My father was an Adlai Stevenson Democrat; my mother was an Eisenhower Republican, and, even in the 1950s, one lively political discussion in the kitchen ended with Mom dumping a colander of fresh Oceano strawberries upside-down on my father’s head.
JFK was the first Democrat my mother voted for, but that was because he was Irish.
So those are my political credentials. I am a Flaming Moderate.
As such, it dismayed me to hear the president* shift arguments about his Triumphal Arch. “Who’s it for?” a reporter asked in an Oval Office press gaggle last week. “Me.” Trump replied.
Later, he amended his reason for The Arch. The military wants it. Its height (250 feet, facing the 98-foot Lincoln Memorial) would make it ideal for launching drones and for storing a vast cache of ammunition intended for the snipers who would find vast fields of fire from atop The Arch.
It makes you wonder: For whom are the drones and the snipers intended? And precisely which flag officer implored that the president* build the Arch for those purposes?
In July 1830–the time of Les Miserables–the French overthrew King Charles X, who rode to his coronation in a gilt coach and entered the cathedral, on a white horse, in a full suit of armor. It went no better than the president’s* Reflecting Pool: hundreds of doves were released above the king and, being excited, they did what doves will do, and all over the King’s burnished armor.
His reign was marked by catastrophic crop failures, which generated inflation in the price of bread, which the king ignored. Charles responded to rising dissent by shuttering the press, dissolving the Chambre, the Chamber of Deputies, and by turning the cannon that defended Paris atop their ramparts inward, toward the city interior.
Parisians rebelled, in what they call the July Days. The cannonball, from July 28, 1830, was never removed from the wall to commemorate the downfall of a tyrant.
Thankfully, the tyrant abdicated–the revolution against his rule is also the subject of the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People-– and fled to England disguised as woman. The throne passed to his son, who likewise abdicated after a reign that lasted fifteen minutes.
Sadly, Charles did not yet have his own arch–the Arc de Triomphe would not be finished until six years after he’d fled France–and, even then, it’s sixteen feet shorter than the one the president* proposes for his snipers’ nest.
Mon Dieu.
