The Kennedy Center Offensive

On the culture war and the underground...

Ten weeks in, we now can see the entirety of the scope of Trump’s offensive in his war on the national culture.

He wants to end this war through the classic form of Overwhelming Force waged on all battle fronts at once: the university, the library, the museum, the school, the arts organization, the youth program, the cultural celebration, public television and radio, the performing arts center.

For years the Right has waged its attacks on these fronts separately. Today it feels as if it’s been concentrated in one big display of Shock and Awe. But if we are going to stay on the war metaphor, let us simply remember: Shock and Awe was a short-term tactic in yet another long-term war that was lost.

For the past two months the Kennedy Center has become a symbol of the culture war, and a battleground telling us who’s winning in it: the Empire or the People.

In February, President Trump elbowed his way into the chairmanship of Board of the Center, fired the Kennedy Center president, and replaced the Board members with toadlings, including Usha Vance and Sergio Gor, who has been described as a “right-wing DJ”, which sounds like exactly the kind of party no one would spend money to go to.

Here’s Trump’s Great Re-Replacement Theory in full effect. He has been nursing a boo-boo over Kennedy Center Honors artists like Norman Lear skipping White House events in his first term.

Since its founding the Kennedy Center has been a monument to JFK’s vision of American culture as expressed in two big, sometimes competing ideas: that American culture is not just all-world, but the ultimate form of homegrown soft power; and that American artists need to be uplifted in all their rambunctious diversity and protean creativity.

Over the better part of the past decade, my good friend Marc Bamuthi Joseph has been tending to the second part of this vision as the Kennedy Center’s vice president and artistic director of social impact, opening the doors to this old institution to let in light, air, and joy, and to welcome people back into what was always meant to be, but had not every really been, a people’s institution.

After a tumultuous month including an awesome viral moment in which JD and Usha were booed by a National Symphony (!!) crowd, Bamuthi and the rest of the social impact team was finally fired last week.

The Center is no longer about openness. It is about drastically narrowing the narrative of what American culture is, and then pummeling the shit out of us with it.

In a farewell video he posted, Bamuthi said, “The new leadership of the Kennedy Center is doing its best to disavow much of the literal color that has made this place special.”

In an interview with Democracy Now, he added, “The stated agenda as institutionalized in spaces like the National Endowment for the Arts severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity. The specific attack on gay, trans, and drag performers has narrowed the cultural radius at the Kennedy Center significantly.”

His interview is well worth watching in its entirety.

But if they think they’ve cut off the head and won the war, well — please don’t tell them — but it’s far from over. In fact, a new era of the culture war has only just begun.

TBH the Kennedy Center was never in the plan for us.

When we were all coming up together in hip-hop during the nineties and the oughts — a moment when culture and liberatory politics was coming together — we believed we could leverage change, maybe even a reversal of the onslaught of post-civil rights attacks against us, not through the old means of politics but through the irresistibility of culture.

We would dance ourselves into a new world in the millions of underground spaces we had made for ourselves. Sociologists used to call our movements subcultural. But then people bought into it — literally. Because of course they would.

By the middle of 2010s, against a real-life body count in the streets and the massive expansion of the politics of containment, we had ascended to heights of the culture that we never could have imagined: the loudest of movie grosses, the leadership of the most hoary institutions, the talk of the nation. Fuck subculture. We were the culture.

That is what Trump’s culture war has always been about — to attack the center of a more open culture by calling it elitist, divisive, exclusive, destructive, immoral, and anti-American. (It should be clear to all of us by now that all of their accusations are always projections of their true intentions.)

And so the Empire strikes back .... And instead of drag and hip-hop, it proposes shit like the January 6th Prison Choir.

Who the fuck would pay to see that?

And as our homie, W. Kamau Bell, cracked from the Center stage: “How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain Award?”

(There’s also an awesome April Fool’s piece circulating about a play called Trump! The Musical! Fake news that could still become real!)

Pity all the losers on the new Kennedy Center Board who will have to go and see all that shit. Until they start making attendance mandatory.

Because it’s not hard to see them following re-replacement and defunding and destruction with related imperatives to comply with a new national culture. Call it Trümpisch. You are no longer to enjoy or to think, but simply obey. Then, as Orwell once put it, ““You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.”

And this is why they have a problem. How do you attack a centerless center? The Kennedy Center isn’t a culture-leader anymore, if it ever was. I bet even my man would argue that he and his team were playing catch-up. The reality is that the culture is being shaped in a million other spaces out here — think of them as a network of guerrilla art spaces — than in the grand old institution on the banks of the Potomac.

They have another even bigger problem. No one can be ever given a choice between joy, healing, and diversity on the one hand, and despair, infirmity, and conformity on the other. It’s not even really a choice. The truth of this is apparent when we see that, to enforce their view of the world, they must create a system of compliance and a structure of enforced feeling.

That is why I say I have no doubt that we will win this culture war. My whole life I’ve seen how we win, even when we don’t expect to, because we see and deliver the world that most people want, one of freedom.

We still are the culture.

And if right now you’re hurting because you think we have lost the battle —and no, I know it does not feel good — I’m here to remind you how many years we spent in the underground.

If you’ve ever listened to poetry in a dingy backroom, or moshed in the pit at a dark graffitied club, or nodded to beats and rhymes in a loveworn community center, or watched dancers step and spin lively in a park or on a catwalk, or enjoyed the color, tilt, and mirth of some artist’s marks on an alley wall, you already know what it means to be part of the underground. To speak a language of a present and a future that power does not now and cannot ever command.

As Bamuthi says, “How can you be an American if you cannot hope?”

---

(A legendary piece by Lee Quinones)

---

The underground has been the space of possibility that describes our mass longing for a better world. These guerilla spaces are where we’ve thrived all these years, and they are where we’ll still be even after they’ve tried to eradicate us. In the seventies, New York cops used to say the graffiti movement was like a balloon — soon as you pressed it down somewhere, it swelled up somewhere else. We will not die, we will multiply.

Our time in the sun was fine. But even if darkness has descended, that is what we have always known. We’re still making the spaces where we can mount a real guerilla resistance — where the vision is clear, the fire is burning, and the best is yet to come.

Join us.