In the nearly 15 years I lived in Washington, D.C., I probably visited the Kennedy Center just a handful of times, but what’s more important to know about the center isn’t the building or who performs there. It’s the center’s location in the city and the people there who claim it as a status symbol.
President Trump, who is threatening to demolish the center, is currently in a showdown with courts and Democrats fighting him tooth and nail lest it be approved that the building bear his name as part of a planned renovation. Parties involved who are not aligned with Trump are predictably outraged that he would impose his name on another landmark, which of course is as tacky as ever, but as usual, in their seething anger they reveal the grotesque nature of whatever it is they’re defending.
Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott wrote this week of the center’s majesty. “It offered free performances for passersby; it attracted the black-tie crowd and guys in cargo shorts; it jostled tourists and locals together — and if you spent even a moment eavesdropping, it was a proper Babel of tongues,” he wrote Thursday, with the most fitting biblical reference to an unholy tower that had its construction halted by God. “The ushers were friendly, the wine was terrible and sometimes mice would scamper down the aisle as the National Symphony Orchestra was playing Mahler.”
Sounds nice. Quick question: Does the Kennedy Center accept cancellations? What about walk-outs?
True, the Kennedy Center could at times be an ethnic swap meet packed with hijabs and halal and tourists who, having heard about it in movies, might visit from the Midwest in their finest MAGA wear to see a show. But Kennicott is a fraud. None of that is the reason he and other affluent, mostly white, Democrat D.C. denizens revere the Kennedy Center.
What they’re so devoted to are its exclusive events, the black-tie ones, where you don’t see Republicans or tourists, only the usual green room guests of CNN, MS Now and the network Sunday news shows. And they love its close proximity to Georgetown, a place where anyone who isn’t Democrat D.C.-rich rarely ventures to precisely because of how removed it is from the rest of the city, all of which is unaffordable by any average American income standard.
That’s how the Kennedy Center devotees like things — exclusive. Because they hate the people who can’t afford to live in Georgetown and can’t attend the exclusive black-tie events. That’s everyone who doesn’t live in Northwest, D.C., or at least commute there for work from Alexandria, Virginia, and Potomac, Maryland.
The “multiculturalism,” “artistry,” and “free performances” Democrats of D.C. profess to cherish are scraps they throw at the city’s poor in exchange for maintaining their status hub, which is really just a monument to their own self-importance and a symbol of their wealth and power. They don’t care if another tourist or impoverished brown kid never sets foot in Foggy Bottom.
To be sure, it’s not a bad-looking building. I had friends with boats, and I always enjoyed riding past it on the Potomac with its Japanese-esque architecture striking the skyline. But I knew who that building was really for.
If it comes down, so what? D.C. Democrats have enough monuments to themselves, starting with this country’s entire capital city.
