Quote of the Day (Peter Tonguette, Viewing the Kennedy Center Honors a Decade Ago)

“In its first 20 or so years, the Kennedy Center Honors—annually allocated to performing artists of purported preeminence—there were more than enough leading lights still living to assure that the well of meritorious honorees would not quickly run dry….Since the new millennium, however, there have been ever-diminishing efforts to separate the chaff from the wheat and ever-increasing attempts to lasso ‘names’ readily identifiable to the television audience. This has made for some amusing sights in those box seats perched high in the Kennedy Center Opera House, where each year’s honorees are seated next to the president and first lady. In 2012, for example, prima ballerina Natalia Makarova was parked next to, among others, David Letterman. As Makarova listened to Tina Fey introducing Letterman, littering the talk-show host’s life story with one cliché after another (‘The guy who broke all the rules became the most decorated man in television’), the former Kirov Ballet dancer must have wondered to herself: Did I defect from the Soviet Union for this? To be honored in the company of the creator of Stupid Pet Tricks?”— American journalist and critic Peter Tonguette, “Slighting Downhill,” The Weekly Standard, Jan. 20, 2014

I came across Tonguette’s observation from 11 years ago by chance last night, after the news came out of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees.

I suppose it’s natural if, like Tonguette, you bemoaned the inability of more recent Kennedy Center honorees to match the inaugural set of honorees in 1978: Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers, and Arthur Rubinstein.

But were the 2013 recipients (actress Shirley MacLaine, soprano Martina Arroyo, and musicians Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, and Billy Joel), the last group before Tonguette wrote his piece, really that bad?

Tonguette lamented that rock ‘n’ roll honorees Tina Turner, Brian Wilson, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, and Led Zeppelin were “storming the gates of the Opera House.” But if he thinks they were barbarians, what on earth must he think of the group Kiss on this year’s honor roll?

Well, maybe he’s fine with it—or, at least, fine with the abrupt process by which Kiss and fellow recipients George Strait, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, and Michael Crawford were chosen.

The selection process used to be long, with input from a bipartisan board at the Kennedy Center. Do I have to tell you that this process went out the window this year when Donald Trump sacked the institution’s management; that, according to NPR’s Elizabeth Blair and Jennifer Vanasco, the remaining staff were—er, “caught off guard” with the news that this year’s group had already been picked; or that President Trump copped to vetoing “a couple of wokesters” proposed by the remaining board?

(That begs a couple of questions: first, who were the “wokesters” that Trump rejected? And second, would he have approved the 1980 choice of Leonard Bernstein, who, for all his “radical chic” tendencies derided by conservatives in the 1970s, surely belonged to the “artists of purported preeminence” Tonguette craved a decade ago?)

I can’t say with 100% certainty that Tonguette approves of all this, but based on his recent views concerning the President, he either supports the choices or is staying mum. Unlike many of his fellow Weekly Standard contributors, he has never joined the “Never Trump” cause.

In fact, he has written a post for the American Conservative blog calling for the repeal of the 22^nd Amendment so that Trump can run for reelection in 2028.

And, to those who believe that Trump displays the very barbarian, sub-cultural tendencies that Tonguette once bemoaned, well, he’s okay with that, too.

After all, surveying Trump’s debate last year with Kamala Harris—you know, the one where he spoke of immigrants eating dogs and cats—Tonguette allowed that the candidate was “admittedly unruly and unfocused—but in his very distractedness and digressiveness, he arguably better reflected the tenor of the times than his glossy, vacuous fellow candidate."

I guess Tonguette won’t make a peep, either, if the “unruly and unfocused” President decides to drop all pretense and repeats Nazi Hermann Goering’s legendary sneer, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning!”