Custis-Lee Mansion : The Robert E. Lee Memorial
National Park Service
1962
It took the events of 2020, in particular the knee on the neck of George Floyd, to crystallize a clearer vision of Americans. A realization among citizens that perhaps we ought to stop praising people who in fact were traitors to the United States. This booklet was part of that time and heaped a degree of awe when vile disgust would have been more appropriate.
It was published by the National Park Service because it has been, for over 100 years now, a tourist destination. Perhaps separate from the Arlington National Cemetery which surrounds it now and in part because it attracts believers and deniers who wish to pay homage to the "noble cause" (enslaving black people).
These 48 pages containing B&W photos of the well mannered house is nothing more than an advertisement for a slave plantation which overlooked lowly Washington DC from it's peak atop the hill. This plantation and honored resting place for our nation's war dead and an assassinated US President is at least a mixed metaphor and at worst is an encapsulation of the "Grand Experiment" which is the United States.
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