It was these fucking things that got me thinking about what eventually became this post. The "Arts of Peace/Arts of War" statues located near the Lincoln Memorial and the bridge across the Potomac between Washington D.C. and Arlington, VA.
The idea for these things dates from the late 1920s. The committee tasked with decorating the D.C. side of the new bridge - apparently the old span was beat-up and undersized, but didn't get up on the target list for replacement until the party to cut the ribbon on the post-World-War-denkmal (the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", in case you couldn't guess it...) was crashed by some traffic jams and general clusterfuckery so noticeable that even the Former Boss of 20th Century Political Corruption, Warren Harding, couldn't look past it - came up with "equestrian statues" since that's what every fucking republic needs is more "statues of men on horseback", right?
Well, the design and construction of these lawn ornaments sounds like a perfect parable for a city run by Congressional committee. The request for proposal went out in 1928 (the actual bridge RFP was issued in 1925) but there was a whole bunch of dicking around with the designs. I especially love this description from the Wikipedia article on how the sculptors were selected:
"James Earle Fraser and Leo Friedlander were both commissioned to craft sculptures for the eastern terminus. Just how Fraser and Friedlander were chosen is unclear. Fraser's biographer, August Freundlich, and the National Park Service both say there was a competition. Freundlich puts the date of this competition as 1931, and gives no further details. This contradicts reports from the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks and Washington Post, which point to a selection process (not necessarily a competition) in 1929. Friedlander's biographers, however, state the artist was directly chosen in 1929. Museum curator Joel Rosenkranz says Friedlander's commission came directly from the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and mentions no competition."
"The more things change...", right? These jamokes would have been right at home slipping Felony Fats' Reflecting Pool Boy a bagful o' cash under the table to fuck up the pond liner.
The tale of the journey between design and construction is a similar sort of "designed-by-a-committee" epic. Design submittals, reviews, redesigns, resubmittals, re-reviews, re-re-designs, and then along came the Great Depression and the whole fucking thing got shut down for lack of funds.
The project diddled along in the Thirties - one big change was in materials for the statues, from granite to bronze - and then along came another World War and bronze was needed for making mess kits or something, so the statue plans went back into storage until VJ Day.
Okay! Now they were cookin'; the post-war boom was ready to go boom, and...wait...now you're telling me that the cost of casting these ginormous traffic islands was twice what you told me in 1939? The fuck..?
Being good American entrepreneurs the sculptors and their Congressional committee patrons shipped the manufacture overseas. To Italy, to be precise, where these paperweights were cast at several foundries between late 1950 and April, 1951.
The Wiki article says that the idea was to "...use fire-gilding to finish the statues. Fire-gilding is a process in which gold leaf and mercury are applied to the bronze. Fire is applied to the area, which causes the gold to adhere to the bronze and the mercury to evaporate."
This apparently was a problem. The quality of the various foundries varied significantly; some were good at the bronze but poor at gilding, others better with the gilt but sketchy with the bronze itself. All the initial gilding was judged too glitzy - the Wiki says that original casting samples were "...shipped to the United States, where it was discovered that the color was too bright." The sculptors' on-site rep had to finesse the Italians to get the metal finish to look like the design plans called for, but eventually did, and the big metal slugs were finally set up and officially dedicated in September, 1951.
And there they sat, for the succeeding 75 years.
Now bronze is a very common sort of "outdoors-metal-sculpture" material. It's fairly durable, and it's also fairly ductile - that is, "not brittle" - so it deals with heat and cold changes, rain, snow, sunlight, all the stuff you can lump together as "elements", pretty well.
It also develops a "patina", a natural (or artificial - different patinas may be applied to bronzes to get certain effects) oxidation product. The link describes perhaps the most familiar patina you know:
"Oxygen and water molecules react with the metal and form a layer of corrosion that discolors the metal. Think of the Statue of Liberty. This statue is clad in copper sheets, but its long exposure to the air and water has corroded the copper, giving it the statue’s iconic green color. That green color is patina, therefore the Statue of Liberty is the perfect example of a beautiful patina statue."
Yep. The big green Frenchwoman in New York Harbor wasn't originally green but shiny copper.
These bronze ponies developed this patina over the course of 75 seasons, like this:
Now I've seen various bronzes, and the natural patina can add some depth and character to what is otherwise just a shiny hunk of metal. The photos of these statues don't look particularly interesting to me, but some of that may be that big Art Deco stuff kind of leaves me cold. It's the Thirties "burly peasant and heroic soldier" kind of monument sensibility that makes me think of Moscow subways and Mussolini's Marble Arch looming over the Libyan desert.
Anyway, peacefully oxidizing along the Potomac is where they were until Trump lumbered into view.
Okay.
Now, if there's one thing that Fats luuurves more than money (for him), and pussy (for him), and punishment (for his enemies) it's gold. I mean, if you know any one thing about the porcine rascal, it's that "gold" is his thing.
His reign is the "Golden Age". The money he throws at the U.S. Navy is to build a "Golden Fleet". His special pay-me-for-a-green-card for rich white foreigners is the "Trump Gold Card". He's nailed up so many gilded knick-knacks in the Oval Office that the sonofabitch looks like the party room in a sleazy Vegas cathouse only with Gilbert Stuart's George Washington glowering down from over the bathroom door.
So it's hardly surprising that when Orange Foolius turned his artistic vision to these statues the result was to go from this...
...to this.
And that's what got me going.
I'm not sure exactly what part of this latest damn gold Trump thing that got me so hot.
Was it the gaudy waste? Sure! Here's the guy with whose encouragement his buddy Elon took a chainsaw to government pennies that went to help people, like USAID, but who's been hoovering up graft and hucking tax dollars to J6 traitors, rich pals, and other scummy wingnut fool farms like beads off a MArdi Gras float.
That this cretinous toad thought nothing of chucking a million or five at slathering gold on fucking statues while telling people who he was kicking off food stamps and utility-bill-assistance to suck it? Sure!
Was it the whole Welthauptstadt Germania neo-Nazi/grotesque Soviet statuary gilded vibe of these things? Sure, that too! The Atlantic magazine piece about them starts like this:
"The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s."
I'd say that equating them with a Chang's was a bit too high-tone a metaphor for this paint job; they look more like the sort of cheapo gilded plaster knockoff "Venus de Milo" yard ornament you'd expect to see outside the "Dolphin II Gentlemens' Club" on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway right off Highway 217.
But after I sat down and thought about it I realized what really pissed me off about this. For itself, an as an emblem of my country circa 2026.
I hate all of this.
I hate the "fuck you, I got mine" arrogance of it.
I hate what that says about the person who did it. About the people who applauded it. Or ignored it. Or hand-waved it. Or voted for it.
I hate that while something like half to two-thirds of the people in the nation he rules despise this motherfucker, loathe what he's doing, utterly reject what passes for policy coming out of his gilded palace and the fuck-you to all of us who despise him that these golden idols symbolize...
And that there's not a goddamn fucking thing we can do about it.
Our system makes it possible for him, for them, to rule like kings. With 50.1% of the Congress, 6 of 9 of the Supreme Court, that Felony Fats can rule like goddamn Caesar.
And that's what this shit looks like.
It's Louis XVI with his table full of ormolu clocks while starving kids begged in the street and died.
It's Nicholas II playing warlord while his soldiers were butchered by his incompetent "leadership".
It's George III, it's Charles I, it's Nero and Tiberius and Caligula. It's every other goddamn plutocratic royal moron, lolling about in golden ignorance and carelessness (or petty anger or madness...) while the nation burns and the people rage in powerless fury.
The original tricotreuses were poor women of Paris.
In October 1789 their fury - at their own poverty and starvation and at their royal masters' wealth and indifference - erupted in something called the "Black March":
"Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory for weapons and marched on the Palace of Versailles. The crowd besieged the palace and, in a dramatic and violent confrontation, they successfully pressed their demands upon King Louis XVI. The very next day, the crowd forced the king and his family to return with them to Paris."
As is so often the case, however, these people were offered public praise and made much of...until they tried to get hold of real power to punish those aristocratic scum and to change their lives for the better:
"On 21 May 1793 they were excluded by a decree from the galleries of the Convention; on 26 May they were forbidden to form part of any political assembly. The veterans of the march and their numerous successors and hangers-on gathered thereafter at the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution...as sullen onlookers...the tricoteuses...watched the guillotine as they knitted."
And that, my friends, is right where I am. Exactly how I feel.
Does that mean I'm not going to do whatever I can do within the current political climate to defenstrate the gilded sonsofbitches? Ohhellno.
But in a political system increasingly tilted against me, with "allies" on my side of the political divide who seem to think that empowering words and optimistic protest songs will defeat fascist goon squads, I'm left with nothing more than a hot coal of rage burning my chest.
I long for nothing so much as a day when I can sit and rock and knit and smile as one after another the bloody heads tumble down off the block.
Trump, Miller, Hegseth, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Markymarkwayne...fuck it, let's toss Alex Jones' and Newt and Callista Gingrich's and Steve Bannon's empty noggins in the basket, too.
It took millions of soldiers and sailors and aviators, tens of thousands of bombers and aircraft carriers, tens of millions of tons of bombs and shells and bullets to defeat the last great outbreak of fascist scum.
Before that it took years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths and miles and acres of destruction to defeat the first great outbreak of racist traitors here in this nation.
Now that task is before us.
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
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