Kennedy Center Board Votes To Close Rather Than Be Renamed, Setting New Standard For Institutional Spite
The Kennedy Center board voted this week to shut the building down entirely after a federal judge blocked, for the second time, an effort to attach President Trump's name to it. The reasoning, as best anyone can reconstruct it, is that if the marquee cannot say what the board wants, there is no point having a marquee.
This is a remarkable innovation in American governance. Most institutions under pressure compromise, rebrand quietly, or wait out the news cycle. The Kennedy Center chose to salt the earth of its own lobby. Somewhere in the basement there are 1,100 programs for an October chamber series that will now be pulped, and a gift shop with roughly 400 tote bags reading THE KENNEDY CENTER, which are, in the narrowest sense, now collector's items.
The judge's ruling was not complicated. A law named the place after John F. Kennedy in 1964, and courts tend to notice when laws exist. What followed was not a legal argument but a tantrum with a quorum.
Canadians should resist smugness here, because we do the same thing at one-hundredth the scale. Ottawa has spent eleven years unable to decide what to call a bridge. The difference is that we argue about names for decades and then open the building anyway, while Washington now argues about the name and then closes it.
The National Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, has nowhere to play. Its members have honored the moment in the traditional manner of American labor: by asking, politely, who signs the checks now.</body>