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.