Man vowing to save his name on Kennedy Center photographed holding plans titled 'Kennedy Center DEMOLITION.'

…(cont) On August 29, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio board member who has already beaten back one round of the administration's proposed changes in court, said the litigation might yet stand between the wrecking ball and the building. "Who's going to stop them?" she asked, and answered her own question with a lawsuit.

Wednesday night settled it a different way. A photographer working outside the plane caught the president aboard Air Force One, reading a placard through the little window. Not a renovation schedule. Not a naming-rights memo. A placard that said, in full, "Kennedy Center DEMOLITION" — no name on it anywhere, no contingency, no if-the-courts-allow. Three weeks of conditional grammar, gone in one exposure. The building did not get an "if."

Preceded in death, then, by the renovation, which turns out never to have been a separate thing from the demolition — just its outdoor voice, its public-facing nickname. Survived by the lawsuit, by Beatty's seat on the board, and by a public that spent three weeks arguing over whose name goes on a building whose own blueprint already had a different word printed across it.

That is malarkey dressed up as urban planning, and I do not say so lightly at my age. The whippersnappers in this trade like to call it messaging. I call it a placard on a plane, photographed sideways through glass nobody remembered to cover.

In lieu of flowers, the administration might simply release the demolition filing itself — the real one, not the one glimpsed at an angle through aircraft window — so the public can read plainly what the president was already reading.