News reaches us of a scandal that, were it not so utterly predictable, might actually astonish. Workers have painted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool – that austere, symbolic stretch of water mirroring the Great Emancipator – with a coat of blue paint. Yes, paint.
Not water. The kind of cheap acrylic one might use to tart up a garden shed. And the world, predictably, has responded with the sort of snickering contempt that Americans, in their current intellectual decadence, seem to court.
One cannot help but compare this to the late Roman Empire, where the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the throne to the highest bidder. Here, the National Park Service has auctioned off dignity to the lowest contractor. The pool, a place where Martin Luther King Jr.
once dreamt aloud, is now a puddle of commercial buffoonery. Critics on social media have likened it to a swimming pool at a budget motel. They are too kind.
It resembles the sort of blue lagoon one finds in a child’s crayon drawing, executed without talent. The deeper tragedy, however, is not the paint itself but what it signifies: a nation incapable of maintaining its own symbols, reducing them to kitsch. Victorian England would never have countenanced such a thing.
They understood that monuments were the bones of national identity, not mannequins for cheap theatricals. Today’s America prefers the quick fix, the painted-over crack, the illusion of depth. The Reflecting Pool now reflects nothing but our own shallowness.
And yet, the real farce is that we will drain it, scrape it, repaint it with water, and declare the crisis solved, forgetting that the stain on our national honour is not pigment but purpose.
