疲惫的美国迎来二百五十岁生日

An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty By Christopher Hooks T he imperial capital has many beautiful buildings, and they are always kept tidy and clean. They have a quality that grates, though. The landscape is didactic, insistent. Somebody is always trying to teach you something. This is true, of course, of the monuments and museums that are purpose-built to press a vague sense of republican tradition into generations of American schoolchildren on field trips, but there is hardly a pediment or lintel or courtyard in Washington that is not given over to instruction from some half-remembered ancestor. It is a shouty place, and to mixed effect. …