Now that President Donald Trump has named himself chief cultural commissar of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, what shall we expect?
He names Mel Gibson and Kanye West to his first class of Kennedy Center honorees?
He stages a musical version of “Mein Kampf?”
He renames the Kennedy Center after some other Kennedy — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps?
Preposterous, of course.
Anyway, why should we care? The Kennedy Center’s just a tiny piece of the damage being done by this bitter bully who has nurtured his wounds for eight years and is now hellbent on revenge against anyone he believes has ever done him wrong.
So why should we care about his hammy hand taking over some sliver of American arts and culture?
Because for more than half a century, the Kennedy Center has represented not only song and dance and storytelling, it’s given us a mirror image of the best of who we think we are.
As Americans, as human beings with our talent and our ebullience on full display.
And far beyond what’s happening at the Kennedy Center, that’s exactly what Trump and his minions are taking away from the entire country in their attempted destruction of some of our most benevolent government institutions: our sense of who we are and the great generosity of the American spirit.
We’ve always been the world’s great benefactor, as befitting the world’s richest nation. For those of us born since the end of World War II, think about the national generosity that has stretched from the Marshall Plan that fed millions of starving, newly vanquished Germans, to the millions we’ve kept alive facing AIDS in Africa.
And now we watch as Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk wreck programs aimed at helping the world’s sickly and hungry and homeless.
Trump-Musk look at American aid programs and see numbers on a page. American leaders used to look at these and see suffering human beings and not bloodless arithmetic.
We were helping them and, in the process, helping ourselves — because the world loved us for such generosity. They may have hated us for other reasons but they loved us for our kindness. And we loved it, too, that image we had of ourselves as a loving, giving, protective people.
Did we give too much? That’s the argument the Trump-Musk people are offering now, knowing there’s an entire chorus of Americans who have always made that claim.
But they’d have a better argument if they had better control of their numbers.
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center declared that most Americans think about 25 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid.
In fact, Pew said, in the 2023 federal budget, $71.9 billion went to foreign aid.
Which is 1.2 percent of federal spending.
We spend a little, we get back a lot.
And not to be minimized, we get a sense of our better selves. That’s what foreign aid does, and that’s what we get from such cultural icons as the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
In both cases, it’s the face America shows the world — the face of ourselves at our best.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
The donation will be directed to help foster research conducted by faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and to advance innovative treatments.
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