The reflecting pool of blame by Cassandra Sparks

There is something almost perfectly Washingtonian about a scandal involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; the water is murky, the paint is peeling, somebody is furious and everyone appears determined to blame someone else.

David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, was accused of vandalising the pool. Prosecutors have now dropped the charges. That should have been the end of a rather strange episode. Instead, it has become another small but revealing drama in the larger American theatre of political grievance, where even a malfunctioning public swimming pool can be recruited into the culture war.

The original accusation had a certain Trump-era neatness. The pool was damaged, therefore somebody must have attacked it. And if somebody attacked it, why not blame the “Radical Left Lunatics”? The phrase has the advantage of requiring neither evidence nor elaboration. It is less an explanation than a political seasoning, sprinkled liberally over any inconvenience.

The trouble is that water has never been especially receptive to partisan narratives. The Reflecting Pool was renovated for $14m and given an “American flag blue” spray-on lining, a description that sounds less like architectural restoration than something ordered for a particularly patriotic municipal swimming pool. Then came algae blooms and peeling paint. Suddenly the grand symbol of American democracy was experiencing the sort of maintenance problems familiar to anyone who has ever owned a shed, a bathroom or a house built by the lowest bidder.

Now the explanation appears to be considerably less cinematic: a “botched” installation. That matters, because incompetence is rarely as politically satisfying as conspiracy. There is no villainous mastermind in a basement, no shadowy revolutionary cell armed with paint scrapers, no ideological cabal plotting the destruction of Abraham Lincoln's reflection. There is simply the possibility that a renovation went badly.

Yet this is precisely where the affair becomes more interesting than the pool itself. Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, initially embraced the vandalism theory but has now blamed the renovation. Trump, apparently displeased by this change of direction, has suggested that she might be fired. Thus a broken pool has produced a miniature lesson in the modern Republican Party: loyalty is increasingly measured not by whether an official follows the evidence, but by whether the evidence arrives at the politically approved destination.

The danger is not merely comic. Institutions depend upon the ability to distinguish between what happened and what one wishes had happened. Prosecutors are supposed to follow facts. Contractors are supposed to deliver what they were paid to deliver. Presidents are supposed to resist turning every administrative mishap into a political morality play.

Instead, America increasingly seems to demand that every cracked surface reveal an enemy. There is, of course, a genuine irony here. The Reflecting Pool exists to provide a serene visual counterpoint to the Lincoln Memorial. It is designed for reflection. Yet the surrounding political culture appears incapable of reflecting on anything. The first instinct is accusation, the second outrage, the third dismissal, and only much later, if at all, comes the inconvenient business of asking what actually happened.

Perhaps the pool's greatest service to the republic is therefore accidental. Its peeling blue surface has exposed something beneath the paint. The problem was never merely algae. It was the national addiction to blame.