Trump, Tearing Down

DONALD TRUMP, in an evident temper tantrum, is now threatening to tear down the iconic Kennedy center, since, after all, it appears that he will not be allowed to rename it after himself. That little boy simply wasn't raised right, no offense to Fred Trump and wife. You literally cannnot make this stuff up. This is a classic exammple of taking your football and going home, holding breath until blue in the face to blackmail parental capitulation,or screaming one's two year old terrible two lungs out until the restoration of fece flinging privileges. The Kennedy Center needs an apgrade, some repair work, just like all buildings do from time to time, as you home owners know all too well. However, most architects and engineers would agree that the needed upgrades are well within reaasonable reach, an architectural walk in the park, well within the capabilities any any mainline construction firm. It is not widely or publicly known precisely what our mentally ill president's mental problems are. Let's face it, everybody is mentally ill, in one way or another. There is no perfect physical or mental health, even assuming our ability to define such concepts. The world's greatest athletes, academics, and artists "suffer" from some mental, emotional, or physical malady or another.So do we all. Perhaps this is nature, reminding us that perfection is merely an abstraction, a concept, a place in heaven, or a poet's dream. We can surely all agree, and have agreed, thatthe world would be a far less interesting place if humanity and the rest of nature operated like a well oiled machine, living to a prescribed age, with prescribed behavior, and mechanistic, always well functiong physical bodily systems. We don't want to be perfect, and we don't want our creations, public buildings included, to be cookie cutter efficient and convenient. The Kennedy Center has by now earned the right to be a bit long in the tooth, so to speak, with a leak, crack, and drip here and there. My friend from Germany laughs when she relates that buidlings in Europe; houses, monuments, public buildings, are in most cases several hundred years old, and still in curculation. Roads, canals, and aquaducts built by the ancient Romans are still up and running, no modern replacements needed or wanted. My ninety two year old German lady friend, who remembers walking from Eastern Germany to central Germany ahead of the oncoming Russian Red Army, hoping to surrender to the Americans, in order to be treated like humans, rather then vermin prefers German architecture to American, The tragedy of World War Two, among its many tragedies, was the wanton widespread destruction of lovely ancient Eueopean cities, their elegant architecture. But we can rejuvenate, we can rebuild. Today the beautifulGerman city of Nuremburg is more beautiful than ever, party because it was rebuilt after the war to resemble its former, elegant self. Anybody who visits Nuremburg today will tell you there is virtually no difference between pre World War Two Nuremburg and the 2026 version, due to the artistic, historical impulse and considerations which attended its reconstruction. Nothing in the ticky tacky land of opportunity, the United States of crass, seems to be built to last or lasts more tha fifty years. this includes our houses and public buildings. The Kennedy Center has qualities which at least remotely resemble the dignity and elegance of old Europe. Maybe it could last, with a little occasional tender loving care, another fifty years. by American standards, this would be quite an accomplishment. Our choice now seems to be to rename it after our criminal pedophilic insanely narcissistic president, or tear it down and start over, a fool's choice, a devilish conundrum. A federal judge has ordered the mad king to erase, chisel his malignant name off the edifce, which he prematurely put there in apparent defiance of sane reasoning and a federal court order, or face the legal consequences of failure to comply. We have few enough lovely structures in our land of ticky tacky to begin with, let's not destroy one of our relatively few ornate, artistic ones. You never know when we will be able to afford another one. What we most certainly cannot afford is a continuation of the Trump presidency, but for the moment we are stuck with it, like we are stuck with our dull, unimaginative American architecture, and a presidential administration which can be counted on to do the exact opposite of what we the American people want and need.