Trump demands Kennedy Center take his name; the Kennedy Center Honors leaves the building instead.

…(cont) Ten days later, on September 15, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled for the second time that the board's effort to put the president's name back on the building was unlawful, call it recognition or call it anything else. The president, who has spent nearly a year on the renaming, called the judge "hostile and conflicted" and declared the Center "destined to doom." The next day, after a rally in North Carolina, a photographer caught him on Air Force One studying a printout that appeared to read "Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED."

By September 16, a niece of the man the Center is named for was calling the fight "hostage-taking." The board had, in fact, voted to close it.

And on October 2, the Honors — the program, not the plaque — left. Not demolished, not renamed, just relocated, the ceremony's first address change since Jimmy Carter was president, to an arena best known for hockey.

Born 1978, the Kennedy Center Honors. Survived by the Kennedy Center, which still stands, still bears the name it was built with, and will not, this December, host the one night a year built to bear it. Preceded in death, perhaps, by the idea that an institution's name and its function might remain under the same roof.

The building is not destroyed. The sign is not changed. The hole in the ceiling is still, as far as the record shows, a hole. What left was simpler and smaller than a demolition: an audience, a date, a reason to walk through those particular doors in December. Hogwash is the word for calling that nothing.

In lieu of flowers, fund the renovation the storm asked for in September, before the next storm asks again.