The Desecration of the Kennedy Center
It would be hard to overstate the awe I felt when, shortly after the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, my mother took me to a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. To this day I remember sitting in the dark, watching the great Judith Jaimison perform her signature work in “Cry.” And there she was, almost six feet tall, a Black woman wearing a sweeping white dress and performing moves that, surely, pointed directly the presence of the holy. I was thirteen years old, scrawny, unsure, and adrift in a sense of my own inadequacy. But as I sat, rapt, next to my mother, I knew that in one way or another I wanted to live in service to art, and that, in this service, I too might put a drop of light into a dark world. The dance, and the dancers, were magnificent.
The Kennedy Center: derided as the great breadbox on the Potomac, its opening nonetheless represented a new era in Washington DC. No longer an overgrown swamp on the seam between the North and the South, an almost-city with no Metro, no sidewalk cafes, and no arts scene where the affluent and the influential dined on roast beef and steak at the Old Ebbitt Grill and staid was the standard (even beautiful women were condemned to dowdiness), Washington was on the brink of a transformation. Cultural backwater no more, Washington became a vibrant city of the arts and letters, and remained that way until approximately a year ago, when Trump and his gang began their reign of ruin.
Ah, but once upon a time, and as recently as last year, the Kennedy Center dazzled. Indoors, a great radiant dark red carpet, enormous windows facing the river, and those dazzling crystal chandeliers. For me, Alvin Ailey was just the beginning. “Pippin,” “A Little Night Music,” the Paris Opera Ballet. In that wonderful place, I had to hold myself back from bursting into pirouettes and leaps of joy.
Here in my house in New Jersey, we have just finished celebrating Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, and I can’t help but compare the Trumpification of the Kennedy Center with the defilement of the Jerusalem Temple at the hands of the Syrian Greeks, circa twenty-two centuries ago. Too much of a stretch? I don’t think so, and though it’s tempting to compare Trump’s debasement of American culture to the Nazification of German culture under Hitler and the bulldozing of Russian culture by socialist realism under Stalin, I’m going to stick with the Temple. And that’s because both the Kennedy Center and the Jerusalem Temple are one-offs, singular buildings that symbolize national destiny. The Temple was not only the locus of worship but also embodied (albeit in stone) a nation that understood itself to be in the service of a divinity that demanded moral order. The Kennedy Center, obviously, is not a place of centralized worship. But like the ancient Temple, it is a national treasure, an emblem of the greatness of American creativity and artistic genius: Now you can go there to see “Spamalot.”
According the story told in the books of the Maccabees, the Syrian strongman Antiochus Epiphanes IV wasn’t satisfied with merely despoiling the Temple with the blood of swine and installing an idol on the altar, he decreed that the study and practice of Judaism itself was illegal, punishable by death. The idea was that everyone in his empire would conform to one (Greek) religion and one (Greek) culture.
Antiochus also liked to throw lavish feasts. Just saying.
I very much doubt that Trump would actually physically befoul the Kennedy center with the blood of pigs, but he’s corrupted and besmeared it, and the nation as a whole, all the same.
JFK deserves better than this. We all do.
