| From Capitol Hill Blue Opinion If Abraham Lincoln had been looking out over the National Mall on Sept. 4, he would have seen a gyrating Britney Spears being partially undressed by male dancers in Redskins jerseys. "For this we're fighting the Civil War?" he might have pondered. What Lincoln would have thought was much in the Senate's mind Tuesday when it voted, in a display of comity unusual in these partisan times, 92-4 to greatly limit commercial displays at events on the Mall sponsored by private companies. Actually, there is a lot of commercial sponsorship on the Mall _ for events like the Marine Corps Marathon, the Breast Cancer Foundation Race for the Cure and the Smithsonian's American folklife festival. But the visual evidence of commercial sponsorship tends to be discreet. Not so "The NFL Kick-off Live from the National Mall Presented by Pepsi Vanilla," with supporting sponsorship from Coors, Verizon and AOL. For $10 million, Pepsi and the NFL got pretty much exclusive use of part of the Mall for over two weeks to mount a three-day festival celebrating football, Pepsi, the U.S. military and a government program promoting volunteerism called "Take Pride in America." There were performances by Spears, Aerosmith, Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin, culminating in a TV special leading into the season's first "Monday Night Football," taking place, in accord with the demands of commerce, on a Thursday night. So the live audience wouldn't be deprived of the total experience, huge screens carried the performance complete with the numerous intervening commercials. The whole thing proved popular, with the special getting good ratings and an estimated 130,000 people attending over the three days. What could be more American than a celebration of football, free enterprise and sex? A lot, apparently. Lawmakers, The Washington Post and writers of letters to the editor denounced the sponsors and the National Park Service for shamelessly commercializing a national treasure. Thus the Senate vote to rein in gaudy commercialism on the Mall. The National Mall is the great green swath that stretches more than two miles from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol. It is flanked by museums and stately government buildings; punctuated by the Washington Monument; and the site of many smaller memorials and monuments. It is, indeed, a national treasure. Only recently, however, has the Mall approached sacrosanct status, perhaps because there is increasingly less of it that is open, with space being devoted to the new American Indian museum, the World War II memorial and planned additions to the Washington Monument and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Mall wasn't always so revered. In World War I and again in World War II, the government erected "tempo" buildings on the Mall _ gray, wooden barracks-like structures that were to serve as temporary office space only until war's end. The last of them was not torn down until the early 1970s. In creating the Mall, the capital might have had a vision of green open space, but it had the more practical goal of filling in a pestilential tidal swamp that regularly flooded. So when Lincoln looked out on the Mall, what did he see? Military camps; field hospitals; slaughterhouses; a railroad; chickens, goats and pigs roaming about the piles of rubbish dumped there; and the open sewer, Tiber Creek, termed "an indescribable cesspool" in a contemporary account. The president would have seen something else, too _ swarms of prostitutes. Union Gen. Joe Hooker, while refitting the Army of the Potomac in Washington, tried mightily to chase them away from his soldiers, and for his troubles his name became a slang common noun for practitioners of the oldest profession. You have to think that Lincoln would have found even crass commercialism and lip-synching vulgarity an improvement over the odiferous chaos and clamor of the Mall 140 years ago. He and Joe Hooker might even have sipped a Pepsi Vanilla while waiting for the Redskins-New York Jets game.
(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@SHNS) © Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue |