By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 02, 2021
As you may know, I have an interest
in the American presidency as a cult
and in the president as an object of idolatry. I am writing a book about the
subject. So I was amused when Donald Trump’s perfervid votaries at that ghastly
clown show down in Orlando actually went so far as to set
up a golden idol of the man for public veneration — I’m starting to feel
like they are trolling me personally, but it’ll be a funny footnote in the
book.
Of course, the Trump idol was fake gold,
and it was made in Mexico — which is to say, it was only four bankruptcy
proceedings away from being the Trumpiest thing imaginable. When the alien
archeologists sift through the ruins of our civilization at some time in the
future, I hope they discover the golden Trump idol, which may help them to
understand where we went wrong as a species.
(Maybe the chimpanzees or
some other cousins will have stepped up by then.)
Trump presents himself as an outsider,
but, in truth, he always fit in pretty well in Washington, D.C., a city that is
packed to the rafters with elderly mediocrities who had rich parents. Trump’s
godlike conception of the presidency is bipartisan Washington orthodoxy, and
his nationalist/neo-mercantilist views are
a lot more like Joe Biden’s than anybody in either camp would care to
admit.
Even the Caligula-by-way-of-Versace
frescoed ceilings in Trump’s noncy Manhattan apartment have their
Washington equivalent. I refer, of course, to The Apotheosis of George Washington, painted on the inside of the
Capitol dome by Constantino Brumidi, who honed his pious craft for years in the
service of Pope Gregory XVI. Like the golden idol of Trump, The Apotheosis of George Washington
expresses in immediate visual form precisely what is wrong — what is worst — in
our political culture.
I understand that, because of the events
of January 6, I am not supposed to talk about how
much I detest Washington, our nation’s hideous capital city, and that I am
especially expected to avoid vituperation against the Capitol itself. It surely
is bad form to keep making jokes about my desire to endow an architecture
scholarship in memory of General Robert Ross, the British commander who burned
Washington in 1814. But there is an ideology and, indeed, a theology in the
monumental ugliness of Washington, and it is worth understanding.
George Washington was venerated during his
own lifetime and immediately thereafter with religious language, particularly
with pagan religious imagery. And so it is in that sense appropriate that his
apotheosis is depicted on the Capitol, under the dome of which Christian
worship services were conducted in the early days of the republic. Those services
were Protestant in character, but Brumidi’s work is entirely Catholic in its
aesthetic sensibility, in part inspired by the Apotheosis of St. Genevieve at the Panthéon in Paris.
But there is some political tension in the
choice of site. The Capitol is the seat of legislative
power, but it is the executive, not any lawmaker, who is elevated to the
heavens there. S. D. Wyeth, a chronicler of the “federal city” in the 19th
century, described the work shortly after its completion:
Washington,
the Saviour of his Country, apotheosized, appears seated in majesty. On his
right is the Goddess of Liberty, and on his left is a winged idealization of
Victory and Fame — sounding a trumpet, and in triumph displaying the victor’s
palm.
Before the
three, forming a semicircle, are thirteen female figures. The head of each is
crowned with a star. They hold up a ribbon banner on which is inscribed, E Pluribus Unum.
These
figures represent the thirteen sister States of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New
Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island — the original
British colonies — that fought, and bled, and conquered — winning freedom, and
the right to sing and shout the glad “morning hymn” announcing the coming dawn
of man’s Millennial Day.
This should if nothing else help to
establish that the cultic character
of this and other images is not the result of the 21st-century reader
projecting his contemporary secular mindset back onto what was only an
affectation of artistic style that was fashionable in the 18th and 19th
centuries. “Man’s Millennial Day” is a Christian or pseudo-Christian
apocalyptic religious proposition, not an extract from the conventional
democratic discourse. Others read even more into the work than Wyeth did, for
example noting that the goddesses representing the Confederate states then at
war with the Union have their backs turned to Washington. Here, the identity of
the founding father with the nation itself is once again reiterated: To turn
one’s back on the United States of America is not only to reject a political
arrangement but to reject a deity — treason, yes, but also apostasy.
The scene surrounding Brumidi’s Washington
is a very American mix of the pagan, the democratic, and the commercial: Ceres
is mounted atop a McCormick mechanical reaper; Venus grips the transatlantic
telegraph cable; Vulcan labors alongside Charles Thomas, who managed the
production of the Capitol’s iron dome; Minerva holds court with Benjamin
Franklin and S. F. B. Morse; Mercury passes off a bag of gold to Revolutionary
financier Robert Morris. The six surrounding tableaus represent the totality of
national life as Brumidi conceptualized it: War, Agriculture, Mechanics,
Commerce, Marine, and Arts and Sciences.
Above it all presides grim-faced George
Washington as commander in chief — as god of war — his military uniform draped
in imperial purple, gripping a sword. Constitutionally, George Washington had
no authority in the Capitol, which is the domain of the legislative branch —
because the president is not a member of Congress, if he even wishes to address
the legislators, he requires an invitation. When George Washington actually was
serving as president, Congress was quick to remind him of the executive’s
limitations, for instance by ritually cutting him down to size in the matter of
the treaty with the Muscogee Nation and rejecting his nominee for a position at
the Port of Savannah when he failed to consult with Georgia’s senators
beforehand. Washington the president vowed never to return to the Capitol and
instead conducted all his business with Congress in writing.
Washington the god soars high above it
all.
In this context, it is clear that
Washington is something more than “first in war, first in peace, and first in
the hearts of his countrymen,” and by no means “first among equals.” Primus inter pares had been a sufficient
dignity for Augustus and Constantine, but after his apotheosis, George
Washington was something more, a spiritual king who established the president
as the central dramatic figure in American life. With his sword and his
military regalia, Washington is the commander in chief who calls to mind the
Romans’ word for that position: imperator,
from which our word “emperor” is derived.
As such, it was inevitable that Washington
should develop divine powers, which he did in the context of his mythology.
While Brumidi was hard at work on his Apotheosis
of Washington, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Amid the
inevitable emotional outpouring for the national martyr were works of art in
the now-familiar style, including a carte
de visite by an unknown artist depicting the apotheosis of President
Lincoln, who is welcomed to the hereafter not by winged Fame or Minerva but by
George Washington himself, in the role of deity, who embraces Lincoln while
crowning him with laurel. It’s a political picture that suggests both the
communion of democratic saints and an apostolic presidential succession.
It is, to my mind and to the minds of all
sane people, much easier to understand the quasi-religious veneration of George
Washington than it is to understand the popular cult of Donald Trump. But the
principle is the same, and the error is the same. Idolatry is idolatry, even
when it is Washington above the altar. There will never be order in our
political culture until the presidency is put in its proper place — which is
not God’s place.
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