On a September afternoon in Washington, thousands gathered along the Potomac to defend a building that is, in many ways, more than a building — the Kennedy Center, the nation's official memorial to a slain president and a living home for the performing arts. Their presence reflected a fear older than any single administration: that what a society builds to honor beauty and memory can be undone by the pressures of power and profit. The protest may have been precautionary, its specific trigger unclear, but the scale of the turnout spoke to something durable — a public unwilling to treat cultural