On hearing that the Kennedy Center had been renamed

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

- Juliet

Sometimes, these days, words fail me, and when they do I often turn to poetry. Yesterday, for example, when I read that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had, without warning, become the Trump-Kennedy Center, I had no more words. With all the carnage going on around us, the renaming of a building might seem a trivial thing. But somehow it symbolized all the pettiness, the self-aggrandizement, the puffery, the strutting dishonesty of this presidency. The board of trustees voted unanimously for the change . . . well, except for Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, a board member who had called into the meeting on Zoom. “It was such a surprise to me when they said we’re going to rename it,” she later told The New York Times. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and pushed my button. But then I was muted. Everything was cut off . . . and then they immediately said, ‘Well, it’s unanimous. Everybody is for it.’”

Of course we are.

In 1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias, a sonnet about the transitory nature of power and the hubris of tyrants. But it is worth noting that the king’s statue is not the only thing that has been destroyed by time and history. He has also turned the empire over which he ruled into sand.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

 And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.