Facing devastating reviews from architectural theorists who found the skeletal steel structure terribly pedestrian, President Donald Trump assured the nation on Tuesday that his new White House UFC arena will eventually require the complete and violent reorganization of the capital’s municipal water supply. The administration promised that future mixed martial arts broadcasts will abandon half-measures and commit to the wholesale subjugation of Washington's zoning grid.
WASHINGTON—One might have hoped that the administration, in erecting an octagonal wire-mesh cage upon the very soil where the republican Easter egg roll once frolicked, would grasp the essential spatial dialectic of imperial spectacle; alas, Paramount’s broadcast of UFC Freedom 250 currently offers merely the aesthetic signifiers of the Colosseum without the foundational, systemic subjugation of the surrounding urban topography. It is a failure of civic vision that borders on the tragic. As Justus Lipsius so painstakingly delineated in his 1584 treatise De Amphitheatro—a text I suppose one cannot expect the current Presidential cabinet to have internalized, given their apparent struggles with basic object permanence—the true Roman ludus was not merely a venue for concussive trauma, but a sprawling, bureaucratic nexus that dictated the flow of local aqueducts, the codification of penal law, and the very distribution of grain.
To witness the President perched in his arena-level pulvinar, flanked by mere senators rather than the requisite six Vestal Virgins, is to endure a pastiche so toothless it evokes not the terrifying, state-sanctioned majesty of Juvenal’s Satires, but rather the frantic, directionless kineticism of the 2006 cinematic masterwork The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The tragedy here is not one of mere excess—a vulgar complaint championed by those who still cling to the quaint, mid-century delusion of a functioning republic—but rather a catastrophic failure of infrastructural nerve. If one is to construct a towering steel dome over the executive branch for the express purpose of streaming mixed martial arts to the masses, one must possess the institutional fortitude to permanently rezone the adjacent neighborhoods into subterranean holding pens for exotic beasts.
We hear the concerns of the global semiotics community, and I can promise you that by UFC 251, we will have successfully diverted the Potomac River to flood the Octagon for an authentic naval battle.
While the administration’s belated promise to reshape the capital's municipal plumbing offers a modicum of solace to the educated observer, one remains acutely aware of the missed opportunity; civilization's literary inheritance demands more than half-measures, and until the losers of the preliminary bouts are legally classified as property of the state to maintain the city's sewage infrastructure, the Emperor will truly have no ludus magnus.