So a former Olympian has been arrested for vandalising the Washington Reflecting Pool. The crime: pouring red dye into its waters, presumably to make some inane political statement. British heritage experts, those beleaguered guardians of taste, have condemned the act. And rightly so. But let us not be distracted by the particulars. This is not about one misguided soul. This is about the rot that has set into our civilisation, a rot that would have been recognisable to Gibbon as he chronicled the fall of Rome.
Consider the Reflecting Pool. It is a monument to order, to symmetry, to the Enlightenment ideals that built the modern world. It mirrors the Washington Monument, that phallic obelisk of republican virtue. To defile it is to defile the very idea of civilisation. And yet, here we are, tut-tutting over a bit of food colouring while the real vandals are those who have hollowed out our institutions, our education system, our very sense of national identity.
The Olympian in question, no doubt a product of the therapeutic culture that prizes self-expression over self-discipline, has merely acted out the logic of our age. We have spent decades telling young people that their feelings are the highest authority, that the past is a prison, and that transgression is a form of virtue. Did we expect anything else? The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that civilisation required repression. They built museums, not protest sites. They cultivated manners, not grievances.
British heritage experts are right to be appalled. But their condemnation rings hollow when our own National Trust, that supposed guardian of England's green and pleasant land, has spent years apologising for the past, removing statues, and rewriting history to suit the whims of the mob. We are in no position to cast stones across the Atlantic. The Reflecting Pool is merely a symptom. The disease is a loss of faith in the very idea of a shared culture, a common inheritance.
This is how empires die. Not with a bang, but with a whimper of self-flagellation. The Romans did not fall to barbarians at the gates; they fell to a loss of civic virtue, to a decadence that made them unable to defend themselves. We are witnessing the same. Our elites mock patriotism, our universities deconstruct our heritage, and our media celebrates the iconoclasts who tear down what they do not understand.
The former Olympian will no doubt be treated as a hero by some, a martyr for the cause of 'raising awareness'. But awareness of what? That we have lost our minds? That we have swapped the sublime for the silly? The Reflecting Pool will be cleaned, the water will clear, but the stain on our collective soul will remain.
Let this be a lesson. Not about the fragility of concrete and water, but about the fragility of civilisation itself. It requires constant upkeep, not just of its monuments, but of its values. And right now, we are failing that test spectacularly.