Remembering the Kennedy Center

With more than 300,000 Haitians in America on the brink of being sent back to their tragic country, you’d think worrying about the Kennedy Center’s future would be a luxury. And that it is, but I think it is an important luxury, both for what the Center has been and for what Mr. Trump is doing to what it represents.

First, he took over managing it. Then, he put his name before Kennedy’s name. Now, faced with performers backing out of contracted shows by the dozens, he decides to close it for two years for “renovations.”

We lived in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington suburb, from 1975 to 1982. The Kennedy Center was fresh and new and spectacular. We most often visited it for performances of the National Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall, with famed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the podium. I particularly remember hearing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, featuring two of the three soloists on my prized premier recording of the work.

Another clear memory is the December afternoon when our Southern Maryland Choral Society performed Bach and Respighi in the 630-foot long lobby. Singing in that hall didn’t feel like second best at all!

I think Maxine and I attended performances in the Center’s other theaters as well, but I cannot name them.

Maxine and I have been regular viewers of the Kennedy Center Honors program each December for just about as long as it has been broadcast. Those programs told the stories of prominent musical artists representing many genres, some of which I confess I do not much appreciate. But we always sat in awe of the stories of talented people honing those talents into high artistic achievement.

Although the Kennedy Center and its programming are somehow related to our Federal Government, I never worried about the politics of the place. The President welcomed the Honors’ winners to the White House, and sat in the premier box during the show. If any president ever had a hand in choosing who performed at the Center, or who was honored by it, I never knew about it. I am willing to guess that, beyond an occasional suggestion or two, the process was non-partisan.

Donald Trump changed all that, just as he has changed almost everything about how we do politics in this country. In my mind, he is exercising presidential power and prerogative beyond any we have ever seen before, while Congress and the courts sit idly by, unwilling to challenge even his most dictatorial moves. State and local governments are doing what they can, and people are in the streets. But still he marches on, our own little would-be Lion King, lording it over all us apes.

I care about what happens to the Haitians now in our midst. Sending them back to Haiti will be a death sentence for many of them. And that’s worse than what happens to the Kennedy Center. But both matters are strands in one huge cloth of hate and fear-driven narcism and racism that know no internal limits. None of this will come out well.

If anyone who could stop Trump’s ruining of the Kennedy Center fails to do so, then I think the least Congress could do would be to rescind whatever action it once took to name it as memorial to John F. Kennedy, and let whatever Trump builds be called the Trump Center for the Performing Arts. Associating President Kennedy’s name with it will no longer be an honor, because the place of his memorialization will have been desecrated beyond recognition. It will, in fact, deserve to be called nothing more than “Trump.”