My visit to DC could have started anywhere. By coincidence, the bus that I caught towards the center dropped me near the western end of the Mall, so I began with Lincoln. In the cloudy, early morning it was lightly attended, with just a dozen people sprinkled around the steps, though a minor ceremony would kick in soon after my arrival. For a couple of minutes, I was alone inside the “temple” with Abe. Before long, my attention was drawn to the right side of the room, to the last paragraph of his words etched into the wall, taken from his second inaugural address, Lincoln states, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…”
Few like Lincoln have understood the critical importance of reconciliation, have borne the awareness that victories in war often sow the seeds of future conflict, have recognized that the peace has to be fought for every bit as resolutely as the war.
Of course, he didn’t have the opportunity to carry that out.
Descending from Lincoln’s temple, I passed over to the Vietnam Memorial, a rather unremarkable gash in the lawn, or so it appears from a distance. The special granite, polished to a sheen, achieves a reflective effect, meaning that as we gaze into this much-criticized chapter of the nation’s past, we simultaneously look back upon the present; as we skim the names of the fallen, we stare at ourselves. It is a reminder that demands a reckoning.
It was, of course, remarkably unpopular when it was built.
I could have been listening to anything as I strolled around DC. I place a bunch of holds in libby and wait for different audiobooks to come available. By coincidence, I was finishing a section of The Wheel of Time, part of an attempt to familiarize myself with classics of genre fiction that I have largely dismissed from my reading habits historically, and starting Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized.
The Wheel of Time features the classic fantasy plot–a Great Evil threatens to eradicate humanity, while a Chosen One strives to fulfill the prophecies that herald his coming. In the final pages of this installment, the hero rails against fate, against humanity’s apparent condemnation, to fail and fail and fail again, achieving survival by the slimmest of margins each time after making a total mess of things. What is the point of fighting on, he wonders, if it only serves to extend a life of suffering and shame?
Klein’s recent work, meanwhile, grapples with the rise of what many Americans would also identify as the Great Evil. Actually, it would be more accurate to write that it discusses how most Americans have come to see the emergence of a Great Evil. Klein highlights some disturbing data, showing how Americans are simultaneously less supportive of their preferred party than in the past but also more strongly opposed to the other party. We don’t know what we like, but we’re damn sure about what we hate.
I could have stopped anywhere for lunch. Indeed, before committing to a place, I sat briefly at a bus stop, considering scrapping sightseeing in the afternoon to go lounge around the house for a bit, put off by the persistent rain that struck mid-morning. Bouncing back, I almost walked into one sandwich shop, but then pushed onto Pret a Manger. Moments after sitting down, I looked up and saw a familiar face staring at me from the line–Carsten, a student from the first homeroom I ever advised as a teacher. It had been more than a decade since we had seen each other.
Over lunch, we touched on all of the kinds of things you discuss when seeing someone with a shared, distant past for the first time in forever. I was struck, though, when he reflected on how he and his peers look back on their high school years, and the persisting grievance that many of them hold for how their class was disciplined by the administration. Indeed, it’s a familiar grievance, as I carried a similar feeling forward from my own high school years. When you leave a place feeling like a wrong was done to you, it’s a difficult emotion to release.
After lunch, I walked to the Washington Monument. With the rain having concluded, the sun poked through the clouds and the surrounding cherry blossoms continued their tentative unfurling. I had spent the early morning reading about the monument. The bold initial vision had drawn some support, but not nearly enough funding. The swampy ground, insufficiently drained at that point, made placement challenging. Still, the proponents pushed on, seeking donations and support from all corners through the early 1850s. Even the pope contributed a stone. That only served to rally the antipathy of the Know-Nothing Party, which organized a raid on the unfinished monument in order to steal the pope’s stone and toss it into the Potomac. The Know-Nothings then thwarted any meaningful continued attempt at building the structure, so it loomed, an unfinished stub in the midst of the mall.
Of course, then the Civil War happened, and symbols of national unity seemed like less of a priority for a while.
Eventually, years after the war concluded, the construction project would regain momentum. The monument would be completed into the towering structure that exists today, the tallest obelisk in the world (take that, Ancient Egypt!).
However, as bad luck would have it, the original vein of marble had been exhausted before the second wave of construction unfolded, meaning a slightly different hue of marble had to be used for the remainder of the obelisk. If one weren’t aware of this, it might be easy to miss–the difference is readily apparent, but not dramatic.
The Lincoln Memorial is nearly flawless, a remarkable work of art that feels every bit as sacred as the “temple” descriptor claims. By contrast, the Washington Monument is marked as flawed by its contentious past. Lincoln gives us an ideal to strive for, a promise of possibility that was lost–at least for a while–almost as soon as it was uttered. Washington preserves our contentious and complicated pasts.
Our symbols, our stories, our pasts–national and personal–give us choices. Do we choose to nurture and stoke the harms done to us by others, as an odd, but certainly real, source of righteous comfort? Do we cling to impossible myths, that offer shallow satisfaction but belie a less fulfilling reality? Or, do we strive to reconcile the darker truths and the unfulfilled aspirations, recognizing the nobility of enduring, of acknowledging where we have fallen short, of tolerating the failures of others much as do our own?
