Let us pause, dear reader, to savour the delicious irony of a court ordering the removal of a former president’s name from a cultural institution. The Kennedy Center, that temple of American highbrow kitsch, has now expunged the Trump moniker with the same bureaucratic vigour one might use to scrub graffiti from a public lavatory. The British, of course, stand aloof, clutching our teacups and muttering about ‘standards’.
We are neutral, you see. We have no opinion, save for the quiet satisfaction of watching the American Republic devour its own political heroes with the appetite of a starved crocodile. But let us not be smug.
The fall of Trump’s name is merely a symptom of a deeper historical malady: the relentless secularisation of public memory. Once, we carved names into stone so that future generations might remember. Now, we erase them as though they were typos in a digital manuscript.
The court, in its wisdom, has decided that Trump is unworthy of the building’s branding. Perhaps he is. But what does this say about a society that treats history as a buffet, picking and choosing which figures to canonize and which to consign to oblivion?
The Victorians built monuments to their villains, too. We still have Nelson’s Column, and he was no saint. But we understood that a man’s sins do not automatically disqualify his contributions to the nation.
The Americans have lost that nuance. They now judge their leaders not by the totality of their deeds, but by the propriety of their Twitter feeds. And the British cultural institutions, ever the cowards, stay silent.
We nod along with the mob, pretending that we, too, would never have placed a name on a building if we had known it would later become controversial. But we did. We named schools after slave traders, streets after imperialists.
We just happen to be slower at removing them. The Kennedy Center episode is not just about Trump. It is about the death of historical perspective.
The idea that a name can be lifted from a building by judicial fiat suggests that we no longer believe in the permanence of anything. All is provisional. All is subject to the prevailing moral fashion.
And that, my friends, is how empires rot. They lose the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads: that a man can be both a rogue and a president, both offensive and deserving of recognition. The Romans understood this.
They built statues of their worst emperors; they kept the names on the archways even after the tyrant was strangled in the bath. Why? Because they knew that history is not a morality play.
It is a messy, festering record of human failure and ambition. The removal of Trump’s name is a petty act of revenge, a symbolic gesture that changes nothing. It does not make the Kennedy Center more virtuous.
It simply makes it more sterile. And the British, standing on the sidelines, pretending we are above it all, are merely waiting for our own turn to be judged. I look forward to the day when someone demands the removal of the Elgin Marbles’ donor name.
Or perhaps we’ll start with the Queen. After all, she did nothing to stop the opium wars. But that is a column for another day.
For now, let us raise a glass to the Americans: for showing us how to conduct a culture war with all the grace of a drunken walrus. And to the British: for perfecting the art of doing nothing while looking superior. It is a system that has served us well since the fall of the Roman Empire.
