The earth is too smart for us to break through

[sovay]

I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.

Comments

[asakiyume]

In theory I don't mind changes to the White House, but it sure is something to see a whole chunk of it just disappear.

What I do mind is the display of wasteful, entitled self-centeredness. It's so entirely, entirely ME ME ME ME ME.

[sovay]

In theory I don't mind changes to the White House, but it sure is something to see a whole chunk of it just disappear.

Renovations are common. Demolitions are not.

What I do mind is the display of wasteful, entitled self-centeredness. It's so entirely, entirely ME ME ME ME ME.

Yes. And it isn't his house. It isn't one of his resorts. It was and is a building that belongs to the nation. He treats everything like a toy to break and throw away and he has no right to. Legally, literally. I do not want him to get away with leaving the world in petulant ruins.