"What a welcome and much-needed reminder of a President who valued art, beauty, and decency. A glaring contrast to the garish, self-serving chaos of the current one."

Says one commenter at the NYT article "The Audacity of Art at the Obama Presidential Center/Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned 30 artists to create work for their campus, which starts visitor previews next week on the South Side of Chicago."

That's a gift link so you can see the photos of the artwork inside the building, which I think is quite good, and so you can gaze at the "View from the Sky Room" photograph that shows a view from the building, looking out through one of the letters of the text from an Obama speech that you can attempt to read if you stand on the ground and gaze upward at the building.

The view from the Sky Room is garish chaos, but the chaos seems designed to give ordinary citizens a place to play, that is, it's not trying to look good, it's trying to offer what can be used. Included in the play equipment is an N.B.A.-size basketball court and a "sledding hill." We'll see how much freewheeling tomfoolery unfolds in this space. The message is casual playfulness for the people, and it is in distinct contrast to the design ideas Trump has been imposing on the White House and elsewhere. His message is grandeur and elegance.

"This isn't a monument to my legacy. It's a gateway to yours."

May the Fourth be with YOU, from the Obama Presidential Center.

Opening June 19. @BarackObama @MarkHamill pic.twitter.com/OzhhUzD789

— The Obama Foundation (@ObamaFoundation) May 4, 2026

It's "May the Fourth," and they've wheeled out Mark Hamill, who's stuck with a scripted role. He reads it woodenly, perhaps because he feels a little bad that he's required to be an egotist, and humor is wrung out of having Barack Obama insult him for being a narcissist. Why am I being subjected to this?, I wondered, and what is the point of using "Star Wars" to promote the Obama Presidential Center?

I guess it must be because the Center has been likened to certain "Star Wars" images, but not in a good way.

What does an arch mean? If Trump, fascism. If Mamdani, warmth and friendliness.

There was this, April 10th, in The Washington Post:

Today, we've got this in The New York Times:

A look at Trump's Triumphal Arch... with the Lincoln Memorial in the background, at a distance.

From "Trump officials unveil designs for president’s controversial 250-foot arch/The arch is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Military veterans have sued to halt the project, saying it would alter key views of Arlington National Cemetery" (WaPo)(gift link). Excerpt:

"The brilliant 1791 plan for the city... was the creation of the French-born, classically trained architect chosen for the task by George Washington himself..."

"... Pierre Charles L’Enfant. The L’Enfant Plan generated many urban nodes calling for the erection of monuments. Yet Washington is the only major Western capital that lacks a triumphal arch.... The triumphal arch originally appeared in Rome in the second century B.C., well before the fall of the Republic. The Romans... modified the monumental gateways of their Etruscan neighbors as free-standing structures and articulated them with the classical architectural forms—columns, friezes, cornices—developed by the Greeks.... It’s worth noting that, contrary to widespread belief, there is no record of a Roman arch being built for its honoree’s triumphal procession...  To be sure, numerous victory arches were erected along the processional via triumphalis that led up to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline in Rome. But hundreds of arches were also erected in many other venues.... They could celebrate the construction of new roads, bridges, ports, aqueducts, or city walls—sometimes being atavistically embedded in the latter, sometimes standing slightly in front of them. They marked entrances to forums (civic centers), sacred precincts, and important public venues such as the Circus Maximus in Rome...."

From an article by Catesby Leigh in City Journal, published last December, "Trump Should Erect an Arch for America’s 250th/His plans to mark the semiquincentennial in 2026 offer an appropriate opportunity to do so in Washington" (City Journal).

This NY Post piece from yesterday — "Trump shares rendering of massive stone monument for DC to mark America’s 250th birthday" — says the idea came from the Catesby Leigh article.

Catesby Leigh brought up the arch in Washington Square in New York City. That arch is well-loved, and you don't have to be a Trumpster to feel glad it's there. And that made me remember that we have an arch in Madison, Wisconsin: 

Trump seeks to excise "divisive" ideology from the Smithsonian Institution.

Read the text of his "Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Restores Truth and Sanity to American History."  Excerpts:

The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

What was happening at the zoo?! 

More generally, how do you decide what is "improper, divisive, or anti-American"? I'm sure some will say that it's improper, divisive, and anti-American to sanitize race out of the presentation of our history and culture.

Does the order step down from that abstraction and get specific as it discusses enforcement of the Trumpian vision?

The sculptor Sabin Howard said he "studied many images from the war, including paintings like John Singer Sargent’s 'Gassed,' a portrait of soldiers blinded by poison gas."

"'Some of my earlier iterations showed the soldiers … traumatized and wounded by mustard gas,' Howard said. 'But I was asked to take it out because it was too much, too much pain. When I started looking at images online, historical images, I saw how the soldiers and wives and fiancées and girlfriends were human beings. The reference to those photos had a huge impact on me because I saw this was a memorial where you need to remember the humans that partook in this. I like to say it’s for humans, by humans, about humans."

From "25-ton sculpture honoring World War I soldiers comes to Washington/The sculpture will be the centerpiece and final element of Washington’s National World War I Memorial" (WaPo).

The pieces of 58-foot long high-relief sculpture arrived in Washington this past weekend. The 5 tons sections were maneuvered into the park through "hours of careful balancing, rebalancing and moving the pieces to fit just so." Black plastic covers everything now. The “first illumination” ceremony will be on September 13th. 

We will see how close or far it is from John Singer Sargent's "Gassed":

The men are walking like that because they were blinded, but apparently the new monument will not show blinded men, and it will even — or so it sounds — include women. The sculptor seems to imply that the men in Sargent's painting don't seem human. Was a decision made to show soldiers interacting with their wives and fiancées and girlfriends? Is that what makes men human — in government propaganda — the love of a woman? 

"It appears that every historical monument in DC is being vandalized with no intervention from the police."

Writes Ian Miles Cheong on X, with this video:

It appears that every historical monument in DC is being vandalized with no intervention from the police. pic.twitter.com/dQxKcW0NlS

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 24, 2024

On the day before the solstice, the group "Just Stop Oil" besmirches Stonehenge.

Just stop oil protestors damage Stonehenge 😭
pic.twitter.com/HSQvfWIdNh

— Stonehenge U.K (@ST0NEHENGE) June 19, 2024

The group stresses its moderation: "The orange cornflour we used will soon wash away with the rain, but the urgent need for effective government action to mitigate the catastrophic consequences of the climate and ecological crisis will not."

"I have a visceral reaction against, against the attacks on those statues. There were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves..."

"... and, you know, I just, I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it. I think we should celebrate who we are. We should celebrate the good qualities of everybody. … If we want to find people who were completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history...."

Said RFK Jr., quoted in "RFK Jr. had a ‘visceral’ reaction to tear-downs of Confederate statues/Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on a podcast that he doesn’t think 'it’s a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase history'" (WaPo).

We experienced the longest darkness in Indiana...

... in Vincennes, Indiana (a place named after François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, who was burned at the stake in 1736, "during the French war with the Chickasaw nation").

His name glows on a vibrant mural:

I don't know if this is the town's official motto, but we talked a lot about it: "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!"

It seemed to be a grandiose claim, but I said maybe the people interpret God's requirements narrowly, so that it's not understood to be terribly difficult. My son Chris, texting, said, maybe God does not give them any particularly challenging purpose. I contemplated whether Chris was saying something different from what I'd just said and decided he certainly was. My idea was that people are self-serving, and his idea was that God was easy-going and pretty darned nice. Hearing that, Meade noted that "fulfills" could mean that citizens are simply wherever they are in a process of fulfilling.

We walked through the festival atmosphere on historic Main Street, by the Wabash River, but given the hubbub and live, loud rock music, we kept moving until we arrived at the memorial for the men who died in the War of the Union....

We set up on the lush grass by the county courthouse, which looked like this at 3:01:51 — 3 minutes before the beginning of the total eclipse:

And here it is, at the very beginning of the totality:

Thanks to Vincennes for hosting us and many others. The show was free and the number of dollars we spent was equal to the number of minutes of the totality of the eclipse. Meade bought a pulled pork sandwich at a food truck:

The text at the pig silhouette in the lower right corner of the truck deserves contemplative comparison to the aforementioned "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!" It says: "Every butt loves a rub."

"I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble."

Said Richard Serra, quoted in "For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. He was known as the Man of Steel. But the sculptor was also an eternal poet, reshaping our perception of space, says our critic" (NYT).

The Times critic Michael Kimmelman begins:

... Richard Serra died yesterday....

 It continues:

"I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the monument’s antiquity."

Said Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, quoted in "Who Knew the Colosseum Was So Old? Tourist Apologizes for Defacement. A man who etched his initials and those of his girlfriend in a wall of the nearly 2,000-year-old monument wrote a letter of apology, and his lawyer says he is hoping for a plea bargain" (NYT).

Il Messaggero, the Italian newspaper, said the apology "defaced common sense."

"The brothers estimate that the $22 million wall of remembrance... contains 1,015 spelling errors."

"It also incorrectly includes 245 names of service members who died in circumstances totally unrelated to the war, they say, including a man killed in a motorcycle accident in Hawaii and another who drank antifreeze thinking it was alcohol. And it includes one Marine who lived for 60 years after the war and had eight grandchildren. Beyond that, there are about 500 names that should be listed but are not, according to the Barkers. They say that the official roster used for the wall was so slapdash that they cannot find much rhyme or reason to who was included and who was left out."

From "A Korean War Wall of Remembrance Set Hundreds of Errors in Stone/Many names of American service members who died in the conflict are misspelled or missing from the new memorial wall in Washington, relatives and researchers say" (NYT).

Remembering 9/11 — a walk through the Flight 93 memorial.

The video is from Meade's visit to the federal Flight 93 memorial on December 15, 2021.

Below are some of Meade's still photographs. Before you arrive at the federal monument, you encounter the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel:

Outside there are these monuments:

Finally, this is Meade's photo of the "Tower of Voices" at the federal memorial:

"I am old enough to have visited Stonehenge (as a child) when you could wander around in the circle and touch the stones..."

"... and it wasn't crowded. I found it a magical experience I've never forgotten. I don't think traipsing past 50m away in a line of other visitors would have the same effect mind you"/"The difference between then and now is depressing, English Heritage have completely sanitised the experience, the drive-by is great though, just don’t do it unless you have a fair bit of time"/"I had it to myself in 1975, oh, and my Australian girlfriend who, fortunately married someone else. Poor darling. Very hot August." 

Those are 3 comments on the London Times article "Give it a miss and head to Durham: Dan Snow’s verdict shakes Stonehenge."

Dan Snow is identified as a "broadcaster," and he's giving advice to visitors doing a historical tour ("You take in York, you take in Durham, you take in Hadrian’s Wall, Hexham — you get into the Borders, Edinburgh, Kelso, Stirling Castle. I think that trip is probably stronger, the strongest in the isles. I think I would suggest people go to Durham Cathedral rather than Stonehenge").

A "bestselling historian," Tom Holland, says Snow is "deranged," because Stonehenge is "iconic," easily "recognise[d] from a silhouette." But I think those are the very things that disappoint you when you go see them in person. You get the feeling, yes, there it is, looking exactly like all the pictures I've seen. Maybe it's a bit of a surprise to see that it's bigger or smaller than it seemed from the picture. And if it's something you thought would give you a magical mystical experience, you're least likely to get it if the place is a popular tourist attraction.

"Statues paint an idiosyncratic portrait of American history. Consider Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko."

"The two Polish noblemen turned Revolutionary War generals are honored with more U.S. statues and monuments than all but a handful of native luminaries, according to the National Monument Audit. The audit was a year-long project to build a list of about 50,000 monuments... from mighty Mount Rushmore to a small monument in Ohio that pays homage to the man who 'brought the tuberous rooted begonia to this country from Belgium.'... Our colleague Gillian Brockell has already covered the report’s headline findings. A.) Half of the 50 most represented men owned other human beings. And B.) Women are so rarely represented that mermaids easily outnumber congresswomen. (Counts of men in statues include Pulaski, who some scholars believe may have been intersex.)"

From "The least diverse cities and most common statues in America. And more!" by Andrew Van Dam (WaPo).

What's that evidence that Pulaski might have been intersex? The link goes to a 2019 WaPo article about a Pulaski monument in Savannah that contained a skeleton which had DNA that matched that of relative of Pulaski's and had a pelvis bone that a forensic anthropologist thought was from a woman. 

Oddly enough, this news comes to me on the same morning that I am reading "Anthropologists Call for an End to Classifying Human Remains by Gender and Ancestry," a Jonathan Turley post"

"The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov produced in 1830–1833..."

"... on the subject of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.... The painting was received to near universal acclaim and made Bryullov the first Russian painter to have an international reputation... Sir Walter Scott is said to have studied the painting for an hour before declaring that it was not an ordinary painting, but an epic.... It was seen there by Edward Bulwer-Lytton whose novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834.... Ivan Turgenev described the painting as 'the glory of Russia and Italy' and it inspired Alexander Pushkin to write a poem about the destruction of Pompeii.... Gogol opined that it was a 'bright resurrection of painting, which has been for too long in some sort of semi-lethargic state,'  but was not alone in seeing a parallel between Pompeii and contemporary Saint Petersburg and the painting as a forecast of divine retribution for the modern city's decadent Western ways. The dissident Alexander Herzen, meanwhile, saw it as an allegory about the collapse of European monarchies or the tyrannical power of the Russian state over the individual""

"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."

Newsweek reports.

The big mystery about the monument wasn't how it got there, but just who paid to buy the land and put it up. It looks a bit like Stonehenge, but it's not ancient. It went up in 1980, financed by someone who worked through a banker who was sworn to protect his anonymity. 

The stones were engraved with 10 principles (in 8 languages), and the first one is blatantly evil, once you penetrate the euphemism "Maintain":

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature

July 4th.