Killing the Kennedy Center
There is literally nothing that Donald Trump won’t ruin. Like a petulant, crybaby, tantrum-haunted infant, he throws everything to the floor and stamps his pudgy feet. Or maybe he flails his fat little hands, the ones with the bruising and the make-up and the bandages. Like some corrupted king in a Shakespearean tragedy, the body of the ruler reflects the rot within. Not to mix my similes or anything, but the manchild is decaying before our very eyes.
The Kennedy Center is merely the latest example. Drumpf’s predations began early in his term. Almost as soon as he hauled his bulk into the White House, he began to dismantle the Kennedy operation. First, he dispersed the independent board, installing himself as Impresario-in-Chief. Fat-cat loyalists followed close behind, along with Richard Grenell, a psycho-phant yes-man, appointed to head up programming and operations.
Things quickly went downhill from there. Bela Fleck pulled out in the initial cascade. So much for the visionary combination of old and new, traditional and experimental, Appalachia and Manhattan. Then came the opera singer Renee Fleming, and experimental composer Philip Glass, who expressed his unease that his new composition would somehow be vitiated by the values at work in the new regime. The exodus of talent has not abated with the decision by the Washington National Opera to find a more congenial venue.
The sum of these defections is an empty schedule, the skeleton calendar of an abandoned husk. It all depends on how you look at an instructional session on Caribbean carnival dancing, and a klezmer group that plays Yiddish labor music. I’m actually tantalized by the second offering, but I wouldn’t go as a matter of principle. Thus it is with trashed institutions: low-brow, obscure, or least common-denominator programming drives out quality, prestige, and artistic adventure. I’ll take my Yiddish labor songs off Spotify, thank you.
What interests me here is the psychology of a man who first destroys an institution and now, in the wake of all of the defections, has decided to close the Kennedy Center for renovations. The news is barely hours old, but Drumpf’s game is perfectly clear. Rather than endure the embarrassment of cancellations and his inability to land major talent, he has decided to kill the Kennedy Center in toto. If it cannot serve whatever purpose he imagines (which is always the goal of self-aggrandizement), he will reduce it to a barren concrete pad and then repurpose it as the National Thunderdome, complete with motorcycles and Tina Turner.
The best analogy I know to this savagery is the terrifying story of the divided baby. A nameless woman in the First Book of Kings steals the newborn child of her housemate. The two women come before the throne of Solomon who declares that, in the absence of a maternity test, he will divide the helpless infant in two. The thieving child-snatcher agrees to this solution, communicating clearly to Solomon that she is not the mother.
Trump, of course, is the political equivalent. If he cannot have the prize he wants, he is compelled by his sick and corrupted soul to smash it all and walk away. If you don’t want my Trump Center, you won’t have anything!
This will change no one’s mind in the next election cycle, but we can hope that it does influence an independent voter somewhere. It may not be the collapse of the economy, but it’s a move so petty, so vindictive, so feral that it must give someone reason to reconsider.