled. I am vindicated.
Every generation fancies itself the one to witness the Fall of Rome. Yet rarely does one see the rot unfold with such literal, pigment-based clarity. The Reflecting Pool is not merely a body of water. It is a symbol. A symbol of the American Republic’s grandest aspirations: the long, flat mirror that, in its quiescence, reflected both the obelisk of Washington and the dome of the Capitol. It was a statement of permanence, of classical order married to democratic ambition. Reflective water has been a device of gravity since the gardens of Versailles, and earlier, since the still pools of Abbasid palaces. It whispers of contemplation, of the nation pausing to look upon itself.
To paint it is to confess a profound cultural illiteracy. It is to treat a national monument as a prop for a social media post. The American appetite for the shallow, for the quick and the garish, has finally consumed even the symbols of its own depth. This is what happens when a society loses its taste for the difficult. When nuance, silence, and tradition are dismissed as elitist, you get painted reflecting pools. You get a populace that prefers Instagram filters to the slow, silvering mirror of history.
And do not mistake me. This is no isolated act of municipal incompetence. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has abandoned its own classical inheritance. The same spirit that paints the Reflecting Pool also canonises reality television stars, turns universities into therapy clinics, and treats the national anthem as a political football. The United States has long been the world’s restless adolescent, but now it is entering a senile second childhood. The pool’s new coat is the makeup on a corpse.
Let the experts tut-tut over chemical stains and paint toxicity. Let them pen angry editorials in the Sunday broadsheets. The real poison is not in the paint, but in the mind that thought it was a good idea. The tragedy is that too few Americans will even understand why this is a tragedy. They will look at the blue water, snap their selfies, and wonder what the fuss is about. And that, more than any political crisis or economic wobble, is the proof of imperial decay.
I recall a passage from Gibbon, on the late Roman obsession with spectacle and surface. The Colosseum’s awnings, the chariot races, the imported marble veneers. While the barbarians sharpened their axes at the gates, the Romans painted their pools. The parallel is exact. We are watching a superpower’s death of the soul, one brush stroke at a time. And I, for one, am not appalled. I am merely disgusted, and more than a little bored.
