Don’t Build the Arch

The meanings of words such as honor, sacrifice, and humility have been leaking away from American civic life like red blood cells from an anemic. But if there’s one place where they retain their rich, sticky, life-giving force, it’s surely in the air around the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.The cemetery is where Americans remember those who sacrificed their lives for the nation. The memorial is where they remember their greatest president—the man who proclaimed an end to slavery and kept the union intact, though the cost was staggering. The air between these two places is the medium through which Lincoln gets to speak with his war dead, and vice versa.If President Trump’s ambition is realized, a triumphal arch will thrust its way into this murmuring conversation like a boastful bore crashing into a huddle of friends swapping stories about a loved one at a wake. Heavy-handed and overbearing, it would pervert the significance of this uniquely meaningful place, forcing visitors to see these two sites through a crass and generalized assertion of victory and triumph. It will interfere with the bond between Lincoln and his troops and, by extension, the bond between America’s precious, hard-won democratic government and those who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend it.Trump wants to erect his arch at Memorial Circle, a rotary you come to from the Lincoln Memorial after crossing the Potomac River on Arlington Memorial Bridge. The arch is to be 250 feet high, more than twice as high as the Lincoln Memorial. It will feature gilded statuary, a winged Lady Liberty–like figure on top, and the inscriptions One Nation Under God on one side and Liberty and Justice for All on the other. The project was approved by one key federal commission on May 21 and goes before another on Thursday, but it also faces a lawsuit filed by Vietnam War veterans.Some opponents of the arch are convinced it will never go ahead. But pink surveyors’ flags were already pl