Keillor: Our nation's capital has become our nation's attic

When those crews are done down South, put them to work in Washington, D.C. The Frenchman L'Enfant (the name means "immature") who laid out the streets in this swamp had grandiose ideas, as anyone knows who has attempted to navigate in the capital, diagonal boulevards laid against a grid, which created numerous odd squares and irrelevant circles which, of course, required large equestrian statues to ennoble them, and so you have Thomas Circle at 14th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW named for Gen. George Thomas who fought at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. [...] does this give him a permanent right to loom over us in 2017 and obstruct traffic and cause honking and obscene gesturing? A whole circle devoted to this small historical footnote and how many thousands of children have pointed to him and asked, "Who is he?" and their parents were clueless and thus authority is undermined, trust is eroded, the family is weakened, our children grow up rootless and liable to fall for crackpots and demagogues. What this says about Washington is that it is so encrusted with regulations and overlapping commissions and committees and agencies that it is incapable of rational progress. In my hometown, St. Paul, here's a statue of a Union soldier standing on a ridiculous smokestack of a pedestal so high you can't be sure if that's his overcoat or a pinafore. Every ethnicity and political faction and interest group has got its monument in Washington -- the Italians got Dante, Russians got Pushkin, conservatives got Edmund Burke, physicists got Einstein, pacifists got Gandhi, feminists got Joan of Arc, Boy Scouts got Teddy Roosevelt, intelligence officers got Nathan Hale, and so on and so forth. Put a recycling bin behind it where people can leave their dog droppings.