7 hours ago
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Who doesn’t love a good home renovation project? Something to take your mind off the humdrum details of life. A fresh start. A dream made reality. I recently repainted my French doors from teal to aquamarine. I felt like a new man, albeit one with all the same problems. Just with a new door color.
The average homeowner will always find something to change, tweak or revise – even in the most beautiful property. Don’t like your kitchen sink? Rip it out. Not a fan of subway tiles? Scrap them. Have you ever considered the sublime serenity of a rainfall shower on your body in the morning? All of these amenities can be yours for the price of materials, labor and the psychic distress of a bunch of burly middle-aged men traipsing around your house with large, thick boots. A small price to pay for a bit of temporary contentment.
The White House demolition, though, is not some minor project. There is likely no more famous house in the world, save for maybe the Playboy Mansion. Significant portions of the East Wing of the White House were ripped out recently, to make way for a ballroom structure. The plan is reportedly to demolish the whole wing by this weekend. The president has claimed he will be paying for some of it personally. Hopefully he’ll also pay for any cost overruns or delays. As of Wednesday, it had not technically even been approved for construction. The Trump administration did say on Tuesday they were going to file plans with the National Capital Planning Commission, but small details like that didn’t stand in the way of getting cracking on the job (officials say they don’t need a permit for demolition, just for vertical construction). This led to all manner of consternation from observers who feel Trump is overstepping his bounds in permanently altering the historic structure.
As a resident of Los Angeles, the capital of wrecking historic structures, I see the appeal of blowing something up because it’s old. What’s worse than something being old? Old things decay and crumble. They cease to be useful. They run the risk of turning into eyesores. Fortunately, our president is none of those things.
The nation itself will turn 250 years old next year, though, and it’s surely looking long in the tooth. Our government is paralyzed, our trust in institutions at historic lows. We are like the grandfather who is no longer able to restrain himself from passing gas in public and hasn’t tied his shoes properly in a decade.
Maybe the country is in need of a home renovation project, too. As critics of the ballroom project have said, the White House is something of a symbol of the United States – a physical embodiment of both its power and its ideals. The people’s house. Never was that more true than the 1829 inauguration of Andrew Jackson (a controversial president whose portrait Trump restored to the White House), when the seat of American authority was open to the new chief executive’s “common-man” supporters. Guests wrecked the place, knocked over expensive furniture and spilled food on the floor. If they were like most houseguests after a raucous party, I doubt many stuck around to wash up.
Unlike at that rowdy event in 1829, it seems doubtful that Trump will open up the facility to free public entry. One only needs to look at the way the president treats his resort at Mar-a-Lago, where he has reportedly welcomed guests who pay millions. There’s not much that’s populist about charging top dollar for the privilege of eating steak with a man pushing 80 whose bedtime is probably before the evening news wraps up. Worse yet, like most hosts, Trump apparently loves to play DJ. How many songs does Lee Greenwood even have in his catalogue?
If the US is to be refurbished in this century, it’s up to us to decide the aims of that project. Is our goal to enrich the few and starve the many? Is it to turn the White House into Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Palace from Back to the Future II? So far, it seems we’re headed for the latter option – the will of the dollar outpacing the needs of the people. Perhaps that’s always been in the DNA of this place. It certainly was when Jackson swept to power, promising to humble the elites who seemed dead set on extracting as much from the country as possible. Jackson rode to victory on his appeal to the masses, and their desire to bring the people’s house back to the people. I am not the first to compare Jackson to Trump, nor will I be the last. But adding a glorified Club Med to the White House doesn’t exactly seem in line with that promise.
The renovation of America should be a collective effort, like when a quarreling married couple has to pick between two different sets of drapes. Instead, it’s a change being shaped by one person whose taste for the dramatic and the gaudy is unmatched. The voice that democracy promises us through voting, the boring minutiae of bureaucracy and rule of law, is muted. If we can’t have a say in how “our” house looks, is it even ours anymore?
I still believe we have a right to choose our own fate. The so-called “American project” was never truly meant to be finished. We all got used to the White House being the White House – the unchanging icon on postcards and commemorative tea sets. Nothing is meant to last, nor can it. Instead of lamenting the change and being unsettled by it, perhaps we should devote our time and energy to imagining what’s next. As easy as it is to demolish what was, it’s just as possible to build something new. Something better. Something more befitting the nickname “the people’s house”. Let’s start planning our next renovation project. We’ll still have all the same problems, but at least we can go back to dreaming for just a little bit.
Maybe a hot tub?
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Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
