by H. L. Mencken (channeled)
There is, in the character of the American statesman, a hunger that no election, no adulation, no gilded ceiling can ever quite satisfy — the hunger to be carved in stone before the worms get at him. Kings used to settle for it with a tomb. Roman emperors put their faces on coins and called it modesty. But your American mountebank, lacking the good taste of the ancients, prefers something gaudier and more permanent: a plaque on a building he did not build, honoring a taste he does not have, financed by money that is not his. This week the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees — a body so thoroughly stocked with the incumbent’s creatures that it might as well meet inside his hat — voted once again to chisel the words “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” beneath the marble portico of a hall named, by Act of Congress and by the plain sentiment of a grieving nation in 1971, for a dead President who is not this one.
That a federal judge had already looked at this exact scheme in May and pronounced it illegal — Judge Christopher R. Cooper found, in language of unusual clarity for a man of the bench, that the statute “makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy,” and ordered the offending name struck — seems to have troubled the trustees not at all. They have simply done what men of this sort always do when the law inconveniences their vanity: they have gone around it. Rip the name off the front, the judge ordered — so, very well, they ripped it off, and for two months hung tarps over the whole disgraced facade, like a family draping black crepe over a relative too embarrassing to explain to the neighbors. Now they propose to restore the tribute anyway, in slightly different lettering, in a slightly different location, with the fig leaf of a $48 million renovation to make the theft look like philanthropy. New marble floors, new drapes, a relocated box office, and — I am not inventing this — new VIP restrooms, so that the better class of donor may relieve himself in surroundings worthy of the Republic. It is a scheme any Tammany alderman of 1890 would have recognized on sight and executed with more grace.
The pretext, as always with these operations, is generosity. The man has “restored” the building, we are told, as if he had gone up on the scaffold himself with a trowel, rather than presiding over an institution that spends other people’s money and calls the result his monument. This is the oldest trick in the referee’s bag: get yourself appointed chairman of the thing you wish to loot, staff the board with men who owe you their dinner, and then vote yourself a testimonial for having permitted the looting to occur. Even Boss Tweed — the Tammany Hall chieftain who spent the 1870s looting New York City’s treasury so openly that cartoonists needed no caption to identify him — was a franker sort of thief: he built things under his own name, took his graft in cash rather than marble, and never once pretended that a court order was merely a suggestion.
What is instructive here is not the vanity — vanity is the standard equipment of every man who has ever sought office, and a President without it would be as unnatural as a fish without gills. What is instructive is the contempt for the plain machinery of law that the whole business displays. A judge said no. The proper reply of a self-respecting government to an inconvenient ruling is to appeal it, or obey it, or at the very worst to defy it openly and take the consequences like men. Instead we get this furtive shuffle — off with the sign, up with the tarp, wait out the news cycle, back on with a slightly reworded sign — the jurisprudential equivalent of a boy who has been told to stop stealing apples and so takes to stealing them after dark. Representative Jamie Raskin called the tarps a “literal coverup,” which is, for once, a politician’s phrase that undersells its subject rather than embroiders it.
And what of the institution itself, the actual Center, the hall where the fiddlers fiddle and the dancers dance? It is, in this transaction, merely the marble upon which the ego is to be engraved — a magnificent, blameless building, conscripted like a park bench for the scrawling of a rich man’s initials. Kennedy, whatever his sins, at least had the decency to be assassinated before anyone could argue about the naming rights. This one intends to arrange the matter while very much alive, with lawyers on retainer and a board of yes-men standing by with the chisel.
The great, gaudy joke of it all is that none of this will buy what it is meant to buy. No inscription, however large, however defiantly re-engraved after a federal judge has said otherwise, has ever purchased a man real immortality — the kind that Beethoven or Kennedy or, for that matter, a half-decent stagehand gets simply by having done something worth remembering. It buys only a plaque, which the pigeons will use precisely as they use every other flat surface in Washington, and a footnote in the histories, filed under Vanity, American, Late Imperial Period. The tarps will come down eventually. The marble will gleam. The VIP restrooms will no doubt be superb. And somewhere under all that new travertine, a dead President will go on being quietly, permanently unconsulted about the whole affair, which is, when you think about it, the fate of every man who has ever had a building named after him by someone still alive and still counting the votes.
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