It's the Jesse Helms Center, set up nine years ago as a shrine for the North Carolina Senator in an old white neoclassical home with a wide portico and fluted columns.
The government bundled up before the fluted columns like an ice sculpture at a wedding--an impressive, preposterous construction molded to take one's mind off the reality that the in-laws loathe one another and that the formal wedding-cake couple will soon be sweating in the sheets.