Christopher Hooks in Harper’s Magazine:
The imperial capital has many beautiful buildings, and they are always kept tidy and clean. They have a quality that grates, though. The landscape is didactic, insistent. Somebody is always trying to teach you something. This is true, of course, of the monuments and museums that are purpose-built to press a vague sense of republican tradition into generations of American schoolchildren on field trips, but there is hardly a pediment or lintel or courtyard in Washington that is not given over to instruction from some half-remembered ancestor. It is a shouty place, and to mixed effect.
A hallway in the Capitol Building preserves Daniel Webster’s immortal proclamation that when tillage begins other arts follow. Broadly unobjectionable stuff. But was it really necessary, beneath a statue of a wise-looking man at the National Archives, to leave an enjoinder to study the past? And having put that on record, was it also necessary to leave a complementary warning, under a wise-looking woman, that what is past is prologue? All this hectoring from the grandfathers—and very occasionally, from a grandmother—gets a little more tolerable once you clock how many of these admonitions, exhortations, and commemorations can carry unintended or ironic meanings.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.