Are you a Monumentalist?
An old tradition holds that the location of the discoloration in the marble of the Washington Monument prefigures the end of the Republic:
The discoloration represents the division between the two phases of the Monument's construction. The phases used marble from different quarries, resulting in a clear visual boundary. The pause between the phases lasted nearly two decades, from 1858 to 1876, and although the original reasons for it are complicated, it was drastically lengthened and nearly made permanent by the Civil War. We may take the discoloration as representing the Civil War, forever the...