Quote of the Day (Robert A. Heinlein, on Rudeness and ‘A Dying Culture’)

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”—American science-fiction writer, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), Friday (1982)

Well, in at least one case, large-scale public rudeness can precipitate a riot.

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 (Irving Howe, on American Culture’s ‘Indifference to the Past’)

“American culture is notorious for its indifference to the past. It suffers from the provincialism of the contemporary, veering wildly from fashion to fashion, each touted by the media and then quickly dismissed. But the past is the substance out of which the present has been formed, and to let it slip away from us is to acquiesce in the thinness that characterizes so much of our culture. Serious education must assume, in part, an adversarial stance toward the very society that sustains it—a democratic society makes the wager that it’s worth supporting a culture of criticism. But if that criticism loses touch with the heritage of the past, it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints.”—American editor and social and literary critic Irving Howe (1920-1993), “The Value of the Canon,” The New Republic, Feb. 18, 1991

Quote of the Day (Sir Francis Bacon, on ‘The Monuments of Wit and Learning’)

“The monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?”—English philosopher, scientist, essayist, and statesman Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Essex’s Device (1595)

Quote of the Day (Edward Albee, on How ‘The Arts are Tough at Their Very Best')

“The arts are tough at their very best. The arts are there to make us question our values. We invented the arts to put ourselves in greater contact with who we really are.''—Playwright Edward Albee (1928-2016), address to Rollins College, quoted in Elizabeth Maupin, “Winter Park—Playwright Edward Albee Thanked,” Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 19, 2000

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on Why Culture is Not a Matter of Credentials)

“Culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity, and sometimes you find things out from fans and buffs that you won’t from a tenured professor.”—Australian critic-poet-memoirist Clive James, Latest Readings (2015)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Culture)

“Culture opens the sense of beauty.” — American philosopher, essayist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Culture,” in Conduct of Life (1860)

Quote of the Day (Edward Albee, on Why ‘The Arts Are Not There to Comfort’)

“The arts are not there to comfort. The arts are there to hold a mirror up to society. If you don't like what you see, why don't you change?''—Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee (Mar. 12, 1928-Sept. 16, 1916), address to Rollins College, quoted in Elizabeth Maupin, “Winter Park—Playwright Edward Albee Thanked,” Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 19, 2000

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Cultured People)

“If they have a talent they respect it...They do not ask for the cleverness which shows itself in continual lying. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity...Besides, they are fastidious." —Russian playwright/short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, from an 1886 letter to his brother Nikolai, on one of the qualities of cultured people, in Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, translated by Constance Garnett (1920)