[Mb-civic] Sweet Land of Giving - Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Sweet Land of Giving

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 25, 2005; A37

Uniquely among the capitals of the world, Washington's monumental core 
pays homage to the word. The glory of the Jefferson Memorial is not the 
Founder's statue but, carved in stone around him, his words on religious 
freedom, inalienable rights and sacred honor. At the Lincoln Memorial, 
one cannot but be moved by the eyes and grave bearing of the martyred 
president, but even more moving are the surrounding words: the sublime 
cadences of the Second Inaugural and Gettysburg addresses, both in their 
entirety. (Lincoln's gift for concision helps. Fidel Castro, of the 
eight-hour speeches, could not be so memorialized.)

Other capitals celebrate the gloria and fortuna of victory. No Arch of 
Triumph here. True, in the past few decades the Mall has added Vietnam 
and Korean war memorials. But these are hardly glorifications of battle. 
They are melancholy meditations upon wars of sorrow. The very newest 
addition, the National World War II Memorial, is jarring and deeply out 
of place precisely because its massive and pointless wreath-bearing 
Teutonic columns represent European triumphalism disfiguring the heart 
of a Mall heretofore dedicated to the power and glory of ideas.

But Washington has a second distinction, more subtle and even more 
telling about the nature of America: its many public statues to foreign 
liberators. I'm not talking about the statues of Churchill and 
Lafayette, great allies and participants in America's own epic struggles 
against tyranny. Everybody celebrates friends. I'm talking about the 
liberators who had nothing to do with us. Walk a couple of blocks from 
Dupont Circle at the heart of commercial Washington, and you come upon a 
tiny plaza graced by Gandhi, with walking stick. And perhaps 100 yards 
from him, within shouting distance, stands Tomas Masaryk, the great 
Czech patriot and statesman.

Masaryk, in formal dress and aristocratic demeanor, has nothing in 
common with the robed, slightly bent Gandhi with whom he shares the 
street, except that they were both great liberators and except that they 
are honored by Americans precisely for their devotion to freedom.

Farther up the avenue stands Robert Emmet, the Irish revolutionary, 
while one block to the west of Masaryk looms a massive monument to a 
Ukrainian poet and patriot, Taras Shevchenko. And then gracing the 
avenues near the Mall are the Americans: great statues to Central and 
South American liberators, not just Juarez and Bolivar but even the more 
obscure, such as General Jose Artigas, father of modern Uruguay.

Discount if you will (as fashionable anti-Americanism does) the Statue 
of Liberty as ostentatious self-advertising or perhaps a relic of an 
earlier, more pure America. But as you walk the streets of Washington, 
it is harder to discount America's quiet homage to foreign liberators -- 
statues built decades apart without self-consciousness and without any 
larger architectural (let alone political) plan. They have but one thing 
in common: They share America's devotion to liberty. Liberty not just 
here but everywhere. Indeed, liberty for its own sake.

America has long proclaimed this principle, but in the post-Sept. 11 
era, it has pursued it with unusual zeal and determination. Much of the 
world hears America declare the spread of freedom the centerpiece of its 
foreign policy and insists nonetheless that America's costly sacrifices 
in Iraq and even Afghanistan are nothing more than classic imperialism 
in search of dominion, oil, pipelines or whatever such commodity most 
devalues America's exertions. The overwhelming majority of Americans 
refuse to believe that. Whatever their misgivings about the cost and 
wisdom of these wars, they know how deep and authentic is the American 
devotion to liberty.

Many around the world find such sentiments and the accompanying 
declarations hard to credit. Europeans, in particular, with their long 
tradition of realpolitik, cannot conceive of a Great Power actually 
believing such hopeless idealism.

The skepticism is misplaced. It is not just that brave Americans 
soldiers die to permit Iraqis and Afghans to vote for the first time in 
their lives. There is evidence closer to home and of older pedigree. The 
skeptics might take a stroll through America's other great capital. Up 
New York's Sixth Avenue with its series of seven sculptures to Latin 
American leaders, culminating at Central Park with magnificent statues 
of Bolivar, Marti and San Martin. To Washington Square Park, where they 
will find the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, while his more republican 
counterpart, Mazzini, resides along West Drive not very far from Lajos 
Kossuth, now of Riverside Drive, hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.

This is not for show. It is from the heart, the heart of a people 
conceived in liberty and still believing in liberty. How can they not? 
It is written in stone all around them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112400771.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051125/99e9edf7/attachment.htm