Tea at Trianon: Memorial Day, the Triumphal Arch, and the Veterans Suing to Block America's 250th Birthday Arch

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Memorial Day, the Triumphal Arch, and the Veterans Suing to Block America's 250th Birthday Arch

From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

On Memorial Day, the country pauses to honor the men who died in its uniform, and the men who came home and continued to serve the republic in quieter ways. It is a day for plain speech about loyalty, sacrifice, and the difference between the two. So it is worth being plain about the piece CBS News published this morning under the headline, “For a group of Vietnam vets, opposing Trump’s arch is about being ‘loyal to the country.’” The piece profiles Shaun Byrnes and Jon Gundersen, two of the Vietnam veterans who, alongside a third veteran and an architectural historian, sued in February to stop construction of the 250-foot Triumphal Arch planned for Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, the empty traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. CBS frames them as career diplomats, decorated veterans, and reluctant non-partisans who have been roused from retirement by a uniquely alarming threat to the republic. The framing is the story. The men are props. And the framing collapses the moment one consults the public record.
Consider how the framing works. CBS allows Byrnes to compare the arch to the architecture of “authoritarian dictatorships,” which he says have “no rule of law, no consent of the governed,” and “monuments for the leaders.” CBS reports, with no audible skepticism, that both Byrnes and Gundersen view the arch as a monument to Trump rather than to the country’s 250th anniversary. The reader is invited to receive this as the sober judgment of patriots who have set politics aside. The reader is not told that Gundersen appeared in a 2020 video titled “Vietnam Vet and Ukraine Diplomat Talks Voting Against Trump as a Republican,” that he has spent years using his veteran status to attack the president’s Ukraine policy from a maximalist pro-Kyiv posture, or that Byrnes publicly attacked President Trump and Richard Grenell when they brokered the Kosovo-Serbia normalization, preferring the conflict to continue. The reader is not told that the burial threat in the piece, Byrnes saying he would “reconsider” interment at Arlington if the arch is built, is a rhetorical device, not a policy objection. The reader is told only what the framing requires. (Read more.)