Glam theorized

Interview by Javier Mattio for La Voz del Interior of Córdoba

1) The visual exhibitionism of glam rock reminds of social networks and Instagram (inevitably joke: instaglam). Indeed, you point out in Shock and awe how Carlyle wrote long ago about the current “cult of one self”. Do you see any connection between both worlds? Does the context (as the end of countercultural ideals did in the 70’s) has anything to do with the tendency?

“Instaglam”, love it!

I think Carlyle was referring to the ancient religion of self-worship.  That only goes to show that things that we think of as very contemporary ills actually go  back across the centuries – and will continue far into the future. Social media and the internet and phones have just provided a new arena in which these ancient human drives  - the Seven Deadly Sins – can enact themselves and create dramas.

When I watched the film The Social Network, about Facebook, I suddenly thought that, in essence, if you took away all the technological trappings, this story could be set in Ancient Rome – it’s about ego, competition, the quest for worldly glory and power, about money and sexual conquest.  The basic motivations driving the narrative are the same -  then as now.

I just rewatched the classic BBC TV series of the 1970s, I Claudius, which is set during the early days of imperial Rome. Back then only the emperors and the Roman aristocracy were sufficiently free from material want to develop syndromes like narcissistic personality disorder and egomania that led to them wanting to be made into gods in the afterlife, while dedicating their terrestrial life to perversions and indulgences.  Most of the population then had to toil for the greater part of the day and then collapse exhausted at the end of it. It was a constant struggle just to survive. It was only the aristocracy who were able to afford to be decadent. But nowadays a much higher proportion of the population is freed from material wants and basically able to devote a huge amount of energy to self-glorification and pursuing personal desires and obsessions.   So I think “decadence” becomes much more of a mass phenomenon in the late 20^th Century and early 21^st Century. 

Bowie would be at the cutting edge of that evolution, or devolution. In 1972 he is mainstreaming bohemian and decadent ideas – a self-obsession, a self-remaking, an individualism that paradoxically isn’t wedded to a sense of a permanent fixed character. He is presenting decadence as an aspirational goal, talking in press conferences of how he and Lou Reed are signs and symptoms of the decline of Western Civilisation.

But this idea that the present is especially corrupt and in decline is in itself a kind of narcissism of the era rather than the individual.  What a whole age believes about itself.  Last week I read Nathaniel West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, which is about Hollywood in the 1930s, and I was stunned by how vividly contemporary all its themes and even its atmosphere was. It describes a world in which people pour all their emptiness into worshipping stars, or trying to become stars themselves. It ends apocalyptically with the crowd outside a movie premiere turning into a crazed mob riot. There is very little about the current era that West and his contemporaries would not have understood. Someone like Trump would have seemed a totally logical development: showbiz meets fascism.

 

2) In your books classic rock appears as the “other” in the sense of hegemonic, macho, tough and repetitive. Are you writing –with Energy Flash, Rip it up, Shock and awe- a big History of rock opposed to classic rock? A kind of critic “Comédie Humaine” of alternative music?

I’m actually a huge fan of rock music in the classic sense – Rolling Stones, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, etc. I really see a commonality of drive and energy between hard rock and a lot of the electronic music that I like – it’s music to rock out, to go wild and crazy, it’s “a program for mass liberation”.  A band like the Stooges didn’t set out to be the godfathers of alternative music or the prophets of punk – they wanted to be the biggest rock band of the era, I’m sure, and had to settle for being simply the best.   Iggy wanted to be the new Jim Morrison or Jagger.  He was but not enough people were ready for it.

Postpunk is different because it has more a self-reflexive and critical relationship with rock as an institution and rock as new set of conventions and conformities. So you get the critique of “rockism” emerging out of UK postpunk culture. But Joy Division are a rock band, and you can see the connections back to the Stooges and to the Doors.

 

3) Where do you stand regarding the ethic aspect of glam? Is there a glam journalism? What’s your idea of narcissistic and show off journalism? Are true and objectivity imperative?

I think the book makes it fairly clear I’m ambivalent about glam - loving the music and the sexual politics and the games with image and the rock-mythical exploits of these legendary figures, but troubled by the fact that so few of the glam stars seem to be admirable human beings and wondering about whether there are limits to the idea of continually pretending to be somebody you’re not.  They seem like lost people in lots of ways.

Psychologically, the quest for fame and some kind of fantasy glamour lifestyle almost always leads to spiritual damage. Bowie’s bi-polar pursuit of fame and then his retreat from it -  which he does over and over again, shows how addictive being in the public eye can be, and yet also how intolerable it is to stay in that limelight space. I find it very ironic that all through his period of fame Bowie was a professed Buddhist – I don’t know how he reconciled the self-abnegation of Eastern spirituality with the ego-magnification of being a stage performer and a superstar.

They have definitely been rock critics who have been like rock stars. They develop a persona, an alter-ego that they got lost in. Writing can be a performance. Certain rock critics have been taken very seriously, they have had fans, and people who wanted to be like them. It’s a small scale version of rock stardom. There’s a few that have been like that in person as well as in print – Nick Kent actually looked like a rock star, like he could have been in The Only Ones, standing in for Pete Perrett. And in fact he actually fronted a band of his own at one point, The Subterraneans.  As have quite a few other rock critics. Then you get the rock stars who actually did some rock writing in their early days – Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Bob Geldof, Morrissey.  It’s a different way of achieving public profile and showing off – not strutting onstage but making striking critical stances and grand claims.

Most “name” music journalists though tend to be less impressive in person than they are in print. But on the page they can conjure a sort of super-self, someone who seems charismatic or like an authority  figure.  Someone once said after a public appearance I did, that I didn’t seem like “Simon Reynolds” – which is to say I was more unassuming and mild and low-key in manner. That reminded me of the famous story about a woman who slept with the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, and when asked how he was, she said "he was fine, but he wasn’t Mick Jagger.”

 

4) As you expose in Shock and awe, glam goes way beyond music and reaches aesthetics movements as surrealism or decadentism. Does glam light a broader conflict between aestheticism and moralism in History? Who or what would be the current glitter icon?

That’s a big question, but yes, what recurs over and over is the fissure between aesthetics and ethics. You see it with someone like Bryan Ferry blithely saying admiring things about the Nazis’s sense of style – their great uniforms and architecture. That’s Ferry the terminal aesthete able to look at the form and not the content; the exterior surface of design rather than the intent and the consequences. What is cool and impressive and stunning in terms of rock music or rock theatrics does not translate into the real world and how people should treat each other. You see this most strikingly with rap today  - the energies and stances that make for the most compelling entertainment of our time involve personal characteristics (boasting, bullying, threatening, etc) that you would avoid completely in real life, and sentiments that you would find deplorable and ugly.  You wouldn’t want to be around these people; you wouldn’t want to be these people.

For examples of current glam or glitter icon, just look to someone utterly consumed with self-obsession and into playing endless games with their public image. You’re spoiled for choice! Could be Kanye West, could be Drake, could be Taylor Swift, could be Gaga or Beyonce.

 

5) Glam rock showed how artifice is more authentic than content or “political consciousness”, but at the same time you observe that Marc Bolan wouldn’t had been who he was without the X-Factor. Does that means that artifice is just a tangential truth?

I don’t think I ever argue that artifice is more authentic than content or political consciousness. It’s more the case that someone pretending to be something they aren’t   - a working class boy pretending to be an aristocrat, as with Bryan Ferry, or Bowie trying to be decadent or like some strange alien monster – is actually telling the truth about themselves: their innermost dreams and desires.  So I talk about Bolan’s glam as a “true lie”.

Equally, there is the argument that when musicians strive really strenuously to  be ordinary and “from the streets”, this supposed realism quickly become a new form of theatre. You see this most clearly with Bruce Springsteen, but also with a lot of punk groups:  it’s just a new code of “real-ness” that is being enacted, gestures and poses that are just as contrived and mannered and stylized.

6) How does music criticism remain in the era of graphic journalism decay? Are blogs and e-magazines the next step in critic writing? How does legitimation work in the 21st century? 

That’s three very big questions I can’t really hope to answer here. Blogs, sadly, seem to have been and gone. They still exist but their golden age was 2001-2005.  Interesting music commentary is fragmented across Facebook posts and tweets and message boards and so forth.  The magazines still exist but it’s unclear who is paying attention. So there is the absence of a central stage as there was in the days of Creem or Village Voice or Melody Maker or NME (when it was something important). And for a music critic to get up and make a performance, they do need to feel like they are stepping  onto a stage and they know that there is an audience there. Your rhetoric rises to the occasion. Increasingly to write now feels like you are talking into the void. 

7) Glitter seems superficial, but with artists like Bowie the movement reached a deep meaning. As you write in Shock and awe, he adopted Buddhism as a perspective of reality, in the Borges or Burroughs sense that everything is a lie and truth and identity are an invention. Shock… starts with a zen quotation. Is that truth the secret center of the book? 

I was struck by that quotation by D.T. Suzuki because of how clearly it spelled out the way that -  despite all the evidence of our senses, and what science and history tells us about the size of the universe and the length of time –  none of us can silence for long the clamorous demand that rises from deep within each of our souls that insists that “I am the centre of the universe! And I deserve MORE!”  In reality, we each of us are next to nothing in importance. That can be reassuring: at the cosmic scale, the difference between Shakespeare and myself shrinks to infinitesimal degree.  We are almost equally insignificant, me and William! Glam -  like all attempts to achieve fame or immortal prestige, which include sports and politics and literature - is a system of heroics,  means by which individuals assert their importance in the scheme of things. Which means believing in an illusion. Through reading Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death  I came to see all cultural endeavor  in this light, as self-heroics or an attempt to attach oneself to what he calls an “immortality project” – self-sacrifice on behalf of patriotism or a religious or political faith of some kind.  

It’s very striking to me that even as he was dying, Bowie spent an enormous amount of his remaining energy on his last aesthetic statements. Think of all the work and ideas and effort that went into Blackstar, into the videos for songs on that album, into the Lazarus theatre project, into the box set Nothing Has Changed. You know you’re heading for extinction but you’re determined to make your exit as elegant and immaculately executed as possible. That shows some last-ditch, right-to-the-end faith in the power of Art to ensure one’s immortality!   

8) How did you receive the Earthling-era Bowie, when he experimented with drum n’ bass? Did you have a new idea of him when you wrote the book? What’s the main Bowie legacy?

I liked Earthling, or rather the single “Little Wonder” at the time, and found it both charming that he would try to keep up with the cutting-edge of modern music (he would have been 50 at the time) and also thought it was rather well done. He’d managed to get the drum and bass sound and in interviews he seemed have done his research, referring to quite obscure, hardcore jungle labels like Kemet and Congo Natty.

I can’t really discuss here my take on Bowie – I wrote about a third of a book, 200-plus pages on this subject! But to keep it simple: he was addicted to fame and tried to kick it several times but never did; and he used the public sphere  - the world of media, publicity, rumor, gossip, rock critical discourse, image etc – as a stage, on which he dramatized himself through a series of roles. I was struck by how Los Angeles, and then Berlin, figured for him as dramatic backdrops for the transformations and identity games he was playing. To the point where you wondered if he really encountered the cities, or whether it was always mediated through his own needs as well as through those cities’s own images and myths and the received history of what they were in certain eras. Certainly there were other LA’s, other Berlins, that he could have found.

Legacy?  How can I answer that in an interview question! One of many legacies is a plague of artists who think they can – and think they should – keep changing images and styles.  But what was interesting when Bowie did it (and then only in the 1970s – the Eighties and Nineties, his constant changing is largely fruitless and desperate) doesn’t mean it’ll work for lesser talents. 

 

9) Latino music is everywhere now, from avant-garde Arca or Nicholas Jaar to commercial reggaeton and Despacito hit. How do you see that phenomenon, is it a late effect of world music or something different? What’s the role of rock now that guitar music is a minority’s liking?

I don’t really have a take on the spread of Latin American music, beyond the obvious comment that we’re all connected by the internet and the global village is a reality. You see the same thing with vogues for African styles of dance music like gqom or Afro-beats.

Rock is a minority taste now. I can’t think of a classic guitar-format band that is significant from the last 15 years. There are popular ones like Muse, and they are ones who survive and play big shows from the earlier eras, whether it’s Metallica or U2.  Even Radiohead really seem like a Nineties band .  I suppose Vampire Weekend are technically a guitar format band but the whole feel of their music is non-rock and their records are increasingly technologically facilitated.

“Rock” as a concept  - in the sense of “rock star” as unbridled excess and wild freedom – seems now to be the property of rap – hence Future calling himself “Future Hendrix”, or Rae Smemmurd saying they are “Black Beatles”.

10) The idea that we have in the newspaper is to make photos of you in a traditional alternative record shop in Cordoba. I’d like to know what do you think about the massive shutdown of record shops, how that changes music sharing and socialization. Is there any sense in being nostalgic? What happens when music becomes air-digital and “spotifiable”? 

There are still quite a lot of record shops in Los Angeles and other hip cities like New York and London. However they are more like hip boutiques than the old record stores I used to frequent, which were often dirty and shabby and cluttered with crap that you had to search through. Record stores now are thoroughly “curated” and they look clean and chic. And the records they stock are usually incredibly overpriced, whether it’s new vinyl or old second-hand records. It’s hard to find bargains anymore.

You can also find vinyl in unlikely places – like the megastore Whole Foods, where there’s a vinyl section right next to the handmade soap and Fair Trade organic coffee. It feels like vinyl has become another bourgeois luxury good.  I always wonder who are these people who are spending $30 on a single album? Or much more for the deluxe box sets.

I have a huge number of records and still occasionally pick up things when I find something that is cheap and unusual. But practically speaking I listen to music digitally – as files I’ve been sent, or have “acquired”, or I’ll go on YouTube, or I’ll use Spotify.  More often than not, even if I own the record or the CD, I will be in a hurry and won’t want to go to the bother of looking for it, so I will go straight to YouTube -  or I might even download it.  Digital is convenient and takes up less space and the logic of that tends to be all conquering. Which is why new vinyl releases nearly all come with download codes, because they know that in everyday life people will play the digital version. So the vinyl just sits there, as a sort of mute witness to a purchasing decision.

The implications of a dematerialized, non-tangible relationship with music commodities are quite huge – again I wrote a whole book that deals with some of these issues, Retromania, so I can’t really give a precis of those arguments. But I think it further reduces the sense of the act of listening as an occasion – digital flow is much more easy to interrupt, to pause, to rewind. I find that listening to an album or even a single song, I might do it a broken way, having to start again, or go back to a bit I missed – because I am distracted by an email or might find myself having to check what’s going on politically and my concentration is divided. So there are big downsides to listening to music through a device – a computer, a pad, a phone – that is connecting to everything else in the world at the same time: friends and family, news media, social media, etc etc. The sacred flow of the listening experience becomes less and less special: it is at once more and more “under your control” yet equally it’s a victim of outside media disruption. You listen distractedly while writing emails or comments on Facebook, reading tweets or stories about Trump – or even while searching for and downloading more music that you never get around to listening to.  Or while replying to interview questions!

Secret Thesis - 1980s Division (t'was Blitz to be alive in that dandy dawn)

There's an exhibition at the Design Museum in High Street Kensington dedicated to the New Romantics and the club scene of Blitz and Billy's and Le Beat Route. On a recent visit to London I checked it out. 

I thought it was well done, informative, and fun - worth a visit for sure (it's running until March 2026). 

But, but, overall it did rather confirm my Secret Thesis about glam, which applies equally to all the neo-glam echoes (New Romantics / Futurists, Romo, electroclash). 

Which is that the sonics are more enduring than the sartorials. 

(Okay that doesn't work with Romo but with the others, definitely).

Take the tunes by Visage that you can hear-see in the videoscreen area. 

Not only do "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" sound better than their videos look, but New Romantic music generally has aged much better than New Romantic style - judging by the clothes displayed on mannequins in this exhibition, or the graphic design of the magazine covers and spreads framed or glass-cased for your discerning eye's delectation.

As for the disparity between how Bowie and his accomplices sound on "Ashes To Ashes" and how he's togged up in the video... 

Bowie and choreographer Toni Basil hanging with his progeny, scouting for talent maybe for the "Ashes to Ashes" promo

Actually, in truth, the Visage promos weren't so bad - "Damned Don't Cry" especially is budget-Visconti stylish. And even "Vienna" by Ultravox, which I hadn't liked at the time, sounds and looks quite grand in its gauche way. 

But overall the gap between the visuals and the aurals reinforced my Undeclared Thesis. With glam and its descendants, the clothing / coiffure / cosmetics, once shocking or startling, very soon becomes: 

a/ dated 

b/ revealed - more often than not -  as garish, over-done, and even surprisingly tatty.

Almost timelessly elegant... almost... 

"I'm so weird"

That's the young Boy George I believe, looking gaunt, snapped for a Blitz Culture feature in ZG, the house journal of St Martin's College.

Now the clothes in the right-hand pic are quite cool in a mid-70s Doctor Who, "royal court of some distant alien civilization"way... 

Okay this is chic - both the sketches and the photo - almost worthy of Jean-Paul Goude

Again, this zany zany spread above reminds me of the "Slave to the Rhythm" video

Whereas - and granted I couldn't design my way out of paper bag -  this is a bit of a mess. I suppose it must have seemed like an energy-burst at the time. 

In contrast, this pair of flyers are just "huh?"

This is how you represent the super-stylists place-to-be-seen?

Again, was this really designed to make people think "this is where I want to be"?

"I'm in with the in-crowd"

This is striking, yes... and I covet the early iDs (and appreciate their 'street fashion' approach, kids caught on camera in the wild, self-fashioned looks rather than boutique-bought) and piningly wonder why no one has scanned all of them and put them out there on the internet commons (you can find the odd early-issue online, some incomplete issues and stray spreads... to buy the intact originals on Ebay or from a vintage magazine seller online would be astronomic) 

"& sweat is best" - I think "sex & sweat is best" was a slogan coined by iD co-founder Perry Haines... maybe adapted from  Sex Sweat and Blood, a 'new danceability' compilation, on which his track "What's Funk" featured

Of all the garments on display, this struck me as perhaps the most chic - I do like that little outline figure of a man near the hem, the diagonal double-lines, the belt, and just the nacreous gleam of the fabric (albeit something of a lobster-y hue). 

This though just seems a bit drab and boxy. 

 

I do like the sort of leafy fabric texture here

Whereas this just looks unflattering. If not for the quasi-military insignia on the collar and the arm, it looks a bit pants-suit executive woman. 

Sort of avant-frumpy

This one is from a spoof by the Not the Nine O' Clock News crew, but actually no worse than many of the things you might have seen in the clubs, or in the real-deal videos

"Nice Video, Shame About the Song"

Lufthansa Terminal, haha

This one is pretty cool as echt-New Wave graphix

Draft for Robert Elms sleeve note to Spandau Ballet's Journeys to Glory.

Now I had assumed the exhibition was in tandem with the Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s. But it seems the Design Museum have their own book / catalogue they are touting: We Can Be Heroes: The Blitz Club -  Where Style Was Born, co-authored by Blue Rondo man Chris Sullivan and Graham Smith (although there is an intro by Elms, along with no less than three forewords - by Boy George, Gary Kemp and Steve Strange (from beyond the grave??)).   As for the exhibition itself, that was curated by Michelle Thom.

Probably the best thing visually in there was a contemporary work - a simulation of what it would have been like to be amidst the bustling poseurs at Blitz, as the club gradually fills up. Improved mightily by its sort of faded-by-time, mists-of-memory effects.

There's a sort of doubling of retro, or of nostalgias, effect looking at this simulacrum because the original club Blitz was - immediately before being taken over the poseur posse - a 1940s / WW2 themed club, hence the propaganda poster decorations. 

I wonder if the proprietors straight up nicked the idea from the 1976 episode of Rock Follies that features a Forties revival club called The Blitz, with air raid wardens as waiters, rationing-style food (cold spam, potato pie, tripe and no onions), gas masks, etc, and in which the Little Ladies perform as The Victory Girls singing songs about the war effort and how Glenn Miller's plane has gone missing. From about  36.52 mins in.

A virtual Rusty Egan on the wheels of steel 

Unlike a similar diorama I saw of CBGBs in a New York museum that notably failed to reproduce even a scintilla of the squalor of the original venue, with the ersatz Blitz there were ash trays with actual cigarettes in them - well, one cigarette that had been lit but evidently not smoked. Still, points for effort on the historical veracity front. Even the most stylish of clubs were rank places, chokingly thick with cig smoke, drink spillage staining the tables and sticky on the floor....

Talking of simulations...

Blitzblogger!

They have this clever machine that takes your picture and makes you look like a New Romantic

In this rendering, I resemble more a Buggle.

The interloper!

After feeling my bitchery build up inside and form itself into a future blogpost as I walked through the exhibits, I was secretly touched to find myself included among the gift shop offerings, even though there's only one chapter in Rip It Up that touches on the New Romantics

Shock and Awe would have sat better in this context, in truth - despite its Secreted Thesis.

From 1978 - 

“A passion for the sham…. A sickness of pretence“

 

I have noted here before the low regard for plastic in post-WW2 highbrow culture - which was transvaluated into a positive by Warhol and other Pop Artists, and in turn espoused by Bowie as an anti-authenticity riff (his Young Americans mode of "plastic soul";  he also described Ziggy as a “plastic rocker”) Sort of “synthetic and proud of it, me!” “Guaranteed not the real thing”.

In this eerie 1962 Monitor short film "The Lonely Shore"- which imagines a team of researchers in the far future visiting the ruined wasteland of Britain and trying to reconstruct the lost civilization using archeological fragments and ancient artifacts whose function and meaning can only be speculated about -  the 1960s literati loathing for plastic is evident with comments about a curiously repulsive substance out of which many objects are fashioned. 

The artificial colours of these man-made materials are connected to a general critique of artifice, pretence, fantasy, and superficiality that is seen as the malaise that rotted out the Lost Civilization, which had waned through its loss of connection to the virile and vitalizing energies of Nature. 

Again, very par for the course for post-WW2 discontents against modernity, cutting across from highbrows like J.B. Priestley with his admass society critique, to the the counterculture of beats and hippies, with their Rousseau-esque "nostalgia of mud", earthen palette of brownish fabrics, additive-free macrobiotics etc

One of the slogans of King Mob - the UK cell of the Situationists - was “Smash the Plastic Death”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Ha, I mentioned J.B. Priestley and his "admass" idea, and here it's his missus, Jacquetta Hawkes, writing the text to "The Lonely Shore" 

As Holloway observes, she looks to have been a fascinating polymath. Amongst other things, she was an archaeologist, which fits with the framing of "The Lonely Shore", she was renowned for her book A Land, about British geology and archaeology. 

Anti-theatricality and politics (big balls)

This piece by Rick Wilson on Trump’s desecration of the White House is limned with theatrical metaphor

The East Wing Obscenity

Trump's Ballroom Is a Tumor On The People's House

There’s a way the light falls in the White House on Autumn afternoons in Washington, thinning with the waning of the year, slanting, a dull gold the color of old parchment, that makes you feel you’ve slipped into a country where history isn’t past tense but a persistent whisper.

In the sad obscenity of the moment, one of the White House’s most beautiful spaces has been amputated, torn away from time and memory in an act of vulgar insult. The East Wing is lost now.

You once walked from the Visitors’ Foyer toward the East Wing, and the world narrowed to marble, glass, and the muffled hush of the People’s House breathing, working, constant and quiet.

It wasn’t grand in the old European sense; it was American grand, which is to say an old beauty, balanced and proper, perhaps a little improvised, a touch austere in places, and deeply intentional. It had the moral clarity of a church vestibule and, if you watched carefully, the workaday charm of a school hallway after the bell.

Generations of tourists and schoolkids and staffers honored to work there scuffed these floors. Marine sentries stooped to pick up a stray mitten and hand it back to a child who, only much later, would understand where she was.

The White House was never meant to be a palace, nor the Oval Office a throne room.

The East Wing was the living artery of the White House, the First Lady’s offices, the Social Office, the machinery of ceremonial democracy where symbolism gets translated into human scale. It’s where letters are answered and tours are staged; where holiday cards go from proofs to envelopes; where military families with tight smiles and damp eyes wait to meet a president who will say, “We remember.”

It was the workbench of the republic’s rituals, the place that once transformed policy into hospitality, power into presence, memory into history.

The first thing worth knowing is that the East Wing wasn’t always there; that is no defense of its obscene desecration today. Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 renovation gave us colonnades that linked the Residence to the outer offices, a balancing act of symmetry and purpose.

But the East Wing as we know it rose in 1942, a wartime facade to conceal the excavation of a bomb shelter beneath the lawn. We built gentility over fear; a classic American move, the practical architecture under the poised exterior. We added a Family Theater, because even during the worst of it, movies shaped our culture, the flickering consolation of stories in good times and bad.

The wing became a geography of grace notes: the East Garden that would later be coaxed into elegance by Jacqueline Kennedy; the corridor where photographs line up like a roll call of American life; the rooms that belong to prior First Ladies’ staffs, the keepers of continuity, the stewards of tone and memory. The current First Lady does not live or work in the White House except for brief, transactional appearances, and barely deserves the title.

Jacqueline Kennedy took the White House and made it an American cultural project without turning it into a museum. Her work wasn’t just about tables and fabrics; it was about the idea that the place mattered, that a nation with the existential threat of the bomb and a tide of trouble on the horizon also deserved elegance and art. Lady Bird Johnson gave us wildflowers and the conviction that beauty is public policy, too. Pat Nixon added to the collection with a practical eye, because good stewardship is rarely fashionable but always necessary. Rosalynn Carter welded compassion to competence.

Nancy Reagan wrapped it all in some theater, yes, but with a director’s sharp instinct for scene and consequence. Barbara Bush, in those kinder, gentler moments, welcomed those points of light to the East Wing. Hillary Clinton put a policy-nerd backbone into it; Laura Bush, a librarian’s quiet welcome to young readers. Michelle Obama threw the doors wide, cultivating White House gardens and kids’ health programs.

In every iteration, the East Wing kept the faith. It was the quiet liturgy of the American idea: welcome, steward, improve, and hand off to the next generation a little better and richer than before.

Then came our age of desecration, where every beloved historic treasure becomes a prop and every prop an instrument of power.

Donald Trump didn’t just misunderstand the East Wing; he loathes the category of things it represents.

He walked into a cathedral with a bullhorn, spray paint, and faux gold leaf. He saw a place designed for civic honor, official tenderness, and historical respect and wondered why it didn’t look more like a casino atrium, a glittery Liberace dreamscape.

The East Wing, under Melania Trump, became a mood board for grievance. The holiday corridors turned into a fever dream of performative menace, a pomo aesthetic that screamed more threat than holiday spirit. The Social Office, traditionally where protocol breathes, is now one more wing of the Department of Trolling, a conveyor belt of grotesque events staged not as acts of national hospitality but as moments for the Dear Leader to caper while his minions offer proofs of loyalty.

The White House grounds have become a gimcrack stage set, a regional dinner theater of the absurd.

It’s American malaise dressed up as blaring pageant: a stripper-pole segment added to a ballet, a spiritual emptiness that comes when a man confuses himself with a country and then tries to decorate the void in more and more gold leaf and Temu-grade gradeau.

There was, and still is, something transcendent about the White House, something balanced and quiet and stately. These are things Trump cannot abide. His vulgarity and transgression are a message that dignity and duty are for suckers; ego, payoffs, gilt ornaments and gaudy filigree are the sacrament.

And so the East Wing must be destroyed to make way for a grotesque carbuncle, a vile big-box Barbie Dream House ballroom so Trump can pack more in more paying sycophants per square foot.

I heard a particularly dumb take yesterday on this moment: the argument that Apple and Google and OpenAI and the other beggars at Trump’s feet are responsible for this.

It was a shallow and puerile excuse. They are, at best, symptoms, enablers, hollow men uttering the mantra of “shareholder value” to themselves.

This destruction, like all his other acts, is the pure, sole, personal responsibility of Donald John Trump, America’s most vile and vulgar president. Blaming the marks and the accommodationists is like saying Vichy France was responsible for the Holocaust.

Trump is the leader of a movement and moment of American rot and corruption. He is its Alpha and its Omega. Don’t mistake the cause of this for the men bankrolling it. It is Trump’s hatred of all that came before him that caused this vile moment.

The past is not past, and a White House is not just stone, boards, plaster and lath; it’s a body keeping the memory of our nation in it’s corners and joints.

The East Wing had known wartime and peacetime, tragedy and grace. It absorbed the grief of widows after Dallas and the tight-lipped resilience after September 11. It felt the scuff of wheelchairs when George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the staccato footsteps of schoolchildren. It welcomed diplomats and astronauts, athletes and scholars. That corridor remembers the comfort of a First Lady’s hand on a Gold Star mother’s sleeve. It remembers the volunteer docents, each one a small-town mythologist speaking the country back to itself.

And it remembers, now, the clatter of a regime that replaced it all with set dressing for authoritarian kitsch.

The desecration is not a broken façade. It’s a broken covenant.

This is not about the wall being savaged by demolition machines.

It’s about what the East Wing is supposed to accomplish in the American psyche. The West Wing, prior to this fallen era, was where decisions were forged under terrible pressure, the grim and necessary mechanics of governance. The East Wing is where the republic breathes out, where we make meaning beyond politics, show mercy, and demonstrate that democracy can have manners.

It’s the wing that says, “We remember you,” to the bereaved and “We see you,” to the overlooked. It was, in a functional theology of civic life, the chapel. We do not need our leaders to be saints, but we are right to insist they treat the people’s house with respect.

Trump’s desecrations go far beyond today, both subtle and loud. Subtle in the way any rot is: the corruption, the cruelty, the menace are a slow corrosion; you don’t notice the termites until the balustrade gives way. Loud in the way his grunting audience demanded: using the People’s House to stage partisan spectacle, turning the staff into actors in his America’s Most Vulgar reality show, collapsing the reverence due to shared spaces into a personal pageant.

If you strip the East Wing to install a grotesque, asymmetric hall to the Dear Leader, you erase its purpose. You erase our past, our shared legacies, our sacred spaces.

What happens to us when we allow our history and monuments to be torn down for ego and avarice? The damage is not contained to a lost facade or a destroyed portico, to a paint chip or an upholstery swatch.

It seeps into memory. The child who saw the White House at Christmastime is supposed to carry home the stubborn belief that the country can be beautiful and kind, and that she could work in that Oval Office one day. She is not supposed to carry home a sense that she crossed the threshold of a cult.

The East Wing is where we perform the rituals that bind an unruly republic: Easter Egg Rolls and Gold Star receptions, diplomatic receptions and dinners, the polite genius of state arrival ceremonies where we say to allies and rivals alike: this is who we are.

Protocol and memory that honor the past are the poetry of self-government. They’re the choreography of mutual respect. When you treat them as costume jewelry, they break.

I know the retort: “It’s just a ballroom; stop being dramatic.” But a nation is a set of stories told into objects. The chair at the table makes a claim. The place card makes a promise. The door held open at the exact right moment says, “We honor your dignity,” and the presence of a child at a ceremony says, “This doesn’t end with us.”

The East Wing was the place where that quiet language is spoken. Burn the dictionary and you’ll still have words, but you won’t have meaning.

Rick Wilson, the ad guy in me, will tell you optics matter because they encode values. Rick Wilson, the citizen, will tell you that destroying the East Wing signals something more dangerous than bad taste and vulgar transgression: a willingness to privatize the public sacred.

The slow vandalism of norms doesn’t begin with a coup; it begins with sneer quotes around the words “tradition” and “decorum.” Treat the People’s House like a personal club where you can extract tribute from lobbyists and corporate titans and you prepare the country to accept government as a private franchise.

Desecration begets a diminished nation, which begets indifference. And indifference is the graveyard of republics.

This is not nostalgia, for nostalgia is a history without edges or subtlety. It is an insistence that the brief occupants of the White House do not own it, do not have the right to destroy it, do not define it for all time.

The Truman reconstruction taught us that a beautiful facade can hide a collapsing interior; he gutted the place and rebuilt it so the metaphor wouldn’t swallow the building whole. That’s what we need now, again, not gilt to cover Trump’s guilt, not a temple to his greed and ego, but the hard, unglamorous carpentry of a national restoration.

We don’t need a palace. We need a People’s House that remembers what it’s for.

It will require one more turn of destruction, but it’s a demolition that puts us back on the path to our true selves as a nation.

Picture, then, the moment he is gone.

Again, the White House lawn echoes with construction machinery, removing the gaudy tumor of his ballroom, stripping it to the bare ground in a swift and certain way. It was a shabby thing, built cheap and fast, a strip-mall junk building covered in faux marble, a cheap imitation of European grandeur at odds with American dignity.

The day breaks on that new era, and earth movers fire up at the same moment and rip out the disco patio he installed in the Rose Garden. The stones he laid down are crushed, chipped to dust, not a sign of them left for a cult to claim from a landfill.

Picture the gardeners and groundskeepers, eager and ready to replant those rose bushes again, restoring one quiet place that belongs on those sacred 18 acres, not on the patio of Mar-a-Lago. Their hands and tools turn the soil, restoring life and dignity to a small space redolent with history.

Picture the careful work, the painstaking restoration of the East Wing and its facade beginning a few days later, an army of skilled craftsmen honored to work old magic with old tools to remake a lost space, guided by photos and plans, by memory and heart.

Picture the lights rising slowly in the East Wing at its re-dedication, the hush returning.

Picture a young staffer carrying a stack of envelopes for condolence letters, setting them gently on a desk polished by other hands, other years. Picture a volunteer pinning on a name tag and taking her place by the portrait of a First Lady who looks back with steady eyes.

Picture a Marine holding a door. Picture a child pressing a nose to the glass at the Colonnade and seeing the reflection of her own face and something beyond it: the outline of a country that belongs to her not because she is rich or loud but because she is here, because we said she belonged.

That is the opposite of desecration. It is restoration. It is dignity. It is respect.

That is the point of those 18 acres on Pennsylvania Avenue.

We must refuse to hand it over to the brutalists of spectacle, the partisans who believe quiet dignity and careful hospitality are weakness and that gaudy, transactional corruption is a national sacrament. We must steel ourselves against the performative contempt that turns civic life into pro-wrestling.

We must say it, constantly and stubbornly, that what happens in those rooms is not vanity; it is pedagogy. We teach ourselves how to be a country there.

In the long American argument between spectacle and substance, the East Wing has always taken the side of substance, by way of the quiet American display of proper humility and kindness.

It was the part of the house that said the loudest thing in the softest voice: this is yours.

Desecration tries to make that voice say, “This is his.”