Name-Changer Gets the Boot from JFK Memorial Center - Part Three

In the wake of US Federal Court Judge Christopher Cooper’s bold and unimpeachably righteous order for the prompt removal of the name of President Donald John Trump from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, much better known abbreviationally as The Kennedy Center, the tragically and the brutally slain President’s niece, by his sister Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver, namely, Maria Kennedy Shriver, was widely reported to have expressed profound gratitude to Judge Cooper and euphorically celebrated the judicial blockage of this Trumpian desecration of the globally renowned Kennedy Monument as: “A most appropriate birthday gift” in commemoration of the 109th Birthday Anniversary of President Kennedy, her well-beloved elder uncle (See The Independent 5/30/26).

Even so, the apparent gut reaction of the former wife of California’s Ex-Governor, Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger, could at best be soberly and solemnly described as “a gross understatement.” For the overwhelming majority of us bona fide Americans, both native-born Americans like my three young adult children, as well as Naturalized American Citizens like Yours Truly, the patently desecration of the integrity of the Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts could not have constituted anything less than what literally amounted to an early morning defecation at the doorstep of St. Peter’s Cathedral at The Vatican.

One can only hope that this veritable act of unspeakable sacrilege marks the very last time that this globally infamous scofflaw and pathologically belligerent nihilist will attempt to extent such deliberately calculated madness - as Nigeria’s Nobel Literature Prize Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, would have very felicitously put it (See Professor Soyinka’s dramaturgical classic titled “Madmen and Specialists”) - to such even more revered iconic memorials as The Washington Monument and The Lincoln Memorial, among the plethora of landmarks and other monuments erected to canonize the visionary and the phenomenal achievements of both the Founding Fathers and the Founding Mothers of the United States of America, from diverse shades of backgrounds including creeds, ethnicities and race.

For the nonce, however, one wonders why it had to take Judge Christopher Cooper’s acute sense of nonpartisan patriotism and civic responsibility to remind the entire constabulary of the august institutional establishment of Capitol Hill, that is, the United States Congress, that it owed The Sovereign Democratic Republic of the United States of America the bounden obligation of jealously ensuring and guarding against such insufferable sacrilege by a multiple criminally indicted American citizen who, truth must be told, properly belongs to a penitentiary equipped with a comprehensive psychiatric ward.

That our globally renowned and, for the most part, almost unreservedly celebrated African American-constructed august landmark and the institutional establishment of The White House, putatively the most significant political symbol of American Civilization and Culture should be so unspeakably blighted by the criminal occupancy of a dubiously democratically elected MAGA (Make America Great Again) gang of Trumpian-instigated putschists - Remember the scandalous mantra of “I just want to find 11, 780”? (See “US Election: Trump Tells Georgia Election Official to ‘Find’ Votes to Overturn Biden Win” BBC 1/4/21).

Of course, it was perfectly to be expected that the US’ Congressional Speaker, James Michael Johnson - aka Mike Johnson - a widely regarded Trumpian toady and a MAGA heave-ho apologist, would be damn too cravenly pusillanimous to raise any significant objection or concerns about the steely determination of the Agenda-2025 Archbishop of the Mar-a-Largo Manor, Florida, to thoroughly and unconscionably dismantle the most prominent and powerful global democratic institutional establishment and Sovereign Republic.

Ironically, though, such abject lack of moxie or political gonads may be forgivable, especially when one also recognizes the fact that America’s Judicial Establishment has functionally risen to the fore in ways heretofore or hitherto not either relevantly or significantly experienced or witnessed, thus ensuring that America’s democratic institutional integrity will not facilely give way to the scandalous dictatorial tendencies of an egomaniacal Trial-And-Error political operative who clearly presumes America’s 259-year-old “Republican,” not “Rapepublican” - as in The Epstein Files - Constitution to be subject to his personal desires and caprice.

For the present author, however, the name and the towering significance of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy first caught his attention from a newspaper photographical clip pasted onto the inside glass mini-book case that his maternal grandfather, The Reverend Theodore Henry (Yawbe-Aboagye) Sintim (1896?-1982) kept in his study or reading room, which also partly served as his guest-reception room sometime in the late 1960s or the early 1970s, when this author was either in upper-primary or freshman level in middle school, and both Speaker Mike Johnson and Congressional Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries were both toddlers scarcely out of their diapers.

My grandfather who, together with my recently deceased uncle and former Chaplain-General of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), The Reverend-Colonel Eugene Boapea Boamah Sintim(-Brown), raised Yours Truly, for the most part, together with his elder cousin, retired Assistant Superintendent of the Ghana Police Force by the name of Mr. Chenard Kwame (Sintim-)Aboagye, Sr., for the most part, would tersely, soberly and heavy-heartedly tell his Most Beloved Grandson that the man whose portrait had been posted to one of the two glass panels of his study-closet’s book case: “Was an American President.” And then, almost immediately as an afterthought, Grandpa Sintim would lugubriously add: “John Kennedy was a good man. But they killed him.” It would be years later, after this writer had been domiciled here in the United States of America, that he would also learn about the equally strange and bizarre story of Lee Harvey Oswald, the widely and perennially tentatively alleged assassin of President Kennedy.

Now, I sincerely suppose, from the aforereferenced Independent newspaper report of May 30, 2026, what the Kennedy niece, Maria Kennedy Shriver really intended to say in her partially quoted Instagram post was that: “In so characteristically irreverently and blasphemously prefixing his much-maligned, slum-lordy name to that of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Mr. Trump was actually assassinating America’s well-beloved and well-respected 35th President for the second and the most unspeakable time.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]