Washington: The Common Man's Mount Olympus

Washington, DC, with its monuments, memorials, and classical architecture is the ordinary person's Mount Olympus.

Enshrined there are the effigies and words of wisdom of the shapers of the United States. These are ordinary people whose incredible minds transformed the outcasts of Europe into a nation. In the process, they lifted up republicanism and democracy as sacred ways of life. We have a God-given right to make our lives and an obligation to do so, they believed. Thus these folks shook off the caste system of their forebears that limited the vision and reach of all but a select few and worked hard at they knew not what. These were geniuses and creators.

That so many monuments consist of larger-than-life figures surrounded by their own words carved into the walls speaks to the value we place on thought and lives built on the values and goals expressed in those thoughts.

That so many monuments to ordinary people doing their best in times of conflict--memorials to the soldiers of WW II, Korea, Vietnam--are all but wordless speaks to the profound respect we feel for those who give "the last full measure of devotion," as Abe Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address.

These thoughts were on my mind as my daughter took in the memorials and monuments for the first time while we were visiting the capitol last week. I stood back and watched her as she photographed the statues of soldiers and of Jefferson and Lincoln, men who stood firmly by their belief in the dignity of all people.

At home, we loaded her pictures into the computer and were thunderstruck by her choices. She photographed all the words that surround Jefferson. She looked Lincoln in the eye as she brought him home.

As she wiggled around for the best angle to photograph Jefferson's words, I overheard a tourist ask a tour guide about Jefferson's affair with a slave named Sally Hemings. Weakly, the guide replied that she wouldn't make moral judgments.

Ironically, I found myself making a moral judgment about a man striking up a conversation with a stranger about the sex life of a man long dead. It's fashionable to take pot shots at the big guys these days, to knock the gods from their pedestals by ignoring their gifts in favor of obsessing about their flaws--real or imposed.

I wonder at the irony of this. Why do we trample the legacy of our founders when we realize that they were human--which is to say flawed, sometimes inconsistent, in some ways weak? These were ordinary men and women, after all. Their greatest gift to us was to make a virtue of being ordinary that we might as a nation become extraordinary.

(My daughter took the photo above with her Polaroid i531. Her photo of Lincoln is part of this video.)