The Obelisk

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

My neck is bent as far back as it will bend. My eyes point skyward. My historian’s heart is bent too.

The National Mall is bleak, blustery, pretty much abandoned by tourists. The leaves have left their trees.

At five hundred and fifty-five feet and five inches from base to pointy tip, the Washington Monument was the tallest building in the world on the day it was christened in 1885. Constructed with white marble blocks locked in place exclusively by gravity and friction—to this day not a dab of mortar, the obelisk was an engineering marvel.

I am in Washington, D.C. to collect facts and factoids, stories and scuttlebutt, bits and bytes, to spice up my high school history lectures. This city is a historian’s playground. The Library of Congress, largest in the world, has 162 million books. The Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s attic, has 138 million artifacts. George Washington's First Inaugural Address is at the National Archives.

Washington lived his life making awe-inspiring choices—and two very bad ones. His staining sin was owning 577 people-slaves. For that glaring, horrible mistake, two and a half centuries later the father of the nation is about to be disavowed by the children of the nation.

The Washington Monument is being renamed, dumbed down, to the Presidential Monument. Henceforth, George Washington, James Buchanan and Donald Trump will get equal billing.

Washington’s second mistake was dying too soon. If he had lived another hundred years, say to the Civil War, as American society was finally, fully ‘woking up’ to the horrors of human bondage, he might have persuaded himself to free his slaves.

Knocking down confederate monuments—they honor traitors for being traitors—is different than purging national heroes. Picking apart a president’s life for becoming the man his parents raised him to be, for living in his own time, for not being prophetic, for not possessing superhuman moral clarity, makes my head hurt.

How can I possibly explain this to my classes without running afoul of the purity police? My stomach is as jittery as a substitute teacher facing an unruly classroom.

I don’t want to teach civics in a crimped world where only the perfect are perfect enough to survive the arrogance of hindsight. Cancelling Washington boils my blood. Before too long, all the nation’s heroes will be extinct.

I don’t grade my students by robotically using their single lowest exam score. Likewise, I don’t want history reduced to the single worst thing every person has ever done.

Ever since the prissy, pro-noun-ed world of political correctness started patrolling my campus, I’ve been grimacing my way through the school day. To keep my job, I keep my mouth shut, but I’ve stopped calling myself an ally.

History is not a romcom—all rainbows and romance. History is made—and taught--by humans with faults and failings, blunders and blind spots. If history ever exhumes and examines the arc of my life, in the spirit of Stalin and Mao my tombstone is sure to be canceled.

Soon, very soon, in the nation’s Capital autumn will be winter. Shivering, shuddering, I turn up my coat collar.

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