michael 
It has been a while, at least a century to be precise, since the last time Washington, DC, received a monumental makeover. Washington, the eponymous city of our first President, was envisioned by our Founding Fathers to be a new Rome.
Indeed, particularly in the dreams of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Rome by the Potomac was intended to eclipse the old Rome by the Tiber.
The first republic since antiquity, the United States was deserving of a city befitting its grand aspirations – a grand city upon a grand hill, erected upon a continent of virtually endless possibility.
In the generation immediately succeeding Washington’s, there was a movement, supported by the aging founders who lived into that next chapter of American history (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the republic’s fiftieth anniversary in 1826), to erect a colossus in the image of George Washington.
Envisioned to be six hundred feet tall, the monumental statue of the republic’s first emperor was to capture the grandeur of his heroism, while paying direct tribute to the mighty displays of heroism from the Old World, in whose ways and means the Founding generation was closely acquainted.
Though technical limitations (and later, war) prevented that colossus from taking on the exact likeness of its namesake, the Washington Monument became a worthy substitute, evocative of the noble spirit of that founding age to which every subsequent age would be inevitably compared.
The Washington Monument was completed in 1848, some 12 years before civil war came, and stood at a towering 555-feet, for that time as well as ours a remarkable feat of engineering, the tallest freestanding structure in the world when it was built.
In the decades hence, the monumental obelisk would be accompanied by other monumental fixtures – first came the Lincoln Memorial, completed in 1922, under the administration of Warren Harding, over a half-century since the death of its namesake.
Then, a little over two decades later, was dedicated the Jefferson Memorial, which commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who wrote America’s founding creed: that all men are created equal – memorialized, for posterity, in a declaration of independence.
Since 1943, no new building, grand colossus, or monument of “monumental” stature has gone up in Washington, DC.
The decades since World War II reveal a government that grew increasingly complex, reifying its indecisiveness through layers of regulation and bureaucracy while trading the early republic’s grand ambitions for the comforts of a late-stage empire.
As other American cities have grown, and quite mightily in those intervening decades, the national capital has stagnated.
Perhaps Washington was never going to embrace the skyscraper, the uniquely American architectural innovation that would typify New York and Chicago.
But it should have readily welcomed the structures conducive to the neoclassical mold out of which the imperial city, with its Capitol Rotunda and Corinthian columns, was sculpted.
And that it did, but only for a time: no great monument went up after the Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1943; the post war-era, defined by decadence and bureaucratic gridlock, seemed to adopt a spirit of despair towards all great things, as if to imply that those things necessarily belonged to the past, for when held up against the standards of the present, they would only invoke deep-seated feelings of guilt.
Guilt had multiple meanings in this context: the modern society would only pale in comparison to its past greatness; its current statesmen were diminutive in the shadows of their forefathers.
But that guilt also suggested that even daring to live up to the standards of the past indicated the existence of standards at all, a precept that was anathema for the age of leveling egalitarianism which defined most of the rest of the twentieth century.
For Donald Trump to now come along, in the two-hundred and fiftieth year, and have the gall to ignore the previous century’s wisdom, which displaced Jefferson’s as our newfound creed, of perpetual decline, caused heads to spin.
He even said that he would just erect a monument at the city’s entranceway, one that would stand as living testimony of American greatness.
Naturally, this audacity was met with tremendous umbrage by the ruling classes, the chief architects of the nation’s decline. It was baked into the cake that the environment had to physically adopt the image and likeness of the philosophy of managed decline.
As a result, Washington’s decaying infrastructure — its broken fountains, crumbling buildings, and neglected streets — came to reflect the ruling class’s quiet embrace of decline.
It was as if the nation felt bound to the trauma of September 11th. The searing images of the World Trade Center collapsing and the Pentagon in flames remained seared into the national consciousness, eventually acquiring a near-theological power that shaped the outlook of the secular elite governing late-stage America.
9/11 bore the world out of which the twenty-first-century American empire was always supposed to pay homage. Every president in those years seemed to accept the worldview of an expanding managerial class — one that treated America’s decline as inevitable, even as the country grew wealthier after September 11th.
And so, a sharp dichotomy arose between the material riches indicated in the nation’s coffers, and the harrowing “facts on the ground” of its great cities in ruin.
Yet, no president, not Bush nor certainly Obama nor Biden would dare question this narrative: their actions implied total capitulation to it.
Only Donald Trump refused to accept this narrative. By rejecting the ideology of decline that his predecessors had normalized, he effectively insulted the creed they had all come to share.
The President is correct to say Washington, DC, for all its marvels, lacks an arch – comparable to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris – worthy of its name.
The location selected for the President’s memorial arch is perfect, for it will be located right across the bridge overseeing Lincoln Memorial, the figurative gateway of the city, and just down the hill from Robert E. Lee’s magisterial Grecian home, where the wartime general resided before being chased into the hills once the Civil War broke out.
The roadway represents the unification of North and South, but the Memorial will serve a grander, forward-looking purpose. Sure, it will in part be testimony to the President who envisioned great feats again.
But symbolically it is also representative of a country that has too often ruminated over its history, finding every opportunity to criticize, while forgetting its cultural achievements.
The barren landscape of Memorial Circle offers a blank canvas for a new kind of history; not one necessarily steeped in the past chaos of civil war, or the evils of slavery, or anything that would placate the fetishistically suicidal appetites of the latter-day elite.
This is what most upsets the Left, which would prefer to wallow in the agonies of the past – even a past to which it finds itself at a great distance from – for time immemorial, never to boldly embrace the future.
The arch would displace this performative critical history for a stronger and hopefully more lasting monumental history, one that elevates the past once and for all and exalts its many glories and heroic feats.
Not for the purposes of guilting the present, but to remind we, the living, that mankind once did great things, and it can still, with the requisite will, do such great things again.
The post The Memorial Arch Is Testimony To America’s Monumental Greatness appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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