Wrecking Ball

I remember watching the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, fearing every moment that it would collapse inward.  Years before that was the attack on the World Trade Center, the airplane hitting the second tower, the posters plastered on the walls by desperate people whose loved ones hadn’t come home.

The storming of the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, felt like that.  The potential destruction of the symbolic center of our government, the possible murder of our representatives, the long wait as help failed to come–all of that seemed to symbolize the end of the United States, and it may still.  While the Notre Dame fire was a matter of human carelessness and miscommunication (New York Times, July 19, 2019), 9/11 and January 6 were acts of terrorism.

There have been those who have tried to change the subject.  Donald Trump’s twitter account, a fountain of disinformation, insults, rage, sudden firings and unconsidered policy changes, was finally–after weeks of lies about election fraud–shut down.  There are some who profess to be more alarmed about twitter’s action than about the attempted coup d’état that came too close to success. But Jack Dorsey, the CEO of twitter, was faced with a client with millions of deluded followers who was openly inciting a coup d’état for the selfish purpose of keeping himself in power. You can’t, in the end, yell fire in a crowded theater.

But as we come to the end of Trump’s tragic presidency, there are two episodes in his life that tell us precisely who he is.

One of these moments occurred in 1980, when Trump smashed the art deco friezes of the old Bonwit Teller building to construct Trump Tower.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art had contracted with him to remove the friezes; but Trump found out it would cost an extra $32,000.  He destroyed them instead (Fast Company, August 18, 2017; Secrets of Manhattan, August 16, 2017.

The other moment has occurred sporadically throughout his presidency, and involves the rare, unique, and very old saguaro cactuses pictured in the header. It is against the law to cut them down.  But some have been in the way of the “big beautiful wall”(LA Times, February 26, 2020).

And the power to smash stuff without consequence, the assumption of white entitlement, the lure of actions without consequences, has proved seductive:

And many of the windows they smashed (Architect of the Capitol, January 22, 2013)?  Were old.  Cared for.  Revered.  Unique.  Respected.

Full circle.

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Header image from Dreamstime.com.