By Peter Balakian
The fallout from Trump’s effort to control The Kennedy Center for the Arts has been predictable, and now, in the wake of so many cancellations by artists, he has decided to close the Center for two years allegedly for renovations. His actions seem like nothing more than damage control in the face of what has become an embarrassment and a travesty. The latest departure from the Center is Jean Davidson, the Executive Director of the National Symphony Orchestra who found the new “external forces” too difficult to deal with. Prior to this, though, listening to what artists have said and done since Trump’s takeover of the Center tells us something significant about American culture and the arts. Philip Glass’s recent withdrawal of his Symphony No. 15, which was to be performed by the National Symphony Orchestra this year, is a particularly instructive act of protest against Trump’s purge of the Kennedy Center board and his appropriation, including the assertion of his name on the Center’s wall — an unlawful act without approval by Congress. The eminent American composer, who is a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors Award, made it clear that “the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.” Symphony No. 15 celebrates Lincoln’s early, important speech about the criminality of mob violence following the lynching of a law abiding, free Black man in St. Louis in 1838. Lincoln excoriates “the disregard for law that pervades this country,” speaks about the urgent need for “sound morality,” “reason,” and the “reverence for the constitution and laws.” As Glass suggests, Lincoln’s call for law and morality stand in stark contrast to the various acts of lawless cruelty carried out by the Trump administration, including the needless killings by ICE of more than forty people over the past year, which would certainly include the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
The continued string of cancellations by scheduled performers (ticket buyers and board members are cancelling in droves as well), and most dramatically the exodus of the National Opera Company, tells us something about artists and their work, and about American culture and the ethnic diversity that has defined it. In cancelling the sensational musical Hamilton, the producer Jeffrey Sellers said that “the purge by the Trump administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national center stands for.” The American folk duo Magpie referred to the boycott as a “moral picket line,” while the choreographer Doug Varone said the renaming “pushed me off a cliff.” Singer-song writer Sonia de Los Santos said that she “[does] not feel that the current climate at this beloved venue represents a welcoming space for myself, my band, or our audience.” Folk singer Kristy Lee stepped back “out of respect for the artistic freedom and the Kennedy Center’s founding mission.” The Puerto Rican band Balun cancelled, explaining that “the space no longer aligns with our values. Our safety, integrity, and commitment to justice come first.” The US Marine Band, the country’s oldest professional music organization, cancelled noting “the program once based on equity and diversity of voices is no longer supported at the deferral level under this administration.” Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist for musicals such as Wicked and Godspell, cancelled his appearance with the Washington National Opera saying that the Center’s home for apolitical free expression for artists of all nationalities and ideologies has been severely undermined by Trump.
The Kennedy Center is part of a powerful tradition of America’s culture, both past and present. Since its doors opened in 1971, it has been an important part of the continuum of creative work in the arts and humanities that has defined America. A central location for culture and the performing arts, The Kennedy Center is by its definition an inextricable part of our culture of critical thinking. Performing artists are creative artists who think conceptually in their particular art forms as they critique power, human flaw, and institutional corruption, and often offer us edgy insights about ourselves and society that inspire us and can also make us uncomfortable. Popular, jazz, and classical musicians, opera singers, song writers, stage actors and directors, choreographers, conductors, dancers, and comedians have all defined the Kennedy Center for the past fifty-four years. If you think of just a few of the great performing artists who have performed or been honored by the Kennedy Center, you get a sense of what this great multicultural caravan of American culture means: Mahalia Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald, Pete Seager, Count Basie, Martha Graham, Alvin Alley, Miles Davis, Placido Domingo, Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan, Shen Yun, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Barbara Streisand, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, David Henry Hwang, Stevie Wonder, Queen Latifa, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert DeNiro, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, Lin-Manuel, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, Cher, Lily Tomlin, Norman Lear, Mavis Staples, Ray Charles, Arthur Rubenstein, Gene Kelly, Cecily Tyson, Alvin Alley, Martha Graham, Marian Anderson, Oprah, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Sammy Davis Jr, Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Morgan Freeman. Given Trump’s animosity to diversity, it pushes one’s sense of irony to think of his name on a performing arts center in the nation’s capital given what the performing arts owes to African Americans, Latinx Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans and many others.
At the core of the contradiction of Trump’s self-proclaimed directorship and name usurpation is his pervasive anti-intellectualism and hostility to critical thinking. Ever more in his second term, he has become an embodiment of what the historian Richard Hofstadter identified as “anti-intellectualism in American life” — a hostility that is manifest in his language and actions. He vilifies professors as “Marxist lunatics and traitors.” He disdains liberal culture deriding it as wokeism — a clichéd slogan for the unthinking and one that has become grist for his social media propaganda. He has dismantled the Department of Education, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts, while also gutting the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — all hubs of the nation’s intellectual and knowledge production and all of which involve critical thinking. His campaign to control some powerful universities by withholding federal funding is an extortion-like tactic. His efforts to censor journalists and the critical-thinking media are assaults on the First Amendment.
The arts embody human empathy, a passion for truth, the unorthodox dynamism of the imagination, a reverence for language, and the authenticity of the human voice. Artists engage with human suffering and vulnerability, moral conscience, and the capacity for self-irony and historical critique, and they take us into the complexities of both the tragic and comedic dimensions of existence. Trump’s lack of humanity is a glaring inversion of these values. His compulsive lying and fabrications, his often-vile language and name-calling at perceived enemies has lowered the moral and cultural atmosphere of the nation. His contempt for diversity, for vulnerable immigrants and refugees, his pardoning of white-collar criminals including drug and sex traffickers, and his need to create division and enmity across our nation are inversions of what the arts embody.
