American letter | Running with Jefferson, FDR and Luther King

(Washington) In the Washington Runner’s Guidewe suggest dozens of little-trodden trails.

I ran to Rock Creek, near the zoo and its two stars: Bao Li and Qing Bao, two pandas who arrived in FedEx trucks last month, in the middle of a convoy followed by TV helicopters.

I know the old canal which leaves from Georgetown and goes back to the 19th^e century and even Maryland.

However, I invariably come back to the biggest cliché: the National Mall, its institutions, its monuments, its great museums. First, there is the slope to get there, which encourages me. Starting from the North-West, we open the door and we just have to let ourselves tumble towards the Potomac.

But, even if the confession costs me a little, the truth is that I am still amazed by this architecture and this urban planning. It’s not a race, it’s a journey of political philosophy. A sort of nostalgic constitutional triathlon between the branches of the American state.

The military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, chosen by George Washington to draw the plan for the future federal capital in 1792, was the son of one of the architects of Versailles. The French spirit is evident in the organization of this plan dividing the city into four, with the Capitol at its center. The concepts behind the city’s finely drawn geometry, inspired by European capitals as much as by ancient cities, are extraordinarily subtle.

Perhaps a little too much, in fact, because Washington ended up firing L’Enfant, but his concept survived.

What was needed was a monumental city, where fundamental American political ideas would be expressed through the location of buildings and their relationships to one another.

Arrived at the end of the 7^eor the 5^eor the 4^eI go up Constitution Avenue towards Capitol Hill and its esplanade. I can see just behind the white marble building of the Supreme Court, which watches over the actions of elected officials, sometimes well, sometimes crookedly.

I go around the Capitol, back down the hill, to arrive on the Mall, with the obelisk in the middle in memory of the first president.

I walk along the Washington Canal, with its largemouth bass fishermen (it’s a town of lobbyists), and I arrive at the monument to Thomas Jefferson. The brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence was also a hypocrite, having fathered six never-acknowledged children with Sally Hemings, his slave – because he owned 600 without freeing a single person.

He nonetheless laid the foundations of what sometimes makes this country great.

“If I had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate for a moment to choose the second option,” he wrote to a friend in 1784. “But every man would have to receive these newspapers and be able to to read them… Do not be too severe towards the errors of the people, but try to correct them by enlightening them. For if they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and the Congress, the assemblies, the judges and the governors would become wolves. »

Two hundred and forty years later, it is still true. Americans know how to read, but what is a “newspaper” today if not an endangered species? THE entertainersinfluencers and disinformation propagandists are surrounding the next president and I already seem to be hearing wolves…

A kilometer further, I find myself in front of Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt with, why not, their dog Fala.

His cousin Teddy attacked trusts and monopolies at the turn of the 20th century.^e century, relying on the power of the press. It could happen!

FDR came to power during the Great Depression, with language that seems unthinkable today for a president of the United States.

In his inaugural speech at the 1936 Democratic convention, he took on big American capital head-on. In this country founded in opposition to the tyranny of a monarch, these ultra-rich are a new aristocracy, he said.

Technological progress, industrial production, new means of telecommunications – he spoke of the telegraph and radio – have led to the emergence of a “new civilization”, he told delegates.

A new civilization which poses problems “to those who want to remain free”.

“Because this modern civilization has seen the birth of new dynasties. New kingdoms built on concentrated control of material things. » All technical progress, unthinkable for the founders of the country, served to create this royalty.

“They have created a new despotism, wrapped in legality. »

It’s 1936, I insist. Television wasn’t even invented. Today’s tech giants have even more power, and they too are forming a new aristocracy above the law.

Even without being given the keys to the state by Trump, Elon Musk is himself a duchy, a kingdom, with more power than most politicians, and than several states.

A little further on, I don’t fail to climb the steps to greet Abraham Lincoln. The one who saved the Union and abolished slavery at the cost of his life. It sits in front of the large pool looking straight towards the Capitol.

There is no democracy without the commitment of the men and women of the people, who will only respect it if it guarantees them security and dignity, he said.

I take Constitution Avenue, where you have to resist the food trucks, to arrive a little higher in front of the White House, but when I get there, I think mainly of the ribs that the president ate in House of Cards, and I return towards home between the electric scooters which, surprisingly, hardly cause any deaths.

There’s nothing original about this journey, I know. But since I’m only passing through here, I project my American mythology there. What is current or updatable in the founding texts of this country, in the era of artificial intelligence? In old buildings and monuments, like political museums?

Some on the far right speak of a “post-constitutional” era. But not because of the grip of power of the new barons of technology and finance. Rather because in their opinion, the federal state has become so big that it overlooks the entire political world, imposes its “liberal”, “woke” ideas, and prevents it from exercising power in the name of the people. Hence the plan to dismantle it.

In a conservative podcast, JD Vance said in 2021 that there no longer exists a constitutional republic, but an “administrative state”. He is not the only one in this movement to think that the United States is in a twilight phase of its history, where a kind of woke tyranny has taken over.

This morning, I will go back to run on Mall, where the 47^e President will take an oath on January 20 to “defend and protect” this Constitution. Better luck this time, Donald…

I forgot to mention the monument to Martin Luther King, where we can read: “From a mountain of discouragement, a stone of hope”.