A sinking feeling

By Capt. Fogg

The Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC is sinking, little by little. It's built on caissons and pilings sunk deep into the Potomac riverbank mud, but the National Park Service isn't exactly sure why the building modeled after the Pantheon in Rome is becoming unstable and have hired an engineering firm to study the problem. Of course many of the monumental masterpieces of the US Capitol are built on rubble, mud and landfill and not bedrock, much like our government itself. Such things as this memorial to the author of the Declaration of independence, enemy of tyranny and champion of secular democracy, need to be maintained, shored up and monitored for slippage much as does our constitution and body of laws which do not rest on the certain bedrock of divinely mandated law, or on kings subject only to God, but on the free will and consent of the governed.

It's not only our monuments that are settling into the mud of course. The foundations of Democracy are no more stable than the subsoil of the drained swamp the capitol city is built upon and the pilings of the Bill of Rights, of Habeas Corpus, the system of checks and balances that are meant to maintain a government of laws and not of men, have been eroded of late.

Schnabel Engineering is due to release a report on the monument next month, but I doubt it will discuss the great rumbling underground which is our founding fathers in their graves; their bony fingers clawing and grasping toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I am sure none the less that the needed course of action, should we venture to stop the subsidence of liberty and justice along with the marble and concrete is much more obvious. We know what and who is eating away at our foundations while calling it patriotism. It is the jihadists and conquistadors in the Executive branch, the dimwitted toadies in the legislature and the politicized judiciary. It's the hysterical, small minded and superstitious voters, it's all of us.