Who’s afraid of American pride?
For 125 years, a monument was supposed to rise on what is now a traffic circle by Arlington National Cemetery. Now, President Trump has proposed a 250 foot tall ‘Independence Arch’ (one year for every year of America’s existence) to mark the nation’s 250th birthday.
Democrats however have rallied in defense of the traffic circle in the name of the Confederacy.
After President Trump’s reelection, the demolitionist party that had cheered the toppling of monuments, the vandalism of the statues of Columbus, Lincoln and Francis Scott Key, suddenly became born-again preservationists, clutching their pearls over the White House ballroom, the Kennedy Center renovations and now the even more suddenly sacred traffic circle.
Calling for the preservation of a traffic circle, one that doesn’t even have BLM stenciled on it, is an uphill battle, especially since the ‘preservationists’ suddenly interested in it had never expressed any prior interest in the particular traffic circle. It’s not that they really care about the traffic circle, but that they don’t want a triumphal patriotic arch taking its place.
And so the same movement that had been tearing down Confederate statues has been reduced to arguing that putting up a patriotic arch would be wrong because, in the immortal words of the Washington Post, it “could obstruct views of Arlington House, the former Lee estate that sits on a hillside in Arlington National Cemetery.” That’s the same estate that the newspaper was campaigning to rename a mere four years ago because its very existence was offensive.
Now, when campaigning against the Independence Arch, the Post complains that “a large arch would significantly alter past lawmakers’ and architects’ ambitions for Arlington Memorial Bridge, which was intended as a bridge between the North and the South in the wake of the Civil War and to connect memorials for President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”
That might be a better point if the radical faction doing the complaining hadn’t been running around tearing down and renaming Confederate monuments and sites only to turn around and plead for the historic importance of them to stop President Trump from building a memorial arch.
The original intent of the Lee Estate, or more blandly, Arlington House, commemorating national reconciliation, was overturned after the BLM era and the estate exists to talk about slavery, targeting not only Lee, but George Washington’s family. (Washington had no children, but he adopted his wife Martha’s children as his own and the family named a number of their children ‘George.)
If the Washington Post and its born-again preservationists had been concerned about the integrity of the original intent of bridging North and South, and honoring Lee for his work for peace between both sides, it had years to protest. Not only didn’t it protest, it backed it. --->READ MORE HERE
The Trump administration revealed designs for a new 250-foot triumphal arch just outside Washington, D.C., on Friday, as the US prepares for celebrations this summer to mark its 250th birthday.
The neoclassical monument will feature a winged Lady Liberty statue atop its stone structure and bear the golden inscription, “One Nation Under God,” echoing the concluding words from the Pledge of Allegiance.
Golden lions will also sit at its entrance facing east, along with two enormous gilded eagles on either side of Lady Liberty.
It resembles France’s historic Arc de Triomphe, which is 164 feet high, and would sit just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, which is around 100 feet tall.
The site at Memorial Circle in Arlington, Va., is near the nation’s national cemetery for military veterans. The Custis family mansion, Arlington House, sits up the hill to the west of the circle.
Some vets have sued to stop construction of the project, arguing the arch — which President Trump has boasted will be “the biggest one of all” — could obstruct views of the graves of America’s fallen heroes.
Harrison Design, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, filed the renderings with the US Interior Department and the Commission of Fine Arts on Friday. --->READ MORE HERE
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