Demolition
By Alice Bond
It’s always the cruelty.
President Trump has reduced the East Wing of the White House to a tangle of broken wire and rubble in four days —without official permission or letting the public know in advance. When he did let us know, he lied. Architects, preservationists and historical societies decried the speed and scope of demolition and asked for a pause.
The loss delivered a deeply felt, disorienting gut punch to Americans: the brutish devastation of one third of the White House, standing for over 220 years in our country. And why wouldn’t it? Its image is stamped into the American psyche, a permanent fixture. It is the People’s house, and the emblem of our democracy.
This time Trump’s attack on democracy is concrete and in full view, not hidden behind closed doors, or siloed like the screams and horror inside immigration courthouses, the desperation of air traffic controllers working without pay, or the growing number of families falling quietly off the SNAP program who may be going hungry.
Deliberate destruction of public monuments brandishes its own language. Chief among the options is the ruin of culturally significant civic and religious buildings. It has been practiced throughout history as a show of subversion and domination.
In the 1500’s Cortes mounted a brutal campaign against the Aztecs. To serve the King and Queen of Spain, and the Pope by securing riches and converts, he borrowed a popular trope from the “spread” of Christianity in Europe. He reduced the iconic Templo Mayor pyramid in the Aztec capital to wreckage and built a cathedral over it using the same stones. Dominate and erase. Spanish conquistadors repeated this effective cycle throughout North America.
In 1941 during World War II in Zagreb, Croatia, the fascist mayor ordered the razing of the capital’s main synagogue, a nearly hundred-year-old building beautifully detailed with spires and Moorish arches. The false and official line was that the building did not fit into the urban plan for the city. A traumatic blow to the community, it was also a dangerous symbolic gesture and part of a broader plan. Mass round ups and executions preceded and followed the demolition. Today the site remains covered by a parking lot.
More recently in 2001, the Taliban obliterated the colossal twin Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan. Carved out of sandstone in the 6th century, one hundred and two hundred feet tall. Patently holy. Why? I wondered at the time. But the Taliban ran a Sunni Muslim nation. They, too, had a broader plan: terrorize and dominate the local Shia Muslims who lived nearby.
Does a vulgar impulse to crush a cherished national symbol chalk up to just losing an old building? Was it a display of anger and intimidation —or perhaps a metaphor for a broader plan?