Gutting the Kennedy Center

And you say art is not political?

On a cold April morning with the west wind blowing the palm trees outside my windows, I was listening to Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now! (90.7 fm KPFK) report on the Orange Felon firing of Deborah Rutter, who served as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the last decade. This week,  he replaced many board members with his supporters. Then, on Wednesday, the new board elected this cultural ignoramus as the center’s new chair. Something that a U.S. president has never done.

It was a fulfillment of the promise he repeated on Monday to become chairman, along with promising the Kennedy Center’s performances would be “good” and “not woke.”

For decades I have enjoyed the Kennedy Center’s annual awards ceremony that honors so many of our greatest performers from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, actors and musicians from classical to popular — no one ever asked if they were “woke.”  No one ever challenged why Harry Bellefonte, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Dick Van Dyke — a list far too long to reprint here (https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/honors/honors-highlights/) — were given such national honors. And even further, how did this term go from being slang for awoken to the hidden history of America to being a Republican derogatory slur?

This president and his enablers are using this slang to attack America’s arts and education institutions that have been supported by Congress and the American people for generations. 

What makes the arts political you might ask? 

It’s the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of freedom of expression. Without that protection — that first of our freedoms — all else fails. What is liberty if you can’t express the soul of yourself?

And right now our core institutions are being attacked by an “unwoke,” delusional ego-centric narcissist who thinks he’s the king, rather than an elected officer to serve the people — all of the people — not just the wealthy.  He doesn’t know what it means to protect and to serve. He only knows how to inflict harm and disparage others.   

Rutter, who recently was interviewed on NPR (another institution under fire), said, “It is by congressional mandate the National Cultural Center [exists] … a mandate from 1958 that calls for [the Kennedy Center] to be the National Performing Arts Center and the National Advocate for Arts Education. In 1964, they added the Living Memorial to John F. Kennedy. So this is more than just the local performing arts center. It represents America to the world.”

It was named after one of our most beloved presidents and now it is being controlled by our most despised, vain and vicious autocrats. 

Kennedy once said, “Art is political in the most profound sense not as a weapon in the struggle, but as an instrument of understanding of the futility of struggle between those who share man’s faith.”

And so it is — oddly enough — that this is at the center of that struggle, and symbolically so. The struggle between those who share man’s faith and those who don’t. Clearly, the Orange Felon’s only faith is in greed and abuse of power.

The desecration to the building was the removal of JFK’s portrait that was replaced by the Orange Felon’s, his wife’s and the vice president and his wife, who are now all on the board of the center. The unwokeness of these four and their billionaire collaborators will be the obituary that they will all be remembered by. Not by the great words of JFK that still grace the walls of the Kennedy Center, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose … and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization” and “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – Nov. 22, 1963) 35th president of the United States.

This, more than any other words, places the arts at the very epicenter of our political freedoms right there next to our right to vote and the others that are now under attack from a far right overthrow of our Constitutional values.

 Marc Bamouthi Joseph in his remarks to Democracy Now! said:

There has been, as you’ve distilled, an infusion of a kind of binary political discourse into what’s supposed to be a sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression. The Kennedy Center, it should be said, has not officially canceled any performances or explicitly contractually removed themselves from relationship to any artists. But as you’ve been describing so diligently and so bravely over the course of your entire career, we create atmosphere through rhetoric. The stated agenda as institutionalized in spaces like the National Endowment for the Arts, let’s say, severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity. The specific attack on gay, trans and drag performers has narrowed the cultural radius at the Kennedy Center significantly, so that artists feel like they can’t in good conscience come to the Kennedy Center. So, you’re seeing artists like Issa Rae or the producers of Hamilton or the artist Rhiannon Giddens remove themselves from their relationship to the Kennedy Center.

And that, in turn, trickles down to the brave staff, who are arts professionals who care about cultural providence and have to do their very best to make it possible for artists to continue to be at their best. But against the backdrop of this oppressive regime and this politically narrow board of directors, that’s extraordinarily difficult to do.

This needs to be a clarion call to every artist and arts organization in America and beyond to say “This will not stand, we shall resist!”