The Passion of the Arches

📜(Scripture for a Captive Planet)

🏛️Today’s Context — When the Monuments Start Building Themselves

In the middle of a government shutdown, while federal workers are furloughed, agencies starved, and food inspections on pause; Narcissist in Chief, Trump reportedly wants to build a triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial.
The design echoes Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, supposedly to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.

💲 Funding? Ambiguous.
🔎 Oversight? Compromised.
🍆 Symbolism? On brand.
No one’s entirely sure whether it’s public, private, or psychotic only that it’s real enough to make marble nervous. 🥶

If that sounds ridiculous, it is. But it’s also familiar.
History’s full of leaders who build when they should govern; stacking stone as morale crumbles.
So, in the grand tradition of civilization’s midlife crises, I wrote the following scripture — a small addition to humanity’s growing library of architectural therapy.

---

And on the seventh day God got scared that maybe the planet would run away,
so He wrapped it in barbed wire to make sure it stayed put — knew its place. Amen. 🙏

---

The Gospel According to Trump

In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was 🪙🪙🪙“branding.” 🪙🪙🪙
Thus was conceived the Arch of American Greatness — a towering marble ego erected while the government was too broke to pay the janitors who’d sweep beneath it.
They called it a monument to freedom. It looked suspiciously like a padlock.

“Lo, he built himself a gate so wide that even his hubris could pass through.”

---

The Pilgrimage of Stone

Rome gave us the Arch of Titus, a war trophy that still smiles over the rubble.
Paris followed with the Arc de Triomphe, the empire’s participation ribbon in granite.
St. Louis arched westward, calling conquest a gateway.
Mecca’s glass towers rose to outshine prayer.
And every one said the same quiet thing: Look what we can hold still long enough to own.

“Each arch, a metal halo forged from someone else’s spine.”

---

The Architecture of Containment

They told us arches marked progress; thresholds to a better world they said.
Turns out they were checkpoints. 🚓
From Rome to Washington, from commerce to colonization, every arch was a loop in the same long chain. 🔗
Together they form the planetary tether — civilization’s jewelry line for the mortal wanna be gods of control.

We thought we built monuments to celebrate human achievement.
Turns out we were just installing the handcuffs.

---

The Blight Seen from Orbit

Zoom out far enough and the pattern reveals itself:
the Amazon stripped to ochre, the poles weeping meltwater,
the blue marble cinched tight by glowing wire.
It shines abysmally from a distance; as all disasters do.

“The Earth no longer spins; it seems to have relented.”

---

The Scripture of Containment

And so the story ends where it began —
a frightened creator clutching his restless creation,
tying the final knot in a planetary leash.

And on the seventh day God got scared that maybe the planet would run away,
so He wrapped it in barbed wire to make sure it stayed put — knew its place. Amen.