The Kennedy Center Is Empty and in Peril

I’m thinking, for the moment, of a 1960 orchestral work called "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. It is music pitched past pitch of grief, furious shrieks of anger, cacophonies of tone clusters and percussive noise that suggest in sound the intensity of a painting by Franz Kline or Allen Ginsberg's poem “Howl:" "Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!"

That's how angry people who love the Kennedy Center are over Donald Trump's wanton, unnecessary and vindictive destruction of it. Although the president caricatured it as an elite institution, and slandered it as anti-American and a danger to youth, the Kennedy Center was perhaps the most authentically populist major arts center in the country. It offered free performances for passersby; it attracted the black-tie crowd and guys in cargo shorts; it jostled tourists and locals together — and if you spent even a moment eavesdropping, it was a proper Babel of tongues. The ushers were friendly, the wine was terrible and sometimes mice would scamper down the aisle as the National Symphony Orchestra was playing Mahler.

Like so many federal buildings, it had years of deferred maintenance, water damage and needed new internal systems throughout. It wanted care and love. Instead, it got Donald Trump, who is holding it hostage.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.