A visit to the White House - The Jewish Standard

A few weeks ago, our great-grandson Noam visited the White House with his third-grade class from a DC area Jewish day school. The kids were all dressed up, as befitting a special event in their lives. Noam, who is more comfortable in his baseball team uniform, wore a suit and tie. It was a proud moment, and I’m sure he and his classmates will never forget it.

But for me, there is so much in that house that I wouldn’t have wanted him to see. My pride in Noam is undiminished, and his name fits him so well. He is a pleasant young man. But the White House today is not a reflection of prestige or propriety. Or pleasantness! Unfortunately!

It all brought me back to my days as a third-grade teacher at a Newark public school in the 1960s. Some of the older teachers, much older than me, told me that many of the kids, when those teachers themselves were young, were brought to school in chauffeur-driven limousines. The school had been built in 1880 and already was not far from its centennial when I arrived. Not much had been done to modernize it in the ensuing years, and the student population had changed. It was now a school for struggling impoverished families, often forgotten by the city’s government.

Nonetheless, we teachers worked hard and did our very best. One area that our principal stressed was our bulletin boards. He felt that anyone entering the school should be surrounded by joyous, colorful displays that would foster enthusiasm in pupils and visitors alike. It was not an area that was typically stressed elsewhere, but I agreed that it was a valiant effort to dress up a decaying building, with its often neglected children. And so we carried on, and we always attempted to make the boards perfect. That included thematically and, especially, grammatically. Spelling mattered. So did proper capitalization. A lot!

I especially remember my own favorite bulletin board. It was for September and I had each child bring in a personal photo, taken annually by the school. I fabricated a paper window and captioned it in large lower-case letters. The leaves of autumn drifted by my window. The word autumn was not capitalized. Nor should it have been. After all, I was responsible for teaching these children and the best way was, and always is, by example!

Why do I tell you this, and what is the connection to the White House?

In these years of Trump’s second term, the White House has been subject to abuse after abuse. The East Wing was summarily torn down without any proper authorization, in order to create a multimillion-dollar ballroom that you and I, who are paying for it, despite the president’s fallacious claims that it will be paid for by donors, will never be invited to visit. Personally, I never felt deprived or any less of an American because the ballroom didn’t exist. I was not embarrassed at all by this lack. Were you? I don’t know whether Noam and his schoolmates saw the debris left behind as the approval for the ballroom languishes. It’s a sore sight.

And speaking of sore sights, Trump hastened to redo the capital’s reflecting pool to the tune of close to $15,000,000, using a no-bid non-competitive contractor. Mother Nature’s revenge is an unprecedented overgrowth of algae turning the water green and peeling the newly painted pool walls. How many additional millions will be required to ameliorate this problem? The new plan is to do it all over again. This might be funny, but it isn’t. Not when the average American is paying $4 for a gallon of gas. Now our hard-earned money has to pay yet again for another Trump project submerged and drowning in sleaze!

And just last week, hopefully after Noam’s school trip, the lawn of the White House was, unbelievably, host to an enormous, gaudy, structure that became a setting for a cage match, which I learned is a wrestling match. A bloody one. If it reminds you of gladiators, you’re right on target.

Friends, there is low class, and then there is simply no class. In Yiddish it would have been called prost. This tasteless monstrosity cost our government untold millions while it desecrated the dignity of the residence. So, while we the people are shelling out enormous amounts of money for our daily bread, our president is exercising his power by creating totally unwarranted and decadent expenses, for which we are the suckers who pay.

But what does this have to do with the leaves, the autumn leaves?

Much of it is about capitalization. Much of it is about unsuitable verbiage. Our president likes to tell us he went to an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania. He clearly must have missed those classes that featured grammar and spelling. The five Jewish day school graduates in our family who attended Penn all mastered those areas, even before they finished elementary school. But you really must read Trump’s writing to see his total incompetence with written words. It is truly beyond belief. After all, the White House must have some literate employees who can proofread the president’s work.

There is a section in the White House, a well-traveled hallway near the Rose Garden, that features portraits of every past president of the United States. Noam was there, so I assume it’s part of the typical WH tour. Trump has composed many of the lengthy captions that accompany the pictures. To call his writing undignified is really to give it some shred of dignity that it doesn’t deserve. My bulletin boards when I taught third grade would have had to be removed if they followed Trump’s pattern. This area of the building is essentially a museum. Words are incorrectly capitalized, even though they are mid-sentence and not proper nouns. These are a random trifling few examples of many such words: Weaponization, Law Enforcement, Popular Vote, Big, Cities, Farmers, Inflation, Energy. No sense of grammatical propriety exists. In a lifetime of visiting museums I can not recall ever noting such a callous and inappropriate misuse of the English language.

But then there’s the content. There is no photo of Joseph Biden Jr. at all. Instead, there is a picture of an autopen and the following words: Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Etc! (Note: incorrect capitalization is Trump’s, not mine). Trump seems to have had no problem signing the inept Iran deal agreement with his own autopen.

That level of content, mostly applicable to the more modern presidents, exists in many other lengthy captions. What should have been written by bonafide historians, and certainly proofed by professional editors, is instead a national disgrace. I would hope that Noam and his fellow third-graders did not witness such abuse of our language by our president.

One can only wonder if this level of inattentiveness to detail exists in the White House, what can it be elsewhere in our government? In our vaccines and public health? In our military preparedness? In our courts? In our FBI? And if you really want to chuckle, what about the education of our children? If abuses like this are not a huge embarrassment to our nation, then there is simply no hope.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com.

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