Pro Wrestling Comes To The White House - Outcrassing The Arch And The Ballroom, And The Left Still Doesn't Get It

The Left was horrified at the pictures of the transformation of the South Lawn of the White House into a a wrestling ring.  If the construction of a giant 250' Triumphal Arch, a tacky, bourgeois ballroom, the Disneyland National Garden of American Heroes, and the Rococo remake of the Kennedy Center wasn't enough, Donald Trump was turning the elegant, rolling, green, gardened lawn looking out over the Potomac into a venue for the most lowbrow, trailer trash, mindless entertainment that America has ever produced.  

  

Professional wrestling is fake, marvelously fake, outrageously fake.  Americans know it and love it even more so.  Olympic wrestling - set positions, timing, classic maneuvers, and patriotic cheers - is boring, unwatchable.  Sweaty bodies in tights grappling and tussling.  Impossible. A waste of time. 

But professional wrestling, comedic and vaudevillian is the greatest show on earth.  Thunderous smackdowns, Herculean body slams, Marvel comic figures bulging with steroids, grimacing like Maoris or Kali, posturing, threatening, intimidating...now that's entertainment. 

Winning and losing have no place here.  Lions and lion-tamers trade places. No one cares who wins just who ends up on top, and how the man on the bottom will rise up in full ferocious glory the next time and pins his opponent to the mat with a volcanic, earth-shaking, crushing slam.  

The combatants are doo-dadded up, tricked out, pimped up - face painted, tattooed, and savage-looking.  They are superhero supervillains, giants as big as trees, massive muscular mammoths.  

And this is will be the featured entertainment at the Trump White House. No Pablo Casals playing Bach or Robert Frost reading his verse. Not the literati, the intelligentsia, artists, ballet dancers, opera divas but a gross inversion of everything cultured or sophisticated. There is no beauty here, no elegant gracefulness of Swan Lake, no poetry, no operatic arias - it is bearded women and two headed babies, sword-swallowers and contortionists, a Fun House chamber of horrors. 

Trump hatred - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is nothing new.  The American Left has hated the man since he first appeared on the political seen.  He has been vilified, caricatured, smeared, and attacked by the Left for more than a decade.  The man is inherently, irreconcilably evil, they say.  An autocrat with intimations of kingship, a destroyer of all that is sacred and holy, a travesty, a satanic interloper, a man without a democratic bone in his body. 

Yet the real reason why he is so hated is because of the ballroom, the arch, and the wrestling.  It is one thing to be conservative and out to undo all the progressive programs of the Biden era, to dismantle the bureaucracy, close the borders to the needy and the destitute, and to enrich crony friends while so doing; but it is another thing to be an expression of the worst, grossest, most uncivilized culture. 

This is what has thrown the Left into such apoplexy - the outrageous, unconscionably bourgeois taste of the man.  It wasn't just that the classic architectural purity of the White House would be destroyed by the addition of a ballroom, it was because it was going to be garish, Rococo, all glitter and gilt, mirrors, and marble, chandeliers and sconces...an abomination, a travesty.  How could he have?  How could he have destroyed the very fabric of American culture and turned the White House into a whore house?

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body. 

The ballroom, so outrageously tacky and out of place in the old, historical, revered building, would be one mighty fuck you to the presumptuous, elitist, insular cadres of progressive Washington.  

Yes, it would be decorated with appointments from Walmart and Target, yes it would have the faux grandeur, the preposterous imitative look of the grand ballroom of Versailles re-imaged by Hollywood, yes it would be bourgeois, lowbrow to its very posts, lintels, and sconces. And this was the point. 

 

The Kennedy Center, a reflection of the patrician tastes of the former President who gave state dinners for the literati, the upper class, America's aristocracy and heirs to the cultural heritage of Europe, will be turned into a theme park, another Disneyland, a horror of bad taste.  

Worst of all, the most unbelievably crass, outlandish, gross, and disgusting display of boorish lack of culture is Trump's plan to build a 'monument to America', his term for an Arc de Triomphe-looking monstrosity, a tower of pure ugliness and horrific taste. And now wrestling. 

The American Left - dour, sorrowing, and bitter - can't take it any more.  The heating climate is withering the land, and these Trump buffoons fill up their Ford F-350s and park two of them in the driveway.  Black people are suffering in the inner city, and the Trump White House is filled with white-only, blonde, blue-eyed runway-ready women. Gays, lesbians, and transgenders are struggling to come out and be counted, and they are cast aside, freaks in Barnum & Bailey side shows.  

And now, not only has everything they have worked for since the days of Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis being tossed in the gutter; the Left have to stand by and watch while the garish ballroom destroys the civility and historical importance of classical architecture, the magnificent unimpeded views of the Mall, the Potomac, and Arlington Cemetery are defiled by kitsch and plastic, and the high culture of America are derogated, dismissed, and replaced by a cartoonish vision of crude fantasy. 

Of course those elected to Congress are from the very lowbrow culture they now vilify.  They know nothing about Palladian architecture, Chippendale, Townsend, and Revere, or the principles of Rousseau and Locke on which the Republic was founded. They act on received wisdom - some archaic notions of what is 'presidential', and no clue about the origins, nature, and expression of American culture.  They are a stampeding herd, bellowing, moving this way and that across the prairie, dumb as animals. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, a man of the people. 

He is the first president to understand and embody Americans' deliberately illogical preferences, passionate anti-intellectual populism, and anti-establishment rectitude. Issues never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward is visceral and absolute.  There is no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus is the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

America is not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. It is decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our sedans. We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, catfish noodlers, and NASCAR fans. 

So what did the Left expect?  Were they not paying attention?  Did they really expect a conservative version of Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter? Policy changes only, serious enough but confrontable? Did this outrageously lowbrow bourgeois street fighter come out of left field? What were they thinking? 

Trump, his ballroom, his arch, his remake of the Kennedy Center, his Garden of American heroes, and pro wrestling is exactly the reason why he was voted in. This cultural revision is the best possible refutation of progressives' cant and faux seriousness.  Image is the message - the hackneyed, discredited old chestnuts are done and gone, a whole new ethos, a new zeitgeist has taken its place. 

The Trump presidency was a long time coming.  Indeed the country has never seen anything like it.  Finally the real America, the arm candy and tinsel one, is finally out of the closet and on international display. 

Love Out Of The Box - A Ghetto Romance, Or Stick To Your Own Kind

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

In short, the story is about diversity.

The remake of Bernstein’s original, faithful to theme, music, and lyrics attempted to make the story one of today – all traces of racial and ethnic stereotypes removed and the upbeat, happy ending emphasized.  Although we may cling to outdated notions of cultural and racial separatism, we will eventually realize our common humanity and such divisions will disappear.

However, this will never happen – history since the first human settlements records the persistent identity of tribes, clans, religious sects, communities, states, and nations. Although recent DNA analysis has shown that homo sapiens did interbreed with Neanderthals, it probably was no more common than clowns marrying circus freaks. In fact historians of pre-history conclude that the two ‘racial’ groups tried to kill each other off, and thankfully the right side won.

Why is this lesson so hard to accept? Don’t birds of a feather flock together?

Don’t they peck at the intruder until he leaves?

av

No society – not even Margaret Mead’s Trobriand Islanders whose kinship and community patterns she distorted to suit her theories – exists without social, ethnic, economic, or racial divisions.  Whether India with its persistent caste system; our division by wealth, income, and race; or Iraq’s splintering divisions by Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd, we all do it.

Vicki had seen and loved West Side Story many times, both versions.  She was charmed by the lyrical beauty of the first, entranced by the simple Romeo and Juliet story, and nodded in understanding at the remake.  Finally Hollywood put its money where its mouth was and cast real ethnic characters to play ethnic roles. Yes, white people could play Puerto Ricans, but casting originals gave the movie authenticity and made it more consistent with the multicultural times of the day. 

In all her romantic fantasy she overlooked the central, inescapable lesson of the musical reprise - stick to your own kind.  Although Bernstein intended it to be an expression of the damaging, insular, and hopelessly aggressive tendency for sameness, its powerful method of watch out what you wish for is clear. 

A recent production of The Merchant of Venice was produced by the Washington (DC) Shakespeare Company, and the producers turned it into a farce.  Each of the communities of the play - Italian, Jewish, and WASP - were all caricatures.  The Venetians were tough Jersey goombas, the Jews were pure Seventh Avenue, Diamond District, shylock moneylenders, and WASPs talked with Locust Valley lockjaw and pranced around like spoiled debutantes. 

The play, taken over by 'diversity' missed the whole point.  The audience cheered, but for what?  The old Jew got his due from the WASP-in-disguise lawyer? Ethnic stereotypes in this case were not unreal, but reality.  The Joisey dumbing down of the guineas was also on target.  That's what Italian Americans are like after all, still spaghetti and meatball oafs. 

In any case Vicki was young enough and single enough to search for love 'out of the box' as she called it. An affair with an African American would lay to rest any doubts about her progressive credentials, would dispel cruel stereotypes of the well-hung machismo of the black male, and would finally break the confining mold which had held her captive since her days in high society. 

She met Pharoah Jones at a conference on racial injustice.  For too long the black man had suffered at the hands of white supremacists, locked in poverty and dysfunction, and despite the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and billions of dollars of investment in the inner city, he remained much as he was 100 years ago. 

Perhaps it might have been wiser for Vicki to move up the racial ladder - starting with the likes of Barack Obama, a mellow whitish black man close to standard - but she opted for a ghetto pimp who had been invited to the conference because of his street savvy, his ghetto culture, and his particularly black entrepreneurial (drug running) spirit. 

Now, Pharoah did not come to the conference all tricked out in bling, zoot suit, and patent leather.  He knew his audience - liberal white women - and so he dressed the part. As a con man Pharoah knew how to enjoin, engage, trick, and profit from the gullible, the credulous, and, the idealist. 

He was her mark, her john, her foray out of the box; and while her colleagues warned her - diversity does have its limits - she forged ahead, made overtures, and locked onto her prey. 

Of course as much as Vicki thought she was the operator in charge, it was Pharoah who thought the quick seduction of this blonde, blue-eyed white girl would be a nice finish to a tedious day.  

It turned out better than either of them expected.  Pharoah treated her well at the beginning, happy to show off his white prize to his malt liquored stoop mates in Anacostia; and she was delighted to be had by a real man (yes the hung stereotype was true); but not surprisingly, the affair went quickly bad.  The sisters in the neighborhood dunned Pharoah mercilessly, no prize there, they said, fucking a dumb white chone.  'Chocolate pussy no good no more?'

And it didn't take much for Pharoah to revert to his pimping ways. Vicki was just one more whore in his stable, worth nothing more than the money she brought in; but before he had a chance to send her out onto the streets, she split for uptown, chastened but not bowed.  Bad luck was all. 

There was Prince, then LaFarge, then Ra-Leyden, and finally Washington Carver Lincoln, where she should have started, a Denzel Washington Roman Israel, PI respectable Negro; but in the end he was too white and not worth the effort. 

Stick to your own kind, so she spent more time than usual at the Yale Club and the Society of the Cincinnati, a place for the most high-toned, aristocratic, top-of-the-line old English American royalty; but was bored to tears by Edwardian clones and Wall Street bankers.  Now, if these investment types had been the Jeffrey Skilling, Enron variety - macho men out for a killing - she might have been interested.  They were white, OK, but they were certainly out of the box. 

But these young men were throwback to another century, old fools fifty years too early and as sexually inviting as old wool. 

She felt silly at the Adams Morgan Latino festival. These smallish leaf-blowers had none of the appeal of ghetto men, none of the swagger of Pharoah Jones and none of his African-bred sexy muscularity; but she was out to show that her progressivism was not just an academic prospect. 

She went after the tallest Jose, a 'retailer' although he did not specify what or how he sold, Salvadoran by his accent, and with some education noted in his nearly correct grammar; but he turned out to be the virtual Latino stereotype - Gaithersburg split level, four Corolla beaters in the driveway, new arrivals in the kitchen, salsa on the radio, squalling babies, and endless fighting. 

What was next? Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Arabs?

And then she pulled up.  What was she doing in the first place?  She was no different than her progressive sisters loving pho, tacos, and felafel and calling it diversity - a game, a ritual, a pastime.  She was screwing stereotypes instead of just talking about them, but that was only a difference in modality.  She was as definitively a product of her parents and her lovely environment as they- as ignorant, presumptuous, and adolescent. 

A reprise of Bernstein's West Side Story was being performed at the Kennedy Center, and she went, delighted as she was the first time, convinced of the play's deeper meaning, and vowing to return to her roots. 

Pleasant roots they were - summers on the Vineyard, winters in Palm Beach and Gstaad, Chippendale, Townsend, Revere, and Copley and boys of the same ilk, and the Muffy Cabot and Harrison Lodge wedding. 

Multicultural Diversity - Better Asian Than Black, Better Confucian Than Rap, The Evolution Of A White Liberal

Vicki Barnes lived in the city and told everyone it was 'for the diversity'.  It was comforting and satisfying, she said, to be able to eat tacos, pho, and butter chicken within ten minutes of her house. 

That, however, was as far as Vicki ever got to multiculturalism or wanted to go - ethnic food and the people who served it.  She had all the diversity she needed at her lunches at Delhi Dhaba or Thai Garden. 

When the closing bell rang, the Chinese, Koreans, and Indians who worked in the mathematics department down the hall from her, left for the suburbs . When Vicki became pregnant, a Chinese colleague said, 'Why not take your baby away from here? Chinese people are very smart', he said. 'PhD, MIT. White people in suburbs smart too'. 

It was nice to hear honesty for a change.  The university like most was a liberal, politically correct place where black people could do no wrong; and despite the lowest socio-economic indicators in the city, high rates of incarceration, and dysfunctional families, her fellow white professors sang their praises.  

The Asian professors were not held to the same politically correct standard as their white colleagues and were allowed to comment on racial disparity.  Although they were in America as highly-paid researchers, many people in their countries were disadvantaged, poor, and marginalized; so they had the right to observe racial difference in a critical way.  

And so it was that Vicki did as Hong Fat said, and shortly after her baby was born, she and her husband sold their small urban apartment and moved to Lanier, one of the metropolitan area's wealthiest and best educated suburbs.  Hong Fat was right - thanks to the influence of smart Asians the schools were among the best in the state, the town was crime free, and there was the heady atmosphere of intellectual excellence. 

'I miss the ethnic food', Vicki mused to her neighbor, a Chinese bio-tech scientist.  The neighbor of course thought that the American obsession with diversity was nonsense.  'Americans eat noodles and think they're holy'. Diversity for Asians did not exist.  They had no interest in anything but their own cultural communities. American style diversity would dilute its high-value intellectual universality. If a Chinese scientist crossed ethnic lines, it was to confer with his Indian colleague about bosons or semi-conductors and nothing more. 

Bloomingdale, a formerly all-black neighborhood of Washington, DC, was noted for his high-quality housing stock, tree-lined streets, and uncluttered feel.  The old Victorian brownstones, the architectural hallmark of the city and saved from urban renewal because Bloomingdale was too far from the city center to worry about, were a marvel, and it wasn't long before urban pioneers - white families looking for racial diversity and inexpensive fix-up housing - moved in.

Racial diversity being what it is, Bloomingdale when the first white families moved in, was still the ghetto; and so these pioneers installed iron grates on the doors and windows, floodlights and police cameras over the entrance way and on the roof, kept Doberman Pinchers, mace in the drawer, and industrial sirens.  The black men smoking spliffs and drinking Colt45 malt liquor were not their neighbors but suspicious interlopers, for 9th Street and Independence was now their neighborhood. 

'When more of us move in', said one new white resident, 'the streets will be clean and the schools better', and true enough within ten years Bloomingdale became upscale, expensive, and the place to live. 

'The medium is the message', said philosopher Marshall McLuhan about the new electronic media culture in America.  Everything was about how form did not only follow function, but that 'functionality', the mediazation of culture would change everything from family order to principles of social interaction. 

Cultural environment is the new message; and it didn't take long before Vicki had jettisoned her wokeness and adopted a very Chinese, disciplined, centered, and ambitious ethos.  The sound of children practicing piano scales or the greetings of mothers welcoming sons and daughters home from after-school Russian math programs, or the squeak of violins and lights on after midnight were parts of the influencing environment which changed Vicki from a passionate social reformer, to an academic disciplinarian, an Asian philosopher, and a purposeful parent. 

Playmates for her children were selected for seriousness and an intellectual intensity inherited from their parents - children who could solve Rubik cubes in minutes, who mastered multi-thousand piece Legos, for whom chess was a pastime not an obligation.  At the same time Vicki and her husband became perfect fits for the rarified atmosphere of PhD, tech savvy Lanier residents. 

'Now this is diversity', Vicki said to her husband, referring to the Chinese, Indian, and Korean families in Lanier, and not a pho place or Chinese take-out in sight. 

The old adage - 'Give a progressive enough time and he will become conservative'  - is amplified and intensified by cultural environment. Living in the intellectually rich, academically ambitious, and socially demanding Asian environment accelerated her political transformation.  Identity meant nothing.  Excellence meant everything.  In time because of the shared cultural environment of academic pursuit, creativity, and disciplined work - hallmarks of Chinese Confucian culture - the racial distinctions between her and her Asian friends and neighbors disappeared. 

Lanier is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the state, and the old Vicki would have thought twice about moving there.  The three and four million dollar homes would have been a symbol of capitalist greed, unnecessary bourgeois excess, and a clarion call for the redistribution of wealth.  They were now simply a part or the landscape - affordable for the two high-income earning families, reasonable for four, practical, and convenient. Her neighbors were highly productive, contributing far more than their share to American productivity and competitiveness.  Their wealth was not misspent and squirreled away - it was a means to an end. 

Vicki had indeed become a suburban mom, but not just anyone.  Rather than the caricature of the American suburb - settled, predictable, uninspiring, and insular - Lanier was the new American model. Diversity exchanged for universal excellence. Intellectual homogeneity, cultural unity, a common place. 

Her son could have been Chinese if mentality, ambition, cultural respect, Confucian principles, and respect were the criteria; but perhaps more importantly he - and his Asian classmates - were the new Americans.