Building A Better Ballroom

I AM GRATEFUL that the decision whether to build a ballroom adjacent to the White House is not mine. Too much blowback, as we call it, either way. For the record, I am against it, on the basis of incrementalism. First, a ballroom, then what? A resort hotel, par three golf course, and picke ball courts? Perish the thought of Trump, attired in short shorts and a tank top, trying to cover a picke ball court with an extra hundred pounds of midriff blubber, humorous though the image is. Besides, this administration has yet to demonstrate sufficient competance to keep a glorified wading pool clean. Yesterday my sister tried to back her one hundred thousand dollar bright red C8 Corvette out of her driveway to go to church, and trashed her mailbox. Damage was minimal, a true fender bender, except for the poor hapless mailbox, which can be and must be extensively repaired or replaced. You get to the point where you finally realize that maybe its just plain better to leave well enough alone. Change is not always progress, as conservatives know. In the eighteen fifties the French completely renovated Paris, driving massive highways in concentric circles through and around it. That prject proved worthwhile. Tokyo and Beijing have in recent decades undergone extensive urban renewal and renovation, as have several other gigantic Asian cities. A select few American are old enough to remember the "urban renewel" which transformed American cities in the nineteen sixties, razing blighted slums and replacing them with gleaming skyscrapers and shopping malls, with new all purpose circular sports stadiums thrown in for good measure. Those have long since been replaced by football and baseball specific ballparks with rustic architecture, as styles change. We human beings are like busy little bees, or perhaps ant piles would make a better metaphor. As to whether primates or insects make better architects and engineers is a flip of the coin. My money's on the bugs. The pertinent question is: where and when does it all end, or does it? With bankruptcy? Societal extinction? The ancient Romans overbuilt, over expanded. Maintanance, upkeep costs are perpetual, a forever drain on resources. You'd better get more value out of the structure than the costs to keep it up. That drives up ticket prices, fuels inflation. Then too, unlike those built by the ancient Romans, unlike those built throughout most of European history, our modern ticky tacky American edifices are barely bult to outlast the laborers who lay the bricks and smooth out the dry wall. Its hard to imagine our modern buildings ever doing what our ancestor's structures did and still do, lasting for a near eternity, paying for themselves, consdering the constant flow of resources necessary for their upkeep. More likely, as decades turn into centuries, the expense of preservation against the inexorable forces of the Earth's atmosphere will grind our monuments to ourselves into rubble, and our descendants will behold our folly of ruins, lacking any and all artistic asthetic merit, confronted with the burden of clean up and restoration of the environment. Some future historian, anthropologist, or poet will stand beside the silted in reflecting pool, and will glance first at the crumbling Lincoln Memorial, then at the vine covered Washington Monument, then at the pigeon stained Arch de Trump, and wistfully, ruefully quote Bertolt Brecht. "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them."