Perhaps, like me, you are in the 1.7% of the population who have seen mixed martial arts fighting in the past 12 months. I’ve never watched a full bout, probably no more than a minute at any one time, and usually less. I turn away in horror and disgust.
It occasionally pops up on my X feed and takes only a few seconds to show that it is presenting a loathsome spectacle of intense vulgarity. It celebrates some of the ugliest traits in human character — a preening, self-admiring strutting braggadocio, contempt for rivals, and merciless violence. That the fighters themselves are skilled, strong, quick, and athletic is of secondary importance and does not make up for the moral deficiency of the sport.
It is a repudiation of civilization. Men and some women, many disfigured with unsightly tattoos as though they belonged to crime gangs, meet in a cage, appropriate for this bestial sport, and beat each other until bloody or unconscious. Before they start pounding, they face each other a few inches apart, sneering or expressing with aggressive impassivity their intention of committing violence so extreme that in other circumstances it would be an imprisonable offense.
Unlike boxing, fighting does not stop when a fighter is knocked down — his opponent jumps on him and lashes at him while he is in no position to defend himself. It used to be a maxim of civilized conduct that you did not hit a man when he was down. No longer. It is sickening.
This is what President Donald Trump brought to the White House over the weekend to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and his own 80th.
U.S. military bands in their uniformed and disciplined dignity were deployed at the Lincoln Memorial, where President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address is carved into the marble, calling on the nation to proceed “with malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” Here, in a building that also memorializes the battle for the emancipation of slaves in which half a million people died, was a floodlit ceremony in which MMA fighters descended the steps and were introduced — one of them as the “sugar show” — and lionized by an announcer with a pompous, over-excited voice.
At the White House on Sunday evening, the armed forces were again lonely representatives of a dignified bygone age, and there was a customarily impressive military flyover. But then we got down to the heart of the entertainment, and fighters praised the president for “having the balls to put some s*** like this on.” All the while, the classical south face of the White House was a background rebuke to the bombast and bread and circuses.
The fight cage and surrounding scaffolding, with signs reading “UFC Freedom 250” emblazoned in red, juxtaposed against Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s elegant architecture, implicitly commented, “Look at what we’ve become.”
This desecration of the executive mansion was bigger and more brazen than any before, but let no one think this is the first time the White House has been prostituted by its elected occupier. The debasement we witnessed over the weekend was more hyped but certainly no more unsuitable than, for example, the decking out of the White House by former President Joe Biden to celebrate transgenderism. For Pride Month in 2023, the center of the South Portico was draped in a huge LGBT flag, while the national flag was relegated to either side, where it stood guard over a highly controversial and increasingly discredited political movement. Those invited behaved as grossly as the martial arts fighters — a biologically male trans activist stripped his top off to display surgically attached breasts and was duly condemned.
Eight years before that, in 2015, then-President Barack Obama lit the White House in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that gay marriage was a constitutional right. The illumination was almost a gloating boast from the president that he had been cynically lying during his election campaign when he had claimed to believe in the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.
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The lighting of the White House was like today’s public prayers of Muslims in the West, an assertion of domination, a political display to declare “we are on the right side of history,” a deliberate stuffing of defeat into the faces of those who sincerely and decently argued that one of the most important institutions of civilized humanity should be preserved in the form it had taken for countless generations.
After the noisome practices of the Clinton White House, George W. Bush ran on a promise “to restore honor and dignity to the White House.” It was much needed then. It has been much needed, on and off, for a long time. It is much needed now.