The Midas touch ...

 

Donald Trump has said the reflecting pool will probably need to be drained

for a second round of repairs. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

On June 20th, Perfect! was the initial blurb on the Reflecting Pool delineating just how grossly incompetent and evil this administration truly is. This short rant isn't about liberal or conservative, it's about being able to do anything of consequence without screwing the pooch. The Guardian pix says it all. A know nothing, a very stable genius, has shown to everyone he doesn't know his ass from a hole in a ground but still looks for the hole. It's like bellybutton lint, it too is kinda gross but at least the condition remains private, this insult to America and the world does not.

Narcissus, oil painting by Baroque artist Caravaggio.

Narcissus was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Donald Trump is finding that his effort to overhaul the Lincoln ⁠Memorial reflecting pool in Washington has turned into a perverse tourist attraction and 2,028ft national metaphor.

On Monday afternoon a massive algae bloom had turned the pool a green reminiscent of a plane passenger clutching a sick bag. It also stank, but that did not deter a steady flow of curious tourists snapping photos and TV crews doing eyewitness interviews about the folly of Donald Trump’s $14.7m renovation.

“He has a contrary of the Midas touch, which is everything he touches becomes crap,” said José Lebron, 32, a local tour guide standing poolside. “I’m worried because now the point of visiting the pool is seeing the whole spectacle of the mistake. It’s not enjoying what the pool actually is meant for, which is a reflective space.”

The pool was designed more than a century ago to connect the Washington Monument with the Lincoln Memorial, Lebron added. “Now we’re not talking about that; now we’re analysing what a bad job it is, how it’s peeling, how the animals are dying, that it’s not a healthy ecosystem, that the algae are blooming. I don’t like that changing conversation. It feels like personification of this whole thing.”

Truer words never spoken.

Guardian graphic.

Source: EarthCam archive.

Methodology: Colour of pool averaged daily, calibrated against satellite imagery.
Red hues filtered to visualise greens and blues.

The Midas touch ...