The Desecration of the Kennedy Center
Drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd, the longtime host of the Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, made the only moral decision available when he canceled this year’s performance after the institution announced it was renaming itself in honor of Donald Trump. A sacred holiday tradition, gone, not because Redd is “intolerant,” but because he refused to become wallpaper for a regime that confuses vandalism with patriotism.
The response from Trump’s newly installed cultural commissars was immediate and obscene.
Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, freshly appointed chairman after Trump purged the board and crowned himself king of the place, fired off a threat demanding $1 million in damages from Redd for what he called a “political stunt.”
The vice president of public relations piled on, accusing artists who refuse to perform under Trump’s banner of being “selfish” and failing their “basic duty” to perform for “all people.”
Read that again.
They renamed the Kennedy Center after themselves.
They erased the spirit of John F. Kennedy from his own memorial.
They hollowed out a cultural institution into a MAGA banquet hall.
And now they are threatening musicians for declining to participate.
This is not patriotism.
This is coercion.
This is authoritarianism wearing a flag pin.
And the people who call artists “un-American” for protesting this grotesque takeover are not defending the country, they are defending the demolition of its soul.
Donald Trump, a man who has never read a poem, sat through an overture, or understood a single note of jazz unless it came with a picture book and a teenage blonde on his lap, already hosted the Kennedy Center Honors, and the ceremony was broadcast on national television to embarrassingly low ratings.
The verdict was immediate.
The country did not show up.
The audience did not come.
The empire yawned.
Because fascism always begins by stealing the places where beauty lives, and it always ends by discovering that beauty cannot be coerced.
The Kennedy Center, that marble temple to imagination and the dangerous idea that the human spirit is bigger than a tax deduction, has now been reduced to a MAGA banquet room with flags, folding chairs, and a buffet of cold chicken and lukewarm grievance.
Trump calls this “revamping in his image.”
Which is to say: taking a cathedral of culture and repainting it with the aesthetic of a rundown Midwestern strip mall.
He purged the board.
He named himself chairman.
He crowned himself curator of taste.
Taste.
This is the man whose artistic legacy consists of The Apprentice, a golden toilet, and Kid Rock holding a beer in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Ticket sales are collapsing.
Donors are fleeing.
Artists are walking away.
Renée Fleming resigned.
Ben Folds stepped down.
Issa Rae pulled out.
More than twenty productions vanished.
Because the arts are sacred.
And Trump, by his very nature, is a desecration.
He is the anti-art.
The anti-aesthetic.
The vandal with a key to the museum.
The Kennedy Center is not just a venue, it is a signal to the world of who we are when we are at our best.
Trump hosting the Honors became the punchline to a joke told by a dying empire.
The man who thinks culture is something you put on a baseball hat decided who received cultural immortality, and the country turned the channel.
Everything he touches decays.
Everything he touches becomes cheap.
Every institution he enters loses its dignity.
Not because he hates art,
but because art requires a soul.
And he has never owned one.
So to my fellow musicians, composers, painters, writers, dancers, actors, this is your moment.
This is not about left or right.
This is about whether the inner creative life of this country will be governed by imagination or by intimidation.
When they attack the arts, they are attacking the one part of you they cannot own:
your inner creative self.
Do not give them that.
Do not decorate their decay.
Do not perform for your own erasure.
If the price of patriotism is silence in the face of vandalism, then it is not patriotism, it is surrender.
Art is resistance.
Beauty is resistance.
Refusal is resistance.
And history will remember who protected the stage when the tyrant tried to steal the spotlight.
– by Michael Jochum
Michael Jochum is a writer and musician reflecting on art, politics, and the human condition.
7 comments:
For the party that hawked unbridled unregulated capitalism and great freedom it is NOW CLEAR the real agenda is authoritarian top down rule with loyalty and fealty to the narcissistic pathological liar and xenophobe being demand by the media he is steadily and ruthlessly reshaping.
America is dying under the filth of Trump and his fascist brownshirted morons of destruction.
Trump manifests his personality disorder and diminishing intellect to the world every day.
A few facts, from the Kennedy Center website...
"In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed bipartisan legislation creating a National Cultural Center in the nation’s capital. In November of 1962, President and Mrs. Kennedy launched a $30 million fundraising campaign for the Center’s construction. Former President Eisenhower and his wife Mamie participated in the event which demonstrated the bipartisan support for a world-class center for the performing arts in D. C. In 1963, President Kennedy signed legislation to extend the fundraising deadline for the Center.
Two months after President Kennedy’s assassination, by an Act of Congress signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on January 23, 1964, the nation’s National Cultural Center was designated as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. By this Act, President Kennedy’s devotion to the advancement of the performing arts in the United States was recognized."
The key phrase is... signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Unless and until a subsequent law is enacted, the name cannot legally be changed. But our "law & order" friends who support President Trump and beating US Capitol police officers, don't really care about "law & order" unless they like those laws.
lol! We're coming for statues next...
Conservative writer Mona Charen
"With every renaming of a building you are sending up a signal that screams 'I am so insecure!'" she wrote. "And here’s the truth: You cannot piggyback on the respect John F. Kennedy earned by slapping your name on the arts center that was named by statute to be his living memorial. Your name may be side by side with his on the marble for now, but in our hearts, we will never respect you. Quite the opposite — for all of your depredations and twice on Sunday for attempting to hijack someone else’s honor."
Trump's thirst for attention and respect is as laughable as it is obvious, Charen wrote.
"The 'Gulf of America'?" she wrote. "Musing about absorbing Canada into the United States whether they like it or not? Decorating the Oval Office in a Saddam Hussein aesthetic? Threatening to expropriate Greenland from our ally Denmark? Truly great nations don’t need to prove their manhood by lording it over smaller ones. Imposing tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins? Panting after a Nobel Peace Prize so flagrantly that you’re claiming to have settled eight wars? In two of those cases, there was no war. In the other six, the conflicts are either ongoing or were largely settled without you. Offering meme coins for sale to the highest bidder? Auctioning off pardons to criminals and leaders on the take? You bet they’re laughing."
Despite his bluster, the columnist concluded, Trump had dragged the nation down with him into his worst fear.
"His worst fear has already come true," read the column's subheadline.
"There has never been a president who has made the United States less respected than you have," Charen wrote."
Go ahead -FJ. Identify yourself with the Nick Fuentes racist Nazi loving people like him. Here's how Ben Shapiro, no flaming lib, described people like you who are unable to call out the maggots in your midsts...
You are '"neo-Nazis and propagandizers, [who] deserve to lose. And [you] will lose. Neo-Nazis [like you -FJ] and their propagandizers are not Republicans, they are not America First, they are not MAGA, they sure as hell aren’t conservative.”
Support the statues of traitors all you want. It's a free country. But don't get upset when people call you what you are... An America hater. A Nazi loving America hater.
Shapiro was, and is right.
His name will remain on the center until the day or maybe the next day after the 2028 inauguration. Melt down the metal and turn it into a Studebaker.
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