Obama at Invesco Stadium: The Greek Column Thing, Part One

Well, the Greek column stage-set for Senator Obama’s 20 minute film, speech, followed by fireworks and music after, is seen by some as a bizarre backdrop.

But, perhaps the only odd thing is that many Denverites associate such columns with three notable places in Denver, each one ‘columnized’ out the kazoo, and also very well known for one odd thing or another

a) The Denver Post Office, which is adorned with nearly identical columns. The Post Office was known as the place to go to dispatch mail and boxes, but peculiarly, had the most ‘no parking’ signs around its perimeter so that eventually fewer and fewer people came to trade in its cavernous hallways.

b) The little piece of quaint architecture of freestanding columns in Civic Center Plaza across from the Colorado State Capitol building (with its dome, once painted with gold-toned aluminum paint.) You might recall Civic Center Plaza was declared by Recreate68 last week, to now be under their control… after the city displaced the many homeless people who call selfsame park their home base day and night for years now. In a good many Denverites’ minds, “columns” remind them of the place where the most downtrodden drunks and drug addicts hang out.

c) The Promenade at Cheesman Park, a lovely set of columns set atop a concrete pad on which rollerbladers love to skate by day. This set of columns in Denver were most well known, despite concerts and other events given there, at night in particular, as the cruising place for men looking for men, and vice squads looking for men looking for men.

I wouldn’t begrudge the columns for Obama’s big night. It seems just sort old sentiment symbolizing origins from times past… Unless those columns hatch a rotunda and a rose garden in a kind of Deus ex machina ending to Senator Obama’s speech at the stadium, it’s not an astonishing backdrop.

And yet, the symbolism of columns may carry more import: a pillar is meant to support an entablature, a roof, an arch … it is meant as basic, paramount to the structure, holding up a heavy roof load, helping that structure remain standing, sturdifying its centrifical tensions.

Too, there is a less common aspect to pillars–those which stand alone…. as a kind of monument… often bearing up only an ornamental faux roof, or bearing up nothing. These are often meant more as a stark statement, say, marking a significant death site, or simply as a pleasing aesthetic.

I hope it isn’t in poor taste, and I don’t mean it meanly, to just mention too, that the imported aesthetic of pillars …were also the absolutely preferred architectural ornament of choice used over and over by American slave-owners… whether in their personal mansions, governmental buildings, or in their pillars used as whipping columns.