The East Wing Obscenity
Rick Wilson
There’s a way the light falls in the White House on autumn afternoons in Washington, thinning with the waning of the year, slanting, a dull gold the color of old parchment, that makes you feel you’ve slipped into a country where history isn’t past tense but a persistent whisper.
In the sad obscenity of the moment, one of the White House’s most beautiful spaces has been amputated, torn away from time and memory in an act of vulgar insult. The East Wing is lost now.
You once walked from the Visitors’ Foyer toward the East Wing, and the world narrowed to marble, glass, and the muffled hush of the People’s House breathing, working, constant and quiet.
It wasn’t grand in the old European sense; it was American grand, which is to say an old beauty, balanced and proper, perhaps a little improvised, a touch austere in places, and deeply intentional. It had the moral clarity of a church vestibule and, if you watched carefully, the workaday charm of a school hallway after the bell.
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