| (Almost) every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the super-sized Aug. 28 chat, dedicated to the season finale of “Game of Thrones,” here, and submit questions for the post-Labor Day Sept. 11 chat here. This week, a reader asks about President Trump’s widening rift with the arts community. You may have already addressed this, but what’s your take on the president bowing out of the Kennedy Center Honors? To me, not surprising but very disappointing. To me there was something very moving about the president, no matter the party, paying tribute to the arts. I may be naive, but I think appearing, and acting like he enjoyed it, could do a lot to “humanize” this president, who in my view is in dire need of humanizing. I don’t think you’re naive, but I think your admirable wish for a unifying moment was probably not ever possible, on two levels. First, I don’t think President Trump is terribly interested in the arts, and I don’t think he has the capacity to perform the expected convening functions of the presidency. Certainly, he doesn’t have the patience to sustain such a performance. At this point in his administration, I think this would have been a largely hollow gesture: Trump has shown us who he is, and that includes being someone who proposes cutting the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Showing up at the Kennedy Center Honors would have been cover for him and his agenda as much as it would have been a genuine gesture of support for the artists who do so much to make our country great, and I think it would have been read that way. I’d also urge you to consider another side of this, which is what it might mean for this particular set of honorees to be feted by this particular president. It’s one thing to have policy disagreements with a president of the United States. It’s another to feel like the ideals your work is in service of are not something the president of the United States shares. The idea that Trump is going to show up and pretend to care about Norman Lear’s pioneering work on social issues in sitcoms or LL Cool J’s work in hip-hop, among other things, rings incredibly false. Asking Lear and many of the other honorees to accept praise from a man who has spent his entire career in politics attacking the values are at the core of their work would cheapen the honor the Kennedy Center hopes to bestow on them. I hate that it’s come to this, obviously. At their best, the arts help us break out of narrow partisan politics and see the great issues that face us in new ways (which is not the same thing as being aloof from politics). But I don’t see a way for the Kennedy Center Honors to simultaneously show deference to the president and truly uphold the ideas they stand for. Under those circumstances, it’s better to keep the focus on the ideas and on the honorees. |
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