By Shiriel King Abramson
As the Kennedy Center is shuttered and the midterm elections send shockwaves through the electorate, I’m reflecting on the contradictory visions of America offered by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump. The world-class performing arts center in Washington has been embroiled in a naming dispute with a president who made his mark on the public stage in 2016 by declaring “I, alone, can fix it.” Yet the center also got its financial footing from a president who said, famously, “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
In Trump’s vision of America, our perils are reduced to problems solvable by one powerful man. In Kennedy’s vision, it is up to the populace to create the country we want to see.
Kennedy’s quotation has been so often repeated as to be cliche (and so sticky in the ear as to be an exemplar of the rhetorical device “chiasmus” in high school English classes around the country). Yet Kennedy’s beliefs on arts and democracy are less well-known. .
“Art is the great democrat,” wrote Kennedy, “calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” He saw art as a means of transcending difference, as both a product of democracy and a contributor to its flourishing.
The Kennedy Center was first named the National Cultural Center, the result of bipartisan legislation signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958. During his presidency, Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fundraised $30 million for the Center in 1962, and after his death in 1964, the Center was designated as a “living memorial” to the President, in recognition of his devotion to the performing arts.
Contrast that with Trump’s legacy of public works––the “beautification” of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, most recently. This failed project has become a symbol of his administration’s reckless spending of public funds. Trump’s joke about renaming the reflecting pool after himself, delivered in a speech the night before the midterms, would be funny were it a sign of his self-awareness rather than his utter refusal to acknowledge the costs of his decisions to the country.
Trump’s own claim about being a “very stable genius,” tweeted back in 2018, puts his erratic behavior regarding the Kennedy Center into the context of his own narcissism (though, of course, there are many other examples). His threats to shut down, then demolish, this institution hint at just how threatened he feels by a vibrant cultural sector.
The Kennedy Center, over the years, has hosted the nation’s premier music, theater, and dance companies. In doing so, it has become a symbol of excellence in the performing arts, a sought-after performance venue by our country’s most talented performers.
On the campaign trail, John F. Kennedy took note of the role of art in public life. “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” Kennedy wrote in 1960, in response to a letter by Theodate Johnson, publisher of the magazine Musical America. “The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life can also be a New Frontier for American art.”
By this logic, it’s no wonder that Trump wants to quash artistic expression. He is not interested in a New Frontier but rather an old tradition of patriarchy and white supremacy. Making America great again means returning to an imagined greatness of the past, not welcoming creativity to advance something new.
This creativity is often countercultural. Where Trump’s politics thrive on a fear of the other, the arts offer us a window into the worldviews of those who are different. They help us imagine what it’s like to be someone else, “seeing them not as forbiddingly alien and other, but as sharing many problems and possibilities with us,” as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes in Cultivating Humanity. In doing so, we develop empathy, so we can more peacefully coexist with our neighbors.
We need both mirrors and windows: stories in which we see our own lives reflected, and stories that allow us to see into the lives of others.
On that note, the scandal of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is uncanny. Where Trump is literally seeing himself in the pool, joking about rebranding the memorial in his image, he is clearly only interested in the mirror of his own reality. His public works aim to narrow our national imagination to a vision of his own distorted self-reflection.
The Kennedy Center, meanwhile, has tried to broaden the public imagination. Through its “digital” stage, it reaches viewers who might not be able to afford expensive tickets. Next at the Kennedy Center is a PBS series intended to showcase the diversity of performing arts cultures to a larger audience. It features such greats as Gaby Moreno, a Guatemalan singer-songwriter and guitarist who moved to Los Angeles at the turn of the century.
One of Moreno’s songs, “Ay Que Emigra,” released in 2011, recounts the heartbreak of leaving home to immigrate to a place far away. “Vengo desde muy lejos / Buscando el azul del cielo / Siguiendo predicamentos / Vengo desde muy lejos,” she sings. (I come from far away / looking for the blue of the sky / chasing prestige / I come from far away.)
But “prestige” can alternately be translated as “predicament,” which seems prescient in light of ICE’s yearslong campaign of terror. In the context of this Kennedy Center saga, Moreno’s lyrics bring to mind Trump’s desire to deport Central American immigrants to Guatemala in his first term, and his subsequent rage at Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales for refusing to sign an agreement accordingly. Where Trump tries to expel immigrants, the Kennedy Center platforms their stories for a larger audience.
Of course, art that’s concerned only with the plight of The Other can feel cheap. The Columbian film Un Poeta, released last year and directed by Simón Mesa Soto, hilariously makes fun of this idea when the titular character asks his disciple, a young girl living in poverty, to write poems about her disadvantaged circumstances. Poetry that was once beautiful becomes trauma porn. The poetry association wants to show how art can change the world, and in doing so confirms its own exotic ideas about living with few means.
Though the midterm elections delivered a stunning repudiation of Trump’s politics, still we have watched our institutions of democracy erode over the course of his presidency. The tripartite model of government meant to ensure no president becomes too powerful, no congress too majoritarian, has only partially checked the whims of a wannabe tyrant. The fourth pillar of democratic society –– the free press –– has not been able to prevent state-sponsored fictions from spreading.
We must do more to safeguard our democracy, even with a new Democratic majority in congress to check the power of the president. While the arts cannot win legal battles or forestall bad policy, they can at least inspire our commitment to civic engagement, broadening our moral imagination to make way for more compassionate futures.
For most Americans, voting is our primary means of making our voice heard. Yet to truly hear the voice of the people, we need to hear not only our support or opposition for candidates and ballot propositions, but the stories of the people themselves. Perhaps then we might know our neighbors well enough not to vote against their welfare, realizing their dignity holds value like our own.
Many artists and organizations have already taken on the task of storytelling for the sake of democracy. Storyworks, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, produces bold documentary theater that shines a spotlight “on the human costs of injustice and structural inequality to help drive social change.” Their productions can be seen in the Bay Area and across the country.
Let’s support these artists, and share our own art too. Showing up to a performance or concert is one option; sharing a poem at a local open mic is another. Now that the midterms are over, let’s delight in our collective creative expression. We may then answer Kennedy’s call to do something for our country, and, in doing so, discover a more beautiful democracy.
