Hysteria at work?

What's the latest take on Washington, D.C., by Travel & Leisure magazine?

http://www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm (May7th, 2004)

"Surely this was not what Pierre Charles L'Enfant intended when the Frenchman proclaimed that he would create an American capital 'worthy of a great republic.' "

Yes, the magazine rightly points out, increased security is necessary.

But is the federal government taking too many precautions and turning the nation's capital into a city "under siege?"

Judy Scott Feldman, an art historian and president of the National Coalition to Save our Mall, is quoted as saying that row after row of concrete barriers around the city "reflect fear, not the optimism inherent in a democracy."

"The Secret Service and the [National] Park Service think in terms of the worst-case scenario," she says. "Our capital was designed as a symbol of democratic government and the openness of our society. The security measures have a symbolism that becomes oppressive."

Travel & Leisure contributing editor Michael Z. Wise recalled that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York warned: "The task is to keep our nerve in the face of obvious, but scarcely overwhelming threat. We begin to look as if we are afraid, and we ought not."
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Miss Judy Scott Feldman has it right about the barriers reflecting fear, but she also does not seem to understand what our Founding Fathers created- a Republic.

Maybe that is why she considers calling WWII Memorial design, fascist. Stating that saying so "is not a moral judgment," but in fact, "it is an historical observation."

Getting back to the barriers though, I seem to recall, that most of those concrete barriers were put up due to a fear of this nations citizens.

Ah well, what is the old "canard"? "Fear the government that fears its people."

--WP