By any other name

Melania Trump has not appeared on the cover of Vogue or any other major fashion magazine in the eight years since she first became first lady. Every other president's wife since Herbert Hoover has. She has been excluded for one reason only. 

The wrong one.

A Republican Congress member from Idaho, Mike Simpson, tried to shoehorn into a massive federal spending bill, the renaming of the Washington National Opera of the Kennedy Center to become the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House for one reason only.

The wrong one.

Neither action has anything to do with Melania Trump. It's all about her marital vows. Bitter antagonists of her husband want to punish her for guilt by conjugality. They'd have no objection otherwise. She should be in magazines because of her resume. She should not be the namesake of an opera house.

But sycophants of her husband, knowing he'll notice, want to score points with him.

Stadiums, opera houses, concert halls,  sports arenas, museums, other cultural institutions and landmarks of infrastructure should never be named for narcissistic philanthropists, corporations or political leaders, unless their contributions are inextricably linked. Such honors are not auctions and should never be purchasable by the highest bidder.

In professional sports we have, for instance, Loan Depot Park, Crypto Park.com Arena, Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse and Lucas Oil Stadium. Some venues should be grandfathered in, and their names retained. Wrigley Field has a hallowed history beyond chewing gum. Dodger Stadium, though not objectionable, might become Branch Rickey Stadium, for the venerable legacy of the Dodger executive who courageously and at personal risk, smashed the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.

Carnegie Hall was named for the guy who said, "He who dies rich, dies disgraced," so it can stay as is, even if Elon Musk attempts a hostile takeover as a revitalized DOGE Coliseum.

David Geffen Hall is the home of the New York Philharmonic. It's named for a person who can't distinguish beet from Beethoven. He's a "media proprietor" near the peak of Filthy Lucre Mountain, known as the Forbes' list of the wealthiest Americans. The hall should instead be named for Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington or another great artist who was a New Yorker, or left the indelible mark of their genius here.

Nobody gets a major league contract or a Wagnerian role because of who their daddy is, or how much they donated for signage. The Tappan Zee Bridge, recalling its Native-American and Dutch associations, should stand, but not its renaming by a sitting governor as a vanity trophy to glorify his pop. 

What next: The Survey Monkey Institute for Palliative Care? The Roto-Rooter Academy of Dramatic Art?

It's become passé and considered petty to even consider whether an honor has been earned or not. Often it is bestowed for expediency, to open doors, gain footholds, make connections. People are getting PhDs in areas in which they lack a first-grader's expertise.

Ulterior motives outrank core principles any day as prime movers of foreign policy. President of France Emmanuel Macron, being satisfied that the names of Parisian stadiums are already copacetic, has set his sights on granting diplomatic recognition to the boundaryless non-country nation of Palestine.

I am not weighing in on the Israel-Palestine conflict, even if I had a pair of super-insulated gloves to protect me from the third rail of controversial anguish. The purpose of this commentary is solely to illustrate that actions are often taken in the name of ideals or conviction for reasons that belie their stated purpose. 

It is undeniable that anti-Zionism doesn't axiomatically equate with antisemitism, although they frequently co-habit. France has a particularly checkered history, though, quite apart from the ongoing Middle East conflagration. Perhaps they should call ZipRecruiter and hire a public relations team to swat in partnership with historical revisionists. They'll need to work their tails off.

During the Second World War, Paris was the most plum deployment for Nazi soldiers, as they could hang out in cafes and bistros while a sizable number of the occupied nation's citizens participated ungrudgingly in the dirty work or deportation. Dreyfus and Drancy are two incriminating pillars of France's fallacious and shaky motto "liberty, equality, fraternity."

It's taken more than its share of curtain calls on the stage located within the Theater of the Absurd.

France likes to be seen as the standard-bearer among nations where noble principles are concerned,  and is preoccupied with being in the pole position in the global race among countries of conscience. But its own bloody chronicles of colonialism in Africa and Asia suggests its penchant for taking the high ground on public debates about international law does not preclude it taking the low road in its own affairs. 

Gross simplification can be an instrument of both clarification and slander. 

Recognizing a Palestinian state does not mean that France is antisemitic. That would be borne out by the United Nations, though they have run out of their premium brand stock of field-testing  kits. 

I don't seek to delegitimize their initiative, though I suspect the foundation of its cry for self-determination is, at least in part, a tactical accommodation meant to distract increasingly impatient French minority group members from the social and economic paralysis they suffer because of failed leadership at home.

The most synthetic of all forms of artificial intelligence must be faith in humanity. Even as a kid, that would have been my take on life. That's why my parents called me "cheerful little earful." 

But does such a skeptical outlook impact mental health? Pause the Jeffrey Epstein strobe light for a bit and cringe at this illuminating data collected by the Tufts University Cooperative Election Study a few years ago.

According to their statistical analysis, 45 percent of self-identifying "liberals" said that their mental health was "poor.” Amongst "conservatives," the figure was 19 percent. 

What is "excellent mental health"? It means different things to different people and is easier described than defined, but 51 percent of "conservatives" lay claim to it, yet only 21 percent of "liberals" would so rate themselves.

Perhaps this can be partially explained by the fact that blindness to reality and insensitivity to one's powerlessness over human suffering somehow equates with optimism and clears the mind of the cobwebs of despair. 

Maybe people who tend to be more self-centered are more easily fooled. And since "liberal" and "conservative" are words most commonly attached in common parlance to political mindsets, they don't take into account what is buried in the recesses of our subconsciousness or is driven by overbearing biochemistry.

But a columnist for the New York Post wraps it up for us. She says that "conservatives promote family and religious values and pro-community messaging,” and "the right traditionally espouses pull yourself up by the bootstraps messaging-teaching people they can rely on their hard work to get by," whereas "the libs aren't fans" of self-reliance.

Her warped orientation is shared by a co-author of "The Coddling of the American Mind,” who treats the left, progressives and liberals as synonymous, rather than as intimate allies, claiming that "with (their) emphasis on victimhood and vulnerability to impersonal forces ... they externalize their locus of control.”

Apparently, this triggers a morbid penchant for social justice. Something to think about during these "dog days of summer"? 

Maybe those days need to be renamed also.