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Now With Dignified Forms! 

The New York Times identifies a looming menace in presidential monumental-ism:  a renowned architectural crackpot’s involvement in Washington’s prospective Adams family memorial.

Rodney Mims Cook Jr is a man with a mission: hurling architecture back in time to an era of stately forms, and a whole lot of pillars. Cook gave Atlanta a taste of Washington’s magic to come when he erected an enormous faux Arc de Triomphe plotzed amidst big box stores.

     The Adams monument got a boost when America’s Tom Hanks brought David McCullough’s stirring vision of our first one term president to tony HBO. Not since Ken Burns invented the letter-scan-with-voice-over shot has the written word exploded from the screen with such pith and power.

With Cook on board we can look forward to a monumental granite remembrance of flinty New Englanders Adams, the Mrs., and offspring/president Quincy Adams.

Washington’s embrace of the tried, true and trite has a long pedigree. Cook is at the nexus,  tying in Bush Library architect Robert A.M. Stern, McCullough again, artful wordsmith of reaction Tom Wolfe, and voice for all those a little concerned about this Obama fellow, Cokie Roberts.

We could of course do worse, and probably will when Lynn Cheney’s next bio surfaces.  Watch for much of this same crowd engage in still more founder-swoon when this friend of liberty turns her loving gaze on our next to slavingist president, James Madison.

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