CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Abe Lincoln’s Reflecting Pool: A Republican Allegory

Statue of Lincoln, Indianapolis. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

A half score and one year ago, the white marble eyes of Abraham Lincoln gazed eastward across the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, overlooking the collateral damage caused to the pool by the heavy construction of the World War II Memorial.

Skies roiled over Washington, DC, during June 2015, one of the wettest Junes on record to date, with thunderstorms, street flooding, hail, tornadoes, and winds that toppled trees. Weathermen forecast which way the wind would blow from the remnants of Tropical Storm Bill, now moving up from Guatemala.

Meanwhile, a six-day heat wave was cresting on the afternoon of the 16th, the hottest day of the year to date, during the sixth consecutive year that June temperatures trended above normal. Even the Washington Post reported blazing sun at high noon.

Abe’s eyes looked straight through the curved thickness of the WWII Memorial’s Freedom Wall to the side where 4,048 gold-plated stars commemorated American casualties. His eyes then traced with studied regard the elliptical path of the bronze Rope of Unity that bound together 56 pillars representing each of the states and territories that had joined the fight, together.

Sunlight splashed colors from the twin fountains of the Rainbow Pool. Lincoln recalled how the rainbows looked before the waterworks were split apart and surrounded by pillars with their glints of grey that glanced back at him from Kershaw granite, hewn and hauled in from the South Carolina underground. He kept his mind on the math. Add 400,000 American casualties of World War II to 600,000 casualties of the Civil War, and you get a cost of one million American souls.

Lincoln’s republican soul uplifted itself to the memory of Cato’s final hour as dramatized on stage........

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