Defiling L’Enfant: The French architect L’Enfant devised an imposing but simple plan for the city that would be the American capital, Washington, D.C. — a city I would by good luck call home for nearly a decade. The two major seats of power, the White House and the immense Capitol building, would be connected by a wide boulevard, vaguely in sight of each other but not quite, like an intended flirtation. Memorials honoring Jefferson and Lincoln would sit slightly to the side, closer to the Potomac River. These four structures would all be neoclassical in nature, with domes and columns aplenty. At the center of it all there would be a 555-foot obelisk honoring George Washington and acting as a towering fulcrum. The cemetery where the war dead were buried was set into verdant, low-lying hills across the river, in Arlington, Virginia, gracefully low-keyed. Now this president proposes to ruin this perfect symmetry by building a triumphal arch that would lord over the cemetery and approach the Capitol dome in height. It would be his Parisian Arc de Triomphe. The idea comes as no surprise since his overweening vanity has already seen him add his name to the Kennedy Center, a squalid move thankfully undone by a local judge’s stern order. Yet the fact remains that, like a French poodle, this president must relieve himself wherever possible and thus mark his territory. If brought to fruition, the arch idea would mangle L’Enfant’s treasured blueprint. Many were the times when, by night, I would sit on the steps of the Capitol building, the Jefferson Memorial, or the Lincoln Memorial, before 9/11 made such youthful excursions impossible. Still, those lovely days in my lovely Washington remain etched powerfully onto my sense of American-ness. I can be singularly glad that my blindness will prevent me from seeing this gross real-estate developer’s imprint —and it is likely to be only one of many — on my beloved Washington.