1
Washington DC is a marble Disneyland. In DC, the fact of MARBLE has been a major point of emphasis. The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was built as a memorial to JFK, and Italy donated more than 3,000 tons of marble for the construction of the building. That’s over 6,000,000 pounds of marble for one building. And the marble is only a two-inch façade on what must be heavy foundational materials. And the JFK Center isn’t even on The Mall.
DC is also home to the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Washington Monument (the world’s tallest stone structure!), the Lincoln Memorial, and the Capitol Building. Each of those buildings is a temple to MARBLE (and gneiss and granite). The White House is made of painted sandstone, because for a while it was en vogue to build with sandstone in DC. MARBLE, gneiss, granite, and sandstone are all heavy stones. The stones in these buildings did not come from the ground where the buildings now stand, which means all that weight was moved from somewhere else to Washington DC.
2
Earth’s rotation, theoretically, spins on the idea of oblong balance. If you haven’t been teaching middle school lately, or haven’t been reading middle school materials, you might have forgotten that the Earth is not a perfect sphere (it isn’t flat either). As earth spins on its tilted axis, the speed at which it spins is often presupposed to be regular.
That regularity is not really regular though. There aren’t 24 hours in a “day.” In fact, according to some sources, a day is actually closer to 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. But that depends on the time of year, the location on Earth, and which definition of “day” is used.
If the preferred definition of day is “one complete spin of the Earth,” then the sun will be in a slightly different place after 360 degrees of spin is completed and so each day will see the sun nestled somewhere different from the day before at the same “time.” The Earth rotates around the sun (over approximately 365 ¼ days) at the same time that the Earth spins on its axis, thus the Earth must spin more than 360 degrees to achieve the same exposure to the sun as the previous day. What should that mean for clocks? Any surfer knows the time of sunrise changes each day, so the location of the sun shouldn’t matter with regards to the “time.” But if a rotation doesn’t take 24 hours, AND the sun doesn’t match up from one day to the next, what are people even doing? Is midnight going to be high noon eventually? Humans established the “standard day” to ensure that people turned up for congressional sessions concordantly.
3
Two fun anecdotes about two of Washington DC’s edifices:
The Washington Monument has steps leading to the top as well as an elevator, and the elevator was originally a steam elevator, which took 20 minutes to reach the top of the monument. When it first opened, only men were allowed on the steam elevator, where wine and cheese were served to riders. Women and children had to walk the 898 steps.
The Supreme Court features two pediments (a pediment is the triangular space just below the roofline where sculptures can be added to a building). Figures sculpted into the Supreme Court’s pediments include a svelte William Howard Taft studying at Yale, and Cass Gilbert, who was the architect of the Supreme Court, as well as a Tortoise and a Hare, which are two allegorical figures.
In 2018, Taft is largely remembered as a former president so fat that he got stuck in a bathtub; Cass Gilbert is a marble historical footnote that happens to be one of the little-recognized figures sculpted into the Supreme Court; women are still fighting for their rights, and justice is apparently still a tortoise. The speed of justice, like the hours in a day or the definition of justice, is relative.
Building something out of marble does not make it true. Building something out of marble doesn’t even make it more true. In 2005, a “basketball-sized” chunk of Vermont marble fell off of the façade of the Supreme Court, which means that building something out of marble doesn’t make it permanent either.
4
In Washington DC on Tuesday, two days into chaperoning a five-day class trip, I found out that on Sunday a friend and fellow teacher was found unresponsive on a walking trail in Los Angeles. The teacher was subsequently put into a medically induced coma in an effort at calming brain swelling and restoring brain function.
All of the 19 students on the class trip knew the teacher. Ten of the students had class with the teacher last year. Six of the boys on the trip were in the teacher’s advisory this year.
Students were scheduled to receive their phones for only 30 minutes each day while in Washington DC. They would have 30 minutes before bed to call their parents. Many spent part, or all, of their 30 minutes on social media.
In 2018, information spreads quickly. On Wednesday, the school sent emails to parents as the teacher’s condition deteriorated. Students and teachers on campus in Los Angeles were scared and upset and were sending thoughts, emails, and gifts to the teacher and his family.
It was decided that the news could not reach the students in Washington DC. At the hotel on Wednesday, before returning the students’ phones, the chaperones called parents to ask them not to share news of the teacher’s accident with their children. The parents agreed that not telling the children was the best course of action. This was Washington DC, after all, and few places are better prepared to spin a situation by manipulating time and space.
On Thursday, the teacher died.
The message of secrecy was reiterated to parents via email on Thursday. Because the teacher had died, fear of students learning the news through social media was heightened. Monitoring students as they called home was an exercise in deterrence. Chaperones sat in student hotel rooms as inmates used their newly-condensed phone time. The truth had to be guarded by any means necessary.
For three days, the chaperones pretended nothing was out of the ordinary and, when necessary, lied to the students. For three days, students marveled at ornery chaperones overreacting to students’ minor behavior infractions that might otherwise have been ignored.
Mutiny and insurrection burned in the eyes of students when, on Friday, teachers again reneged on the scheduled phone return, instead keeping student phones until arrival at the airport.
5
The marble steps in the Library of Congress have been walked so often that they are no longer flat. Each step is concave from the feet that have trod upon it. Marble dust is implied as the steps are worn down, even if that dust is invisible.
6
I don’t know how many tons of marble have been moved to Washington DC, but I do know that lost in the white noise of climate change debates is the fact that moving all those tons of marble has altered the weight distribution of Earth. That altered distribution has altered Earth’s tilt, which has altered Earth’s spin, which impacts the length of days, the change of the seasons, and the distribution of weather phenomena.
7
I don’t know if Washington DC is, at its core, a testament to all the things that people commonly assert DC is a testament to. The physical weight of the city has increased the gravity of the city. With each piece of marble tossed into the fountain of the Potomac, there was one unstated wish: “I wish for Washington DC to appear immutable and permanent and to act as a metaphor for an eternal country with eternal laws that is eternally just.” Unfortunately, the city achieves unwished-for accomplishments in lieu of stated goals. The propaganda of eternity has invisible, implied vectors.
8
There is a quote on the face of the Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law.” The propaganda of the eternal that screams from the white facades of Washington DC’s most infamous buildings is combatted by the noxious verbal manipulations of our nation’s politicians. The propaganda of the eternal is subsumed by the platitudinous “24 hour news cycle” which spews vitriol with the propaganda of the eternal as a meticulously ignored soundtrack. Somehow, everyone seems to forget the most important allegory of America.
Each day, America’s marble Disneyland continues to warp Earth’s spin and weather patterns. Each day, the marble Disneyland also becomes dust. Time is a fuzzy concept and so is gravity. The fictitious tortoise is the truest symbol of America. Especially as everything turns to dust.
