Apres Moi, Le Deluge: East Wing Blues

 

"This morning the White House police cleared the Ellipse Park, across the street, where journalists had been photographing the demolition of the East Wing. Well, that makes sense: If none of it's on camera, they can just claim the East Wing hanged itself in prison."

--Stephen Colbert

Mad Dog was once given a tour of the Vice President's Residence by none other than Barbara Bush, as part of a group of five or six people she was showing around. 

Barbara Bush

One of the women expostulated, "Oh, Mrs. Bush! Your house is just so beautiful!"

Veep's House, Naval Observatory WDC

And, turning ever so slightly toward her, Barbara Bush smiled faintly, paused and said, "Well, really it's more your house than mine. It doesn't belong to me."

Mad Dog, being an undercover Democrat on this tour--long story, don't ask--was stunned. This was a Republican scion, a woman of wealth and privilege, and if there was one thing Mad Dog knew about people of wealth and privilege it was that every last one of them believed, with all their heart and soul, that they richly deserved every bit of their wealth and privilege, and here she was firmly reminding us that she understood she did not own the privilege, she was simply a temporary guardian, a custodian of it. 

And now we have a man who does not think of himself as a custodian of other people's property, but he believes himself to own government property, personally. The White House is his own to do whatever he wishes with it.

And so he demolishes the East Wing, because he thinks it's his. This he does because he can do it. There is nobody to stop him. Certainly not the Supreme Court. Not the General Services Administration (which is the landlord for government buildings), not the military, not Congress. 

 This is a man who is demanding a personal payment from the government of $270 million because he felt offended by the Justice Department. 

Well, there's Justice for you.

Mad Dog is not much of a student of history, but dimly he recalls a king of France, Louis XV who said, "apre`s moi, le deluge."

Melissa Whitaker did a painting which captures this moment. 

Or, perhaps, if we are going to a French state of mind, there was Marie Antoinette whose blithe disregard of the hardships of others was captured in her famous line, of which no reader of this blog needs to be reminded.

And so we go, not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with the sound of backhoes and bulldozers.

And here is Paul Krugman's take on where we are. He goes on to say we should care about because it is a symptom of something much more significant.

"Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?"