Less than a month before he was gunned down in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave a memorable speech — the last major one of his life — at Amherst College. He spoke at length about the role of art in a free society, discussing its functions of challenging the status quo and holding a mirror to the nation’s strengths, as well as its flaws. Importantly, he exhorted artists to always remain true to themselves.
“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture,” he said, “society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
Considering these words, it’s obvious why, when Congress debated what kind of monument they would build to honor the slain president, the consensus was that it would be most appropriate to build a living memorial in the form of a world class arts center to honor Kennedy’s ideals. When his successor Lyndon Johnson broke ground on the center in 1964, he did so with the same spade that had been used for the Lincoln Memorial in 1914 and the Jefferson Memorial in 1938. It was considered a sacred task.
For more than 50 years, the Kennedy Center has served as the capital’s premier cultural center — until now. Donald Trump, who has no concept of the meaning of either art or culture, had his flunky board commandeer Kennedy’s memorial by renaming it “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Performing Arts Center.” It’s bizarre that any living president, much less one who is still serving, would want his name on a memorial to a dead man, particularly one who is still revered by many Americans. But Trump is single minded in his desire to mark his territory no matter where his tinkle, to use a famous Nancy Pelosi term, splashes.
But all hasn’t gone according to Trump’s cultural coup. Many artists who have previously been honored to perform at the Kennedy Center, respectful of the former president who so poetically venerated their role in our culture and society, are now refusing to perform there. They don’t wish to sully this artistic institution and its history by participating in its seizure by a man whose ego is so large he insists on branding everything in sight, as if it’s the only way he can be sure he even exists.
The administration is threatening to sue these artists for millions, and no doubt they will try to find ways to intimidate and defund any organizations with whom they might be affiliated. But that won’t stop them. Artists, musicians, writers, film makers and performers of all kinds are rebelling, one of the most profound forms of resistance to a repressive regime.
In America, we’ve long had sharp political humorists, including Mark Twain — our greatest social commentator and acute observer of human nature — Will Rogers, Dick Gregory, Molly Ivins and, more recently, Stephen Colbert. Writers like Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Beatty and Joseph Heller, among others, work in that grand tradition. Political cartoonists have bravely sent up the powers-that-be for centuries. Singers, songwriters and musicians from Joan Baez, Odetta, Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples to Childish Gambino, S.G. Goodman, Jason Isbell, Rhiannon Giddens and Jesse Welles have written and sung truth to power.
But from time to time, our government will actually step in and cast a chill on the arts, demanding that they produce propaganda, or requiring the moneyed interests that fund their work enact censorship policies. Perversely, it’s times like these, when subversion and subtlety are required, that creativity flourishes.
The country endured one of the most repressive periods in the 20th century in the wake of World War II. After seeing the effects of fascism and coming to terms with the repression of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, you would have thought the U.S. would have celebrated its freedom and diversity of thought. Instead, the government, along with many institutions, retreated into a paranoid state, creating a tyrannous partnership with private interests to oppress dissent.
As part of the Red Scare of the 1940s, the government targeted the film industry, enlisting movie studios to blacklist those they saw as threats. The studios gamely went along, ruining the lives of a number of their creative talent who refused to disavow their pasts. That didn’t stop movies from telling the story of their time anyway.
Studios had “B” units, which produced the lower half of a double bill. After the war they were mostly manned by veterans who created what we’ve come to call film noir, a genre that reflected the dark, underbelly of an America that was being devoured by an irrational, paranoid faction determined to punish dissidence and nonconformity. Films such as “Kiss Me Deadly,” “In a Lonely Place” and “The Killers” came out of those units and told the story of an America that was profoundly traumatized by the years of the Great Depression and World War II.
Likewise, many well-known geniuses like Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, who were chased out of Europe by the Nazis, brilliantly exposed the hypocrisies and soul deadening conformity of mainstream American culture. Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and many others made incredible films that directly contradicted the edicts of studio bosses at the behest of the government.
These films, along with theatre such as Arthur Miller’s McCarthy era allegory “The Crucible,” and surreal, avant garde works like Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and Samuel Becket’s “Waiting for Godot,” tested the assumptions of bourgeois 1950s America and led the way to the creative explosion of the following decades.
While they didn’t know it at the time, all those oppressive scolds and tyrants of the McCarthy era achieved was to open the door to a period of intense inspiration and artistic innovation that influenced the American public far more powerfully than their show trials and polemics ever could.
Today we are seeing media companies being swallowed up by big tech oligarchs who are eager to work in tandem with the Trump administration for their mutual benefit. The last year has shown that his administration is ready to use its power to suppress opinions and dictate what artists and commentators may produce. There are no doubt plenty who will acquiesce to their demands. But the art is still coming, and it’s telling the real story.
One example is “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film that is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s post-Watergate novel “Vineland.” Set in a surreally rendered present day, it accurately captures the emotion and the aesthetic of our time, reflecting the relentless nature of our current challenge. Using satire and humor in the vein of an equally powerful film of the early 1960s, “Dr. Strangelove,” it exposes the grotesque, absurd nature of the Stephen Millers and Gregory Bovinos more accurately than a documentary ever could. We see the racist underbelly of our culture in ways that are both painful and hopeful.
This is what art can do, and we can expect to see much more of it in the months and years ahead. America’s artists will resist this latest attempt at dictating conformity in a hundred different ways. They will resist, they will refuse, they will mock and they will summon all their talent and creativity to tell the truth. There is no way that Trump and his lame attempt at branding America in his image can possibly compete with that.
As Kennedy said at Amherst, “The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.”
His name will be on that memorial long after Trump’s is relegated to the forgotten pile of obscure presidential failures. The artists will see to that.
