You may have heard that an Eisenhower Memorial is on the drawing boards. Or maybe you haven’t — there has been little publicity. It will occupy a four-acre site just off the Mall and within sight of the Capitol. Perhaps the powers that be saw its unpopularity coming a mile off. The executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission acknowledged that they were “moving quickly,” and according to Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post , that “may be rattling a town that likes to take decades considering additions to its monumental core.” Milton Grenfell, vice chairman of the National Civic Art Society–an organization highly critical of the planned memorial–said the idea now seems to be to “move quickly to construction before anyone can voice objections.” Ground-breaking is (or was) scheduled for the late fall of 2012, less than a year from now. But word of the planned abomination is spreading. And when I called the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s executive architect, Daniel Feil, he told me that they would not be meeting their end-of-October deadline for submitting a revised design for the National Capital Planning Commission meeting in December. The architect chosen to design the memorial is Frank Gehry and you surely have heard of him. He’s the one whose undulating metallic structures draw attention to themselves. Germaine Greer called them “scrunched-up brown bags.” How was Gehry chosen to memorialize Eisenhower? I have been trying to find out, without much success. Oh, there was a “competition”– but it was a choice “strictly confined to modernists,” I was told by someone in the know. Perhaps it was rigged. Apparently an influential figure in the choice of Gehry was Rocco Siciliano, a businessman from Beverly Hills who is also chairman of the Commission. A big fundraiser for Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and a person who sits on the L.A. Philharmonic board with Gehry, Siciliano was an assistant secretary of labor in the first Eisenhower administration. Gehry also brought along avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, who would help Gehry put Eisenhower in his proper place. “It made me very tearful to realize that this great man was not recognized,” Gehry said last year. But don’t trust those crocodile tears. He’s interested in aesthetic issues only to disparage them. “I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying in a particular moment of clarity. The current design for the Eisenhower Memorial is a monstrosity. Two views are published here. One shows 60-foot concrete posts, symbolizing precisely nothing, arrayed in front of the Department of Education building. The other shows the “memorial” in its full 540-foot width, with a chain-link fence (called a “tapestry”) suspended from those monster posts. The Department of Education is almost entirely concealed behind it. Cars in the foreground (on Independence Avenue) show the massive scale. The chain-link “tapestry” depicts what seem to be dead trees in Abilene, Kansas. “These chain-link trees do not have leaves, and depict a permanent winter,” said Eric Wind, secretary of the National Civic Arts Society. That society, which earlier this year held an Eisenhower Memorial counterproposal competition, stated: Gehry’s proposed basketball-court sized metal mesh screens hung between massive concrete posts over 60 feet tall would be an uncivil, brutal insult to the classical city envisioned by Pierre L’Enfant and our nation’s founders. That could be music to the ears of Frank Gehry, however. Kennicott, the Washington Post ‘ s culture critic, has put his finger on what Gehry really wants: “To break with centuries of tradition in the aesthetics of memorialization.” But when a tradition lasts for centuries, maybe there’s a reason for it. Wanting to break with it is the familiar goal of revolutionaries masquerading as artists. In a 1995 interview, Gehry said: “What got me excited in the beginning were the social issues. I come from a very lefty liberal family in Canada and architecture looked like it was the panacea. You could make housing for the poor.” In the case of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis (completed in 1956; demolished in 1972), social issues–crime above all–were indeed central but the high-rise architecture was part of the problem rather than a panacea. The sad fate of Pruitt-Igoe, designed by a mid-century mainstream modernist Japanese architect, was the first (but not the last) demolition of modernist architecture. Since then the Cabrini-Green high-rise projects in Chicago have also been knocked down, as have others all over the country. The Gehry monstrosity on the Mall will cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 million, so, while acting as our aesthetic tutors, our avant-guardians also feast off our taxes. The proposed Eisenhower Memorial is not at all comparable to the one recently dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., also on the Mall. That ponderous chunk of granite at least was paid for with private funds. It was also a sincere attempt to represent King as, precisely, a monumental figure. (The King quotation on it misrepresented what King said, however, leading Maya Angelou and the Washington Post to recommend that it be chiseled off and reengraved.) Kennicott wasn’t entirely wrong when he called Gehry the world’s most famous architect. But famous is an inch away from infamous, and that’s what could lie ahead for Gehry. CONSIDER WASHINGTON’S best-known monuments. The Lincoln Memorial (1912–22) tells visitors: “Here is a man who was a great president!” You are expected to admire him. You probably don’t know who designed the memorial, but that’s because the architect, Henry Bacon, wasn’t trying to draw attention to himself. At a public talk at the National Archives in October, Gehry was nonetheless condescending about the Lincoln Memorial. It’s “in the form of a Greek temple,” he said. “What’s that got to do with Lincoln?” Maybe they should have built him a log cabin. The Jefferson Memorial was also built as a classical temple. (Architect: John Russell Pope. Construction: 1939–43.) By then modernists were already sensing that our cultural borders were undefended and that aesthetic standards could be subverted and then reenlisted in a war against bourgeois taste. So the Jefferson Memorial was criticized as retrograde even as it was being built. Dressing up 20th-century buildings in “styles that are safely dead,” Gehry’s forerunners complained, was a “tired architectural lie.” But the people liked what they saw, FDR was solidly behind it, and the memorial was not changed. It is popular today. The Eisenhower Memorial, like all of Gehry’s work, seems designed to draw attention to Gehry himself. But its very idiosyncrasy suggests that it won’t wear well. What may seem fascinatingly “different” today soon becomes merely tiresome. Gehry’s “twisted surfaces and exploded topology lessons,” as Justin Shubow, chairman of the National Civic Art Society, calls them, do express Gehry’s philosophy, which, he has said, is that “life is chaotic, dangerous and surprising. Building should express that.” But why, exactly, should buildings seem chaotic? Gehry’s seem repetitive and, in the end, merely daft. His Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas “appears to have been designed by an Alzheimer’s patient,” said Shubow. There was an interesting recent contretemps in Paris. Gehry’s plan to build a 150,000-square-foot cultural center called “The Cloud” was suspended by a court ruling in February. On the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, it exceeded height limits, invaded forest land, closed off a road, and so on. An outraged Gehry said his project was a “magical cloud of glass” and that his critics were “philistines.” Now, one hears, the project may be back on track. It’s being paid for by the richest man in France, the owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Givenchy. But it resembles a half-deflated dirigible, or a “squashed lampshade,” as someone said, adding that it should be razed to the ground. MILTON GRENFELL, the National Civic Art Society’s vice chairman, told me that architecture students “have to be taught to love ugliness. They’re indoctrinated into this alternative universe.” (Grenfell designed the traditional Eisenhower statue and pedestal shown at left; it is just one of the society’s counterproposals, all of which, I’m told, are preferable to Gehry’s.) I’m hoping that David Brussat of the Providence Journal is right when he said that the public has grown tired of being “the lab rats for modern architecture’s addiction to experimentation.” It’s high time. In his books The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), Tom Wolfe turned the postwar fashion of abstract expressionism and architecture into high comedy. Frank Gehry’s proposed Eisenhower Memorial represents a far greater cultural decline than abstract painting ever did. The absurdities of Pollock and de Kooning can be ignored, and today they are. You don’t have to have them on your walls, or look at them in museums. If collectors view them as an investment game, that’s their business. Gehry’s monumental invasions are a different matter. He is in your face and intentionally so. And his proposed memorial comes not just at the public’s expense but also at President Eisenhower’s. Grenfell told me that he believes the Gehry monstrosity can be stopped. The Eisenhower family has been openly critical of the planned memorial. Susan Eisenhower has told the press that the entire family is “unified” in its concerns. The proposed memorial should be stopped. Congress should not fund this $100 million-plus scandal, $30 million of which has already been allocated. The latest Gehry vanity, supposedly a memorial to Eisenhower, is a deliberate assault on our sense of what is appropriate and as such should never be built.
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A Monstrosity, Not a Monument
This election—including the Republican primary contest— is about a fundamental question in American politics: We have an opportunity to decisively turn away from big government in Washington. Do we want to take it? Conservatives across the country are fed up with President Obama’s Washington approach to governance. Massive, budget-busting, deficit spending (except on defense, where he proposes cuts that are downright dangerous). Bailouts. An ever-mounting national debt. A federal government that has reached its tentacles further into Americans’ lives, by virtue of Obamacare with its noxious individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Excessive, bureaucratically dictated, job-killing environmental regulation. Dodd-Frank. The actions of the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and countless other agencies. A President who has engaged in offensive recess appointments to pay back his political allies ahead of a race he could well lose. And so on. Almost universally, Republicans hold in contempt the real-life “ends” of the Obama administration’s policies, though admittedly there are those self-described conservatives who have favored (and even authored) Obamacare-like approaches to health care and policies like cap-and-trade. To us, those ends look decidedly liberal and reminiscent of European social democracies, and out of step with our vision for America. Yet some conservatives, while rejecting the “ends” have not yet fully rejected the means, despite the fact that many Americans—and not just conservatives or libertarians— have reached the conclusion that the federal government has just become too big and has its fingers in too many pies, with the predictable negative real-world consequences for the rest of us. They argue that a big intrusive government is fine, desirable even, so long as it pursues “conservative” goals, which frequently when scrutinized are neither conservative nor worthy. Earmarks are okay, as long as they are directed by “conservatives.” Expansions of government like Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind were acceptable because they represented “Republican” policy. Congress spending all its time in Washington, DC, and legislating madly is fine, so long as the congressmen are Republicans and they are pursuing something that the Washington, DC, establishment has deemed “conservative.” It’s okay to have a government so big, so unaccountable and playing with so much money that serving Members of Congress can get rich while on the job, and once off the job, they can get even richer by becoming high-powered corporate consultants before skipping over to K Street itself, to try to grow government and spend even more of your money. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, we have reached a critical juncture at which government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem. Big government conservatives will never truly overhaul Washington because they need the status quo in place to accomplish their objectives. They don’t want to rebuild the machine; they simply want to change the people pulling the levers. But that is not what the American people want. There is such deep and widespread discontent that nothing short of a complete overhaul will satisfy their justifiable demands. The American people expect changes equal to their concern, which is the highest it’s been in at least a generation, and I am the only candidate with a vision that is as strong and sweeping as the public is angry. While others promise to tinker with the status quo, I am the outsider who will overhaul Washington. Others talk about trimming the bureaucracy; I will eliminate the Departments of Commerce, Energy and Education, gut the activist EPA, freeze bureaucrat salaries and make Congress part-time. Others talk about cleaning up the tax code; I say let Americans throw the whole thing out and pay a simple flat tax instead. Others talk about creating jobs; I alone have worked with the private sector to create more than 1 million jobs while the rest of the country lost 2 million jobs. This is what the 2012 election is about with the Republican primary process ongoing, and it is what the 2012 general election should be about, too. Do we want to stick with a big government approach that may, if self-described “conservatives” are in power, deliver up conservative ends, even though that same big government will be used by liberals to advance progressivism the second they get their hands on the reins of power? Or do we want to try something different—making Washington, DC, as inconsequential as possible in our lives and scaling back the federal government to focus on legitimate national priorities like defense and border security, and leaving other matters like education, for example, to the states and localities? This is the choice that I believe faces us, as more primaries approach and as Republicans select a nominee. Our answer to the question will determine the outcome of the nomination battle, and it will also determine whether this choice is ultimately presented to the American people in November. I, for one, hope it will be. America cannot abide another four years of big, intrusive government, no matter its philosophical goals. It’s time for a change. That entails Americans getting a choice.
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The Choice
Here are my final thoughts on the New Hampshire GOP debate which aired this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press and moderated by David Gregory. Jon Huntsman – I think this was his best debate. His answers were full of sobriety instead of snark. The highlight of his debate was his exchange with Romney over his service as Ambassador to China. Huntsman said, “I was criticized by Mitt Romney
I’m rather tired of all the people who don’t like Romney trying to claim Rick Santorum is not a big government conservative, or not a pro-life statist. I would support him before I would support Romney too, but I have no intention of giving up ideological and intellectual consistency in the name of beating Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. He is. You will have to deal with it. He is a big government conservative. Santorum is right on social issues, but has never let his love of social issues stand in the way of the creeping expansion of the welfare state. In fact, he has been complicit in the expansion of the welfare state. I and some friends, none of us Romney fans, have set about exploring Santorum’s record since Wednesday morning. Here now is a non-exhaustive list of what we have found. It does not even include his support for No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, etc. This is not the record of a man committed to scaling back the welfare state or the nanny state. NEA Voted for taxpayer funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. Voted against a 10% cut in the budget for National Endowment for the Arts. Bankruptcy Voted for a Schumer amendment to make the debts of pro-life demonstrators not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Defense and Foreign Policy Voted for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Voted against requiring the President to certify that the CWC is effectively verifiable. Voted against requiring the President to certify that that Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, China, and all other countries determined to be state sponsors of terror have joined CWC prior to submitting the instrument of ratification. Voted for the START II Treaty Voted to allow the sale of supercomputers to China. Voted to ban antipersonnel landmines Voted against increasing defense spending offset by equivalent cuts in non-defense spending. Voted to require that Federal bureaucrats get the same payraises as uniformed military. Voted to allow food and medicine sales to state sponsors of terror and tyranical regimes such as Libya and Cuba. Voted to limit the President’s authority to impose sanctions on nations for reasons of national security unless the sanctions were approved by a multilateral regime. Voted against requiring Congressional authorization for military action in Bosnia. Voted to give $25 million in foreign aid to North Korea Voted to weaken alien terrorist deportation provisions. If the Court determines that the evidence must be withheld for national security reasons, the Justice Department must still provide a summary of the evidence sufficient for the alien terrorist to mount a defense against deportation. Voted against delaying the India Nuclear until the President certified that India had agreed to suspend military-to-military exchanges with Iran. Voted against the Conventional Trident Missile Program Nominations Voted for Richard Paez to the 9th Curcuit (cloture) Voted for Sonia Sotomayor, Circuit Judge Voted for Richard Holbrooke to be Ambassador to the UN Voted for Margaret Morrow to be District Judge Voted twice for Marsha Berzon to the 9thg Circuit Voted for Mary McLaughlin to be District Judge Voted for Tim Dyk to be District Judge Voted for James Brady to be District Judge Labor Voted against National Right to Work Act Voted against Real of Davis-Bacon Prevailing union wages Voted for Alexis Herman to be Secretary of Labor Voted for mandatory Federal child care funding Voted for Trade Adjustment Assistance. Voted for Job Corps funding Voted twice in support of Fedex Unionization Voted against allowing a waiver of Davis-Bacon in emergency situations. Voted for minimum wage increases six times here here here here here and here Voted to require a union representative on an IRS oversight board. Voted to exempt IRS union representative from criminal ethics laws. Voted against creating independent Board of Governors to investigate IRS abuses. Guns Voted to require pawn shops to do background checks on people who pawn a gun. Voted twice to make it illegal to sell a gun without a secure storage or safety device Voted for a Federal ban on possession of “assault weapons” by those under 18. Voted for Federal funding for anti-gun education programs in schools. Voted for anti-gun juvenile justice bill. Reform Voted for funding for the legal services corporation. Voted twice for a Congressional payraise. Voted to impose a uniform Federal mandate on states to force them to allow convicted rapits, arsonists, drug kingpins, and all other ex-convicts to vote in Federal elections. Voted for the Specter “backup plan” to allow campaign finance reform to survive if portions of the bill were found unconstitutional. Voted to mandate discounted broadcast times for politicians. Voted for a McCain amendment to require State and local campaign committees to report all campaign contributions to the FEC and to require all campaign contributions to be reported to the FEC within 24 hours within 90 days of an election. Immigration Voted against increasing the number of immigration investigators Voted to allow illegal immigrants to receive the earned income credit before becoming citizens Voted to give SSI benefits to legal aliens. Voted to give welfare benefits to naturalized citizens without regard to to the earnings of their sponsors. Voted against hiring an additional 1,000 border partrol agents, paid for by reductions in state grants. Taxes Voted against a flat tax. Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for Medicare prescription drugs Voted to increase tobacco taxes to fund health insurance subsidies for small businesses. Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for an $8 billion increase in child healh insurance. Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for an increase in NIH funding. Voted twice for internet taxes. Voted to allow gas tax revenues to be used to subsidize Amtrak. Voted to strike marriage penalty tax relief and instead provide fines on tobacco companies. Voted against repealing the Clinton 4.3 cent gas tax increase. Voted to increase taxes by $2.3 billion to pay for an Amtrak trust fund. Voted to allow welfare to a minor who had a child out of wedlock and who resided with an adult who was on welfare within the previous two years. Voted to increase taxes by $9.4 billion to pay for a $9.4 billion increase in student loans. Voted to say that AMT patch is more important than capital gains and dividend relief. Welfare Voted against food stamp reform Voted against Medicaid reform Voted against TANF reform Voted to increase the Social Services Block Grant from $1 billion to $2 billion Voted to increase the FHA loan from $170,000 to $197,000. Also opposed increasing GNMA guaranty from 6 basis points to 12. Voted for $2 billion for low income heating assistance. Waste Sponsored An amendment to increase Amtrak funds by $550 million Voted to use HUD funds for the Joslyn Art Museum (NE), the Stand Up for Animals project (RI) and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Project (WA) Voted to increase spending on social programs by $7 billion Voted to increase NIH funding by $1.6 billion. Voted to increase NIHnding by $700 million Voted to for a $2 million earmark to renovate the Vulcan Monument (AL) Voted for a $1 billion bailout for the steel industry Voted against requiring that highway earmarks would come out of a state’s highway allocation Voted to allow Market Access Program funds to go to foreign companies. Voted to allow OPIC to increase its administrative costs by 50% Voted against transferring $20 million from Americorps to veterans. Voted for the $140 billion asbestos compensation bill. Voted against requiring a uniform medical criteria to ensure asbestos claims were legitimate. Voted to increase community development programs by $2 billion. Spending and Entitlements Voted to make Medicare part B premium subsidies an new entitlement. Voted against paying off the debt ($5.6 trillion at the time) within 30 years. Voted to give $18 billion to the IMF. Voted to raid Social Security instead of using surpluses to pay down the debt. Health Care Voted to allow states to impose health care mandates that are stricter than proposed new Federal mandates, but not weaker. Voted twice for Federal mental health parity mandates in health insurance. Voted against a allow consumers the option to purchase a plan outside the parity mandate. Education Voted to increase Federal funding for teacher testing Voted to increase spending for the Department of Education by $3.1 billion. Voted against requiring courts to consider the impact of IDEA awards on a local school district. Energy Voted to allow the President to designate certain sites as interim nuclear waste storage sites in the event that he determines that Yucca Mountain is not a suitable site for a permanent waste repository. Those sites are as follows: the nuclear waste site in Hanford, Washington; the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; Barnwell County, South Carolina; and the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. Voted to make fuel price gouging a Federal crime.
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What A Big Government Conservative Looks Like
The AP gets a sneak peak at forthcoming biography of David Petraeus and finds some news : WASHINGTON (AP) – Four-star general-turned-CIA director David Petraeus almost resigned as Afghanistan war commander over President Barack Obama’s decision to quickly draw down surge forces, according to a new insider’s look at Petraeus’ 37-year Army career. Petraeus decided that resigning would be a “selfish, grandstanding move with huge political ramifications” and that now was “time to salute and carry on,” according to a forthcoming biography. Author and Petraeus confidante Paula Broadwell had extensive access to the general in Afghanistan and Washington for “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” due from Penguin Press in January. The salute-and-carry-on instinct is somewhat understandable, and we’ll have to see the quotes in context to fully assess Petraeus’s reasoning, but it’s hard not to wish that he’d gone ahead and resigned. He’s right that the political ramifications would have been huge, but they might also have been salutary.
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Petraeus Almost Resigned Over Afghan Drawdown
