Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, With a Bad Guess About American Culture in the Past Decade)

“What sorts of novels, poems, films, television series, video games, paintings, music, or graphic novels will adequately reflect America’s next decade? We don’t have any idea yet. We can’t: Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Donald Trump’s interest in the arts, gauged on a scale from one to 100, is somewhere between zero and negative 10—lower than any president in the last 50 years. Some of those presidents didn’t give a hoot about the arts, but at least they found it politic to pretend. Trump won’t. In fact, he may not even notice they’re there.”—Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood, “Creative Reconstruction,” The Nation, Feb. 6/13, 2017

Margaret Atwood developed a reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.

Yet it turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture. It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”

In other words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the already vast powers of his office to crush them.

Count among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood Reporter account from earlier this week.

In implementing plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of academe.

But the algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen, writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.”

Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building down.

Even before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures, as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American figures.

Nevertheless, he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s “America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or limited-edition U.S. passports.

When late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a similar fate at ABC.

Anytime something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate either Republican or Democratic fans.)

I guess we should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say, literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential war President.

His second term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7. That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated by images from the state.

Unfortunately, this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.

But she was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.

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!”

Quote of the Day (Anthony Powell, on a Midcentury Cultural Philistine)

“[Kenneth] Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St. John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.

“ ‘I don’t know about these things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don't know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me—which they do not—I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’”— English novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Volume 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time) (1960)

An opportunistic businessman early in his career, Widmerpool changes ideologies along the course of the several decades covered in Anthony Powell’s sprawling 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time.

This cultural philistine has little to no use even for reading. But he carries an extraordinary vindictiveness against those he perceives as slighting him or standing in his way that can manifest itself unexpectedly and dangerously.

Oh, yes, he's also used by an authoritarian power based in Russia to subvert the West from within.

As this recent American news story demonstrates, Widmerpool is a type present in contemporary America as well as Powell’s midcentury Britain.

(The image accompanying this post shows Simon Russell Beale as Kenneth Widmerpool in the 1997 British mini-series adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.)

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on ‘This Thing Called My Life’)

“I'm starting to think that this thing called my life is a movie I'm making. I'm going to write the ending of it shortly, but I don’t know what it’s going to be.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Another force—God—will be the one to decide the final scene to the movie of his life, but the Almighty is likely to be more merciful and less fickle than Hollywood producers or even American filmgoers to daring, passionate, complicated Francis Ford Coppola. 

No matter the disappointing response to his latest, if not last, film this fall, the sci-fic epic Megalopolis, Coppola is assured a place in film history for, if nothing else, The Godfather Saga. His reception of Kennedy Center honors virtually certifies that.

Two speakers at yesterday’s ceremony helped to explain the enormous risks that alternately raised his career to undreamed-of heights and threatened to bring it asunder.

George Lucas: ““Here’s the thing: When you spend enough time with Francis, you begin to believe that you can jump off cliffs too.”

Al Pacino said the filmmaker was ready to break the first rule of Hollywood: Never put your own money in your movie projects.

Photo of the Day: Hall of States, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC

I took this photo a year ago, when I went on a tour of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It is a dazzling tribute to the 35^th President, with contributions from artists from around the world. The Hall of States features flags from all 50 states, five U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia. 

Earlier this week, at his eighth—and, almost certainly, last—honors presentation, Barack Obama received the most sustained applause of anyone on hand. For at least the next four years under the President-elect, I can’t imagine the caliber of honorees matching what it has been under the last eight years. Let’s see if John Ratzenberger gets honored for his work 30 years ago as Cliff on Cheers. (Do you expect The Donald NOT to remember a Hollywood star who said, about his victory, "The adults are back in charge"?)

Photo of the Day: JFK Center, Israeli Lounge

When I visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington this past November, I did not, much to my regret, get to see the African Lounge, and the Russian Lounge simply left me—well, cold. But as soon as I entered the Israeli Lounge, I was impressed—scratched that, overwhelmed—by the level of its detail and its palpable sense of history.

As the name of the room suggests, and like much else I saw in this DC landmark, this was a gift from a foreign nation: in this case, Israel. What you see here is the ceiling, with 40 wooden panels, showing musical events described in the Old Testament: Joshua at the walls of Jericho, David playing the harp, Miriam dancing triumphantly, and a choir on the temple steps.

Those who come into this space—80 standing for cocktail receptions, 60 for seated dinners—can’t help coming away with a feeling of awe, I firmly believe.

Photo of the Day: ‘Don Quixote’ Statue, JFK Center, DC

I photographed this 1976 bronze statue by Aurelio Teno on the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, while on vacation in Washington, D.C. in November. Don Quixote, like so much of the other art in this cultural institution, is a gift from another country—in this case, as you might imagine, Spain.

Photo of the Day: DC and VA, From the Kennedy Center Terrace

On the first full day of my vacation in Washington DC last week, I made sure to visit the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I had toured the building at least 20 years ago, but I was surprised to find so much more there when I went again this time.

This time, one of the things that made an enormous impression on me—completely unrelated to the performances taking place there—was the spectacular vista provided from the terrace of the building. 

What I tried to capture in this moody, late-afternoon shot was how the Potomac River bisected the capital from the suburbs of northern Virginia. To the left, on the other, Virginia side of the river, can be seen the beginning of the large office buildings that fill Rosslyn; to the right, more like specks in comparison, can be glimpsed the spires of Georgetown.