VETERANS and REMEMBRANCE DAY

A COMMENT

This is personal.  Although I have lived in five states throughout my life, and Baltimore is now my home, Washington, DC where I spent more years than any other will always be my home town.  To see its beauty and majesty and history destroyed in the last two years has been, although a metaphor for the destruction of our democratic values and way of life, crushing.  

On November 6, 2026 a "temporary restraining order" was issued against further action by the Trump administration toward the construction of a "triumphal arch".  Three individual Vietnam War Veterans and a historic preservationist and architectural historian had originally filed a lawsuit against the project in June of 2026.  Their standing had been questioned in proceedings over past months.  In October of 2026 the County Board of Arlington City, Virginia, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia joined forces to file a lawsuit as formal plaintiffs against the administration and the project.  These three plaintiffs combined to have powerful standing before the court and are more likely to succeed as this moves forward.  

SHADOWS

The newest action is a lawsuit filed by nine members of the Kennedy family.  It supports an extraordinary analysis in the Washington Post that the "arch" will cast shadows throughout the year over thousands of gravesites in the cemetery, including Kennedy's "eternal flame".  This study [published 10/27/26] was comprehensive in detail, with careful geometry, AI support and 3D modeling.  The study showed that shadows were cast onto the graves of Supreme Court justices, World War I and II veterans, covering the ground for over an hour.  In total, Arlington National Cemetery was shadowed more than 250 days during any given year.  Gravesites from the Civil War, the Vietnam War and those of enslaved people were affected and in total more than 75,000 honored dead were cast into shadow.  In early evening hours, the shifting sun would cast the arch shadow toward the city itself now harassing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial among so many others on the National Mall.

There are many logistical and practical reasons not to build this arch.  There is one reason that stands above all of those.  This arch represents no "triumph".  It was conceived by the small mind of a small man to honor himself, who thinks so highly of himself he never has and will never see beyond himself.  His presence among us shrinks with each new day and no bits of concrete and gold can ever bring him stature or praise or glory he so needs again.  He has failed, he just does not know it.  And the building of "his arch" must fail.