If you visit government buildings on a regular basis, you might have noticed the pictures of the various top officials. Michael Wiseman writes about this in the Post:
I'm referring to the omnipresent pictures of the president, vice president and members of the Cabinet. In February 2001, the Bush administration began an extraordinary portraiture deployment across all levels and locations of government. It's time to call those troops home.
In 2003, a British colleague, stunned by the ubiquity of executive photographs in one agency we visited, remarked that he had witnessed an equivalent portrait reverence only in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad. In government buildings in the United Kingdom, he said, one rarely sees a portrait of the queen, let alone one of the prime minister.
I agree. I have been noticing them more in the past decade or so and the timeline Wiseman presented roughly agreed with my Mom’s experience as well. Personal loyalty to the President is the last thing we need to encourage government wide. The transition provides a simple, easy, and money saving way to end that policy. I’d say we could put up pictures of the Constitution instead, but additional reverence may do little encourage respect for the strong parts and, as Sandy Levinson argues, can blind us to its weaknesses. We’re probably best off saving the icons for holidays.
Read the rest of the op-ed for some funny specifics.
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