Lowbrow And Loving It - How The Trump Ballroom, The Arc de Trump, And The Kennedy-Trump Center Shout 'One Of Us'!

It is very hard for the coastal elites to understand let alone accept Donald Trump. How could this buffoon, this Borscht Belt tummler, vaudevillian, and crass, bourgeois hack ever possibly be in the White House?

But there he sits wreaking havoc.  In only one year he has sent bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razed the heart and soul of the federal government, its bureaucracies.  He has sent SS Gestapo storm troops into American cities to find, arrest, and deport illegal migrants and to intimidate the inner cities, challenged international order with his bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities and ousting of an elected leader, Maduro of Venezuela, and taken over the world's largest proven oil reserves in a greedy coup. 

He has said 'basta!' to DEI and woke and challenged affirmative action programs at every public and private institution in the country, thus returning the black man to a life of want and oppression; and he has unleased the private sector, oil and gas resources, and individual enterprise, sending America back to the Robber Baron era while enriching himself. 

 

But what angers the fervid Left most is his reconfiguration of the cultural ethos of Washington.  By building a grandiose ballroom, a chandeliered, Carrera marble floored, Venetian sconced Hollywood version of magnificence, he has put to rest the coastal elitism that has persisted for two centuries - that patrician nobility, that Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, Park Avenue Englishness, that Robert Frost-Pablo Casals, Empire furniture filled Jacqueline Kennedy White House. 

America might have aspired to Camelot, but has always been a bourgeois nation of glitz, glamour, starlets, soap operas, and fast cars.  Las Vegas and Hollywood are America's iconic homes, all tinsel, sequins, and high heels, grand imitations of pyramids and palaces, outlandish places far from Hyde Park, Kensington, or Holland Park.  Americans may stay glued to Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs, plummy Edwardian series about the British upper classes, but are more at home with pot roast. 

There is nothing Old English about us. In our fantasy we are at home in a pasha's harem, in the Arabian nights, in a Persian palace.  We love their kitsch, gold-inlaid peacocks, scimitars, incense, and flowery pantaloons, in love with the whole garish excess of it all. 

 

Donald Trump is 'One of Us' - not a trace of Nantucket-Martha's Vineyard envy, not an iota of desire for Chippendale and Townsend furniture, Revere silver, and Copley originals.  He loves bright and shiny new things, gaudy things, things that show off wealth and popular taste.  And so do we, children of new money, envious of five Lamborghinis in the garage, fifty-room mansions, arm candy, diamonds and ruby tiaras. 

The Left, as far removed from the old patrician culture of New England as you can get, has somehow inherited its measure. With all the hollering and fol-de-rol about race, gender, and ethnicity, progressives still hew to that old American saw - the presidential president; a man like Joe Biden - uninspiring, uninteresting, an old white caretaker, the kindly butler who dresses properly, a man of quiet but determined purpose. 

Enter Donald Trump, this unwelcome outlier from bourgeois America with none of the above - a rankling, bullying man who has not an ounce of patience for fools.  He calls out stupidity to its face, hammers the preposterous self-importance of reporters in the press room, lectures the EU, the Group of Seven, and NATO without the usual polite circumspection expected of world leaders.

His supporters love his braggadocio, his outlandish style, his political incorrectness, and his bombast.  Finally and hopefully once and for all the faux seriousness of the Left will be gone, done and buried. Americans have been lectured to, badgered, and hectored by the Left for their insensitivity to the needs of the black man, the brown man, the lesbian, and the transgender; their cow town mentality, their insufferable backwater, cracker ignorance. 

Finally they have a president who says 'Bullshit!' to all that, who gives the finger to know-nothing reporters, and does hilarious Borscht Belt imitations of Indians, wobbly foreign ministers, and dumbbells. 

So when Trump announced the building of the ballroom, the renovation of the Trump-Kennedy Center into a popular entertainment center, and the erection of an Arc de Triomphe-like monument, the Left went predictably crazy.  How could he?  How could he build such crass, tasteless, gross travesties?  How could he destroy the historical integrity of the White House with such a grossly tasteless monstrosity? Turn the nation's home of high culture into a Disneyland of rides and cotton candy? And build such an outlandish, horrific monument to himself?

The Trump era is one of the most revolutionary in American history.  His is not simply a refashioning of the socio-economic landscape, but the cultural one.  Washington is finally the people's capital, not just that of the coastal elites.  The Left, haranguing about communitarian collectivism, inspired by dead Marxists, deconstructionists, and European socialists, and on the way out the laundry chute never saw it coming, misread Trump and misinterpreted his intent.  His was not only a political populism but a cultural one.  Washington would be the new Tinseltown, the showy, nouveau riche, glamourous capital of a renascent America. 

Talent, intelligence, ability - the new TIA to replace DEI - is white, middle class, and attractive, not because of any presumed racism but because of demographics.  As Hamilton knew, you dumb down when you go inclusive.  Engineered inclusivity is bound to fail, while competitive inclusivity - the best and the brightest - is sure to win. 

Trump will host the WWE - the professional wrestling league - at the White House, an invitation sure to please his one-of-us supporters, and guaranteed to send the Left into paroxysms.  Of all the lowbrow, trailer trash, tobacco-spitting insult to America, they shout, once again missing the point.  The old way, the old, staid, business-as-usual government is a relic, a discarded thing of the past. 

'Get over it', said Washington, DC Mayor for Life Marion Barry to white residents when he won an election with 100 percent of the black vote and zero percent of all-white Ward 3; and so it is with Donald Trump.  'I'm here to stay', he says, 'love it or leave it' and with his usual bombast dismissed the thought of anything else.  

Crass - How The Left Will Never Accept That Trump Is As Bourgeois As They Come And As American As Apple Pie

Donald Trump keeps hammering on - one maddening, incomprehensible, unjustifiable action after another that enrages the Left.  Is it Venezuela, Iran, China, or Russia that keeps them up at night? No, it is the renovation of the Kennedy Center and the new Arc de Trump.  

The howling is as loud as its ever been.  Not even ICE has upset progressives this much, driven them to such frenzy and apoplectic hate; and it is because they can do nothing that the hysteria becomes even more fevered and wild.  It is all done with private money - from his enormous wealth and from that of his rich Mar-a-Lago, Wall Street, New York real estate cronies. 

And what is it that has thrown them into such apoplexy? Only the outrageous, unconscionably bourgeois taste of the man.  First it was the new White House ballroom, garish, Rococo, all glitter and gilt, mirrors, and marble, chandeliers and sconces...an abomination, a travesty.  How could he have?  How could he have destroyed the very fabric of American culture and turned the White House into some whore house?

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body. 

The ballroom, so outrageously tacky and out of place in the old, historical, revered building, would be one mighty fuck you to the presumptuous, elitist, insular cadres of progressive Washington.  

Yes, it would be decorated with appointments from Walmart and Target, yes it would have the faux grandeur, the preposterous imitative look of the grand ballroom of Versailles re-imaged by Hollywood, yes it would be bourgeois, lowbrow to its very posts, lintels, and sconces. And this was the point. 

 

Now the Kennedy Center, a reflection of the patrician tastes of the former President, the president of Robert Frost and Pablo Casals, who gave state dinners for the literati, the upper class, America's aristocracy and heirs to the cultural heritage of Europe, will be turned into a theme park, another Disneyland, a horror of bad taste and lowbrow ignorance. 

Worst of all, the most unbelievably crass, outlandish, gross, and disgusting display of boorish lack of culture is Trump's plan to build 'a monument to America', his term for an Arc de Triomphe-looking monstrosity, a tower of pure ugliness and horrific taste. 

What the Left will never understand, what they cannot possibly admit, what sticks in their craw and chokes them is the fact that Donald Trump is the first real, true American president.  He embodies not the faux cultural ambitions of a lace curtain Irish President whose father was a bootlegger, Irish bar fighter, and Nazi sympathizer and whose money got his son elected, but the actual, true, historical culture of America. 

As much as liberals cannot stomach the thought, Trump with his yachts, mansions, resorts, hotels, and arm candy; his Hollywood and Las Vegas persona, his unabashed love of glitz, glamour, and an ostentatious show of wealth and the marvelous eye candy, shiny chrome, low-cut dresses, and all night parties it can buy, is what 100 million of Americans voted for and more importantly want to be. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, one of us. 

He is the first president to understand and embody our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment rectitude. Issues have never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward was visceral and absolute.  There was no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus was the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Most are sons and daughters of Italians, Irish, Jews, African slaves, and border-bound Salvadorans.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

We are not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. We are decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our cars We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, teachers, mechanics, and rent collectors.

Progressives hate Trump's America for all its lowbrow instincts. They hate every sequin, every strand of tinsel, every waft of cheap perfume, every high-bosomed line dancer, ever bit of glitter.  They do not hate Trump because of his alleged and presumed crimes and misdemeanors, but because of who he is.  

Trump is an American president whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of America who want what they can't have - a bourgeois, cotton candy St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls. 

How to deal with such a betrayal?  No more Camelot, Kennebunkport, or Hyde Park; no more Renaissance Weekends, summers on the Vineyard or even vacations in Maui; but a full-blown, tinsel-bedecked, Rockettes, over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza.  Impossible to have envisaged by the coastal elites, a true American has acceded to the White House.

The furor of the Left is elitism at its very worst.  They simply cannot stand that a man with this foul, horrendously crass taste is in the White House.  Pennsylvania Avenue is crowded with beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, white women coming and going from the White House.  An Administration of white privilege, pure segregationist temperament, flaunts its brazen racism not with sophistication driven by the lowest form of cultural expression. 

 

They simply cannot stand Trump's exuberance, his uninhibited showmanship, his indifference to serious matters, and his bullying imposition of everything cheap and idolatrous. 

Get over it, man up, face facts - the era of presumptuousness, pomposity, and faux reformist sanctimony is over.  The American progressive Left is a dour, dumpy, humorless lot.  No joy, no exuberance, no delight - just morose, morbid predictions, scurrying criticism, and abominable hatred.  

Which is why progressives hate Donald Trump so much.  He has swept aside the doom and gloom of Washington, the fearmongering, manipulative insidiousness of the Left.  He has opened the windows, raised the flag, sung the National Anthem, and welcomed legions of baton-twirling majorettes, oompah marching bands, and the great American lowbrow culture in all its exuberance. 

The ballroom is symbol of this deliberate insouciance, an in-your-face statement that the real America, the people's America is back and back with a vengeance.  Love it or leave it, we are here to stay.

Trump Renamed The Kennedy Center And Nobody Came - Or Is It Because Classical Music Now Is Just Granny's Night Out?

Natasha Littleton was an occasional, somewhat indifferent patron of the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC's home of classical music and named after former President John F Kennedy assassinated in 1963.

 

Natasha renewed her subscription when her twin daughters were old enough to appreciate a formal concert and were well-behaved enough to sit through a longish performance.  This might be the impetus to get her back in the swing of high culture.  She had attended concerts, recitals, operas, and ballet when she was much younger; but found herself falling asleep during the pianissimos.  

She appreciated classical music but never really like it.  Most times unless there was a lot of tympanum and loud brass she was bored silly, and wondered why she was spending her Saturday nights cossetted and cooped up in a somber recital hall instead of going out dancing. 

Besides, she was a closet rock fan.  The concerts were dutiful pilgrimages, a nod to her patrician upbringing.  A well-brought up girl learned piano, went to concerts, took ballet lessons, and grew up to be a model of cultural sophistication, and Natasha was a good example.  She was brought to concert halls at an early age, banged away at the piano under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Goldberg, who lectured her each and every lesson.  'Adagio, my dear, does not mean fortissimo.  Play Schubert gently, gently'; but it never took, and Natasha made Brahms sound like honky-tonk. 

Once free of the harridan Mrs. Goldberg and the hectoring insistence of her mother, Natasha never again sat in a concert hall until the present day when, since old traditions die hard, she felt it was time to introduce her daughters to fine art. She started them off with a bang - The Nutcracker, a ballet with enough musical Sturm und Drang to keep anyone awake and all children interested - and then proceeded on down the line until she finally decided to see if culture had really taken a hold, and she bought tickets to the New York Philharmonic's Brahms' Symphony No. 4.  If a child could sit still through that drudgery, she was hooked. 

 

Little Elena had to go pee three times, and Katarina had to follow her - 'Is that what Brahms does to people?', Natasha embarrassed and discomfited wondered as she took the twins to the lobby.  The outing was a flop - Natasha herself was glad for the bathroom stops and wondered how long to Intermission, and vowed never again. 

Richard Dare, CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic put it this way in an article in the Huffington Post (The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained)

But this was classical music. And there are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.

I don't think classical music was intended to be listened to in this way. And I don't think it honors the art form for us to maintain such a cadaverous body of rules.

Dare, however, skirted the real issue - except for the rousing symphonies like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique or Beethoven's Ninth or the great organist J. Power Biggs'  bellowing, blasting Bach D Minor Toccata and Fugue, most classical music is a thudding bore. There is no way to change what Schumann wrote.  The conductor can tweak the score here and there all the while respecting the composer, but it still is Schumann, an endless score of dull, musical story lines which would put anyone to sleep. 

Music critic Peter Heilman wrote an article for Esquire (the New York Times turned him down, for although its readership had veered away from the classical and into the weeds of politics, high culture was still part of the editorial ethos of the paper) which laid it on the line:

If there were ever a total waste of time, a self-important show of faux culture and patrician recidivism, it is a classical music concert.  It is only because a persistent arrogant fidelity to European high culture that these plodding, throbbingly boring pieces ever get played.  Outside the concert hall - in clubs, outdoor concerts, everywhere on social media and up and down the radio dial - there is real, live, relevant music.  Blues, the great black experience, American roots, a heady blend of folk, rock, and country, salsa and meringue, Brazilian samba...all shout relevance.  Those immured in concert halls, falling asleep, fidgeting, and wanting to be anywhere but there, are a dying minority, and may they rest in peace.  Classical music is finished. 

Realizing the death throes of the genre, concert hall owners rely on the canon. The fewer concert-goers there are, the more conservative owners and producers feel they must be.  Why take the chance of alienating both old and young with a complex Liszt or Benjamin Britten?  Ironically but not surprisingly, the more predictable and over-performed the music, the less people enjoy it and stay away in even greater numbers.

Most symphony orchestras rarely play any 20th century music, and even 'the sprightly Mozart' cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  Compare this to a rock concert.  

Recently American President Donald Trump added his name to the Kennedy Center, and in a howl of protest from Washington's dyed-in-the-wool progressives, they stayed away in numbers.  The concert hall, once filled, was no empty. 

Now, to be honest, most of those who stayed away were secretly happy, for now there was a cover for their absence.  Subscribers had for years hesitated before writing the check, and now had good reason for doing so.  They were protesting the arrogant lunacy of Trump but were finally and once and for all ridding their lives of the intolerable boredom, the wasted, sedentary hours, the pretention, and the dumb supposition of understanding musical phrasing and key. 

There were rumors that Trump had plans to turn the Trump-Kennedy Center into a high-rent residential complex once the place went bankrupt - nice location overlooking the Potomac, convenient to downtown, easy access, and guaranteed fine living with all the amenities. 

'Putting the cart before the horse', wrote one unhappy editorial writer for the Washington Post who went on to claim that classical music was by no means dead, and that the next Democrat administration would revert to the Center's original name and restore Washington's high-cultural reputation. 

'Whistlin' Dixie', replied music critic Heilman, echoing the sentiments of all those patrons who had happily cancelled their subscriptions and were now back in the American saddle.