If you’re anything like me, you had “that friend” as a child. Not really a friend, but someone you knew at school or from the neighborhood whose companionship you sought out of loneliness or boredom or because there was no one else around. If you grew up without brothers or sisters (as I did) you were more likely to gravitate toward such a playmate.
That friend was manipulative and cruel, and condescended to spend time with you. They let it be known it was a huge favor to you that they would hang out with such a little loser when there were other, cooler kids they were friends with.
That friend would come over to your house and eat your cookies and drink your root beer and put your things in their pockets and cheat on board games. They would regale you with baldfaced lies. They suggested to you how neat it would be to take apart your favorite toy to see how it worked, and revel in its destruction. When your father came home later to find it half-disassembled in the driveway, you’d get yelled at. It would be all your fault, of course.
When you’re seven years old you have never heard the word “sociopath.” You see other kids as bullies or as just being mean. That friend was more subtle. They wormed their way into your life and once established there they started doing damage, possibly out of jealousy (your things were nicer than theirs) or perhaps just to see the look of dismay on your face. The campaign of devastation ended when they got bored with you and went off to seek fresh prey.
When you grow up you learn to distance yourself from such people. If you’ve been paying attention, you learn to see through their cheap charisma to the coldness and cruelty underneath. You’re cordial to them but keep them at arm’s length. If you let them in close enough to play on your lingering sense of inferiority, you’re lost. They know where all the buttons are and which ones to push.
What you have over that friend is that you love something—and they are incapable of love. Their real superpower is that they can zero in on what you love and destroy it. Unfortunately, what’s happening right now is more serious than someone tearing apart your toy Stutz Bearcat and leaving it in pieces. That friend, who turns out to be someone you like and admire and elected president, has set about wrecking the arts and humanities that most of us find indispensable to gracious living. He is defunding museums and libraries and is attacking public schools and institutions of higher learning.
Feel free to start composing your hate mail, but why would a leader veer out of the lane of governance—infrastructure, defense, and stewardship of the economy—to commandeer the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts? Why is he poised to close the National Museum of African American History and Culture? Why is he ready to defund NPR and PBS?
I contend that it is the sheer vindictive pleasure of smashing things that other people love but which he himself cannot appreciate. Admittedly, there is the pretext of an agenda in place, such as the phony culture-war outrage over men dressing up in women’s clothing—a stage convention that has existed since time immemorial. But I assert it’s more like the crude thrill of hitting a Steinway with a sledgehammer no matter what has been played on it.
Perhaps we should have been paying closer attention all along. The following passage appears in Donald Trump’s ghostwritten 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, and while its veracity has been called into question, I believe that it embodies a psychological truth worth heeding:
Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye. I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.
When a self-admitted pugnacious philistine steamrollers into Kennedy Center and appoints himself chair, it’s a grim day for the arts. What concerns me more is the administration denying Black Americans their due place in our cultural gumbo. So much of the best music we have given the world was created by African Americans. Publishing and editing The Syncopated Times, I am reminded every day their music is our soul and our pulse of life.
After the Institute of Museum and Library Services placed its entire staff on administrative leave, Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, wrote:
“I only have my dream job because of the IMLS. I have been part of multiple IMLS grants over the years. Last July, the Louis Armstrong House Museum won the IMLS’s prestigious Gold Award, which was celebrated in DC….And all the people who made it happen are now out of a job. Museums and Libraries are under attack….
“They’ve come after the Tuskegee Airmen, after James Reese Europe, after Jackie Robinson…how long before they come after Louis Armstrong?… No one voted for this. No one campaigned for this. This is just cruelty, a bunch of weak, fragile men putting good people out of work because they’re afraid of history.”
For musicians, actors, artists, writers, curators, and librarians, “shut up and sing” is not an option. As much as we’d rather stay out of it, remaining above the current fray is a luxury we can no longer afford.
We are all in this now.
Andy Senior is the Publisher of The Syncopated Times and on occasion he still gets out a Radiola! podcast for our listening pleasure.
