It’s was bound to happen. Now that the guy in the Gilded Oval Office has wangled a proposal in Congress to name the opera house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for his wife Melania he now has House Republicans pursuing a plan to ditch JFK —and by extension his wife Jacqueline who famously brought Pablo Casals, sublime cellist, and other greats to perform at the White House —in favor of calling the building, designed by Edward Durrell Stone, the Trump Center for who -knows- what?
The late Ada Louise Huxtable, redoubtable architecture critic of the New York Times and then the Wall Street Journal, wrote that this creation was like the fat man in which someone much thinner, architecture, was struggling to get out. Inspired leadership over the years put that review to rest as brilliant music, theater, dance, et al soared through the nation’s capital, dispelling the notion that Washington was a cultural wasteland.
That designation threatens now to return if Kennedy/Trump Center becomes the home of “Hee Haw,” reimagined for the stage, and other TV pastimes similarly exploited. While the name change is said to be unlikely since the center was established by Congress with the JFK designation firmly implanted in the legislation, lawsuits could go on for several years and sound judgment is hardly a characteristic of the current Supreme Court, due to overshadow the country for at least a generation.
As for the Ten Commandments, the Texas Legislature passed a bill last spring requiring that they be displayed in every classroom across the state. Who’s to say this would not become the rule for Kennedy/Trump Center as well? My position is this: First let’s put the Ten Commandments in the office of every legislator in the U.S., including those in Congress, and every governor as well, especially Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, plus the Gilded Oval Office. Once these public officials demonstrate behavior associated with “those shalt not lie, steal, murder, commit adultery and so on, thus setting a good example for young Americans, then we can discuss the schools. One redeeming feature of Texas’s Senate Bill 10 is that it calls for the King James Bible, certainly more poetic than any later version.
To my amazement, Texas, where I live, is not one of the 21 states that have warned JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and BlackRock’s Larry Fink and their compatriots to stop “woke” environmental and ESG operations or face disbarment from the management of their pension or other government funds. Texas declined to join forces with these anti-woke warriors because it already has lowered the boom on “companies deemed to ‘boycott’ fossil fuel industries” with a bill passed four years ago, according to Perplexity. Since then BlackRock has become less environmentally offensive to Texas lawmakers so they are holding off on the 21 states solution while never flinching from the barricades of legislation, litigation and ornery opposition to anything that does not comport with Lone Star values.
The problem with Lone Start values, however, is that they can lead to environmental catastrophe such as the Guadalupe River flood that has killed 136 people thus far. This includes 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic. Surely “thou shalt not kill” includes some corollary about callousness to the needless loss of life.