In the column Straight Nonsense, columnist Moises Mendez II takes a queer eye to the insanity of straight culture.
For the past couple of days, I've been telling my friends that I wish I were stupid. I wish I weren't cursed with an aptitude for reading comprehension and general knowledge because then things like President Donald Trump adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would make sense.
Now, the building is has been renamed the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, for some reason. He hasn't done anything substantial to deserve this distinction — other than stick a bunch of loyalists on the recently gutted board of trustees to make something like this happen, and worst of all, he installed the worst gay in American politics, Richard Grennell, as the president and interim executive director for America's cultural center.
If I had worms for brains, I would be able to take the blatant lies he spews about how he "saved" the building because, before he assumed office, the center was in "such bad shape, physically, financially, and every other way" as he puts it. Did he provide any evidence to support these statements? No, because why would he need to? Nor did he get the proper approval to make this change officially.
Being that the center was legally recognized as a memorial to the late President Kennedy in 1964, just a year after his assassination, it seems Trump would need Congressional approval to make this change legal. But who needs laws and the correct path when you have no regard for anyone other than yourself?
His decision seems to have come as a shock to the Kennedy family, many of whom have spoken out against the decision on social media. Maria Shriver, JFK's niece, uploaded a post to X that reads: "Adding your name to a memorial already named in honor of a great man doesn’t make you a great man. Quite the contrary." She continued, "Putting your name on top of someone else’s doesn’t mean that people will speak of you in the same breath as the other man. Putting your name above another man’s name on his existing memorial… What is that about? Truly?"
Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy (not to be confused with the ill-informed director of the United States Department of Health and Human Services), also posted on X and expressed her disappointment with the move. "Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in? Applying for my carpenter’s card today, so it’ll be a union job!!!"
If I had Swiss-cheese holes in my brain, I would think that Trump forcing his way into America's most important cultural center was a smart move because then we could finally give Kid Rock the Kennedy Center honor he'd been robbed of for years. Who cares about Tina Turner, Carole King, Barbra Streisand, and Dionne Warwick receiving this honor as some of the greatest songwriters and performers of our lifetime? We need real American music back in our nation's capital (is something I would say if I opted out of using my brain and asked Elon Musk's Grok what "good" music is).
According to the Washington Post, ticket sales are "the worst they’ve been in years" since Trump took office again. Yay! Who needs ticket sales anyway? It's actually great that "tens of thousands of seats have been left empty" because, as I wrote in my most recent column, theater etiquette has gone out the window, so at least I won't be accosted by the presence of other patrons.
I desperately want to be stupid so that I can make sense of what is going on in this country. Every day feels like the worst-case scenario playing on a loop. I truly want to understand what millions of people who voted for this egotistical failure of a president who has only made life worse by stoking fear with deploying the National Guard into major metropolitan cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, or the unnecessarily brutal force of ICE that's caused panic amongst almost everyone in my life. I pray that one day I'll be dumb enough to understand what's going on in this country because common sense, empathy, tact, and intelligence don't mean anything in the face of inscrutable ignorance.
Moises Mendez II is a staff writer at Out magazine. Follow him on Instagram @moisesfenty.
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