Please Contribute Generously To My Museum About How Much I Hate You
It sucks. It’s great, but it sucks.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library — that has no collections and isn’t at all a library, which is turning into a theme — is just absolutely gorgeous to look at, inside and out. It blends into the North Dakota badlands, and sends visitors out on a path that connects with the landscape. I love it. The building and grounds are a brilliant accomplishment.
Also, I hate it, and it was almost fatally irritating.
Whole very pretty rooms about all of this: the inherent greed and depravity of private enterprise, the inherent virtue of government, the deep meaning of a life spent in government jobs, the obvious need for a giant central government to make America more fair. A bunch of this reflects what Teddy Roosevelt thought and did, but a bunch of it goes waaaaay beyond him. It’s all infected with the interpretive disease of presentism, speaking in fluent Elizabethwarrenese. Theodore Roosevelt was a passionate advocate for social justice who wanted corporations to pay their fair share, and he spent his political career arguing over virtuous and bold ideas that were unfortunately ahead of their time.
The library has sponsored a podcast as they built the place and got ready to open it, and the guests were people like Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol. (Go ahead, guess what Liz Cheney talked about.) So I guess I’m not enormously surprised.
The place is magnificent, so the message is especially depressing. More details and photos at the Federalist. Note especially what they do with Roosevelt’s views of immigration.
But here’s my favorite detail: A big new museum about a bold progressive reformer spending his virtuous life fighting the greed and darkness of private corporations…
…was funded by guess who. And so, see this very clearly, you spend a couple hours taking in a bunch of exhibits about the evils of capitalism and the sick greed of corporations, and then you go out to take in the views on the…
…ConocoPhillips Terrace.
Corporations are evil, brought to you by the evil corporations. See also.
We condemn this sick evil, and we thank the sick evil for paying for us to condemn them. How remarkably tedious our cultural reflexes have become: the automaticity of the condemnation of the thing that pays the bills and keeps the lights on. I hate it, give me money.
Boring, but apparently the grooves are carved too deep to stop it.
So TR's was built by corporations he hated, and O's is built for people he hates...there's a certain degree of symmetry, I guess.
It reminds me of the story of the teenager who says to her mother, “I hate you and want you out of my life, but first can you take Stephanie and me to the mall?” Too many American adults think and act like teenagers. In other words, they are self-indulgent and unserious, think they know more than they do, and have no judgment.