A Clarion Call from the Ruins of the Kennedy Center
Artistic integrity will always rule over moral turpitude.
Always.
And that is precisely why the so-called “Trump Kennedy Center” now stands as one of the most grotesque acts of cultural vandalism in American history.It is the arts doing what the arts have always done when confronted with corruption:
refusing to participate.
refusing to participate.
The board’s decision to slap Donald Trump’s name on the John F. Kennedy Center, a living monument to civic idealism, artistic excellence, and democratic imagination, is not rebranding.
It is desecration.
It transforms a public trust into a vanity project.
It converts a sanctuary of human expression into a billboard for a morally bankrupt administration that traffics in cruelty, division, historical erasure, and authoritarian spectacle.
And performing there now?
It is artistically vacuous.
To stand on that stage today is to lend legitimacy to something illegitimate.
It is to perform beneath a banner that mocks the very values that created American art in the first place: freedom, resistance, conscience, and truth.
As saxophonist Billy Harper put it with devastating clarity:
“I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name that represents overt racism and the deliberate destruction of African American culture.”
“I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name that represents overt racism and the deliberate destruction of African American culture.”
That is not “derangement.”That is memory.
That is heritage.
That is honor.
That is honor.
The administration’s response, sneering that “the left is mad about it” and accusing artists of “derangement syndrome,” only proves the point.
This regime does not understand art.
It fears it. And they should.
Because art cannot be owned.
It cannot be bullied.
It cannot be rebranded by executive ego.
And it refuses to lie politely while democracy is being strip-mined for souvenirs.
To my fellow musicians, writers, dancers, painters, actors, poets, this is the moment that will be remembered.
The Kennedy Center was never meant to be neutral ground for authoritarian vanity.
It was built as a civic altar to imagination, not a shrine to narcissism.
If the doors of that building now open beneath the name of a man whose administration assaults truth, degrades history, and monetizes cruelty, then we must make our own stages elsewhere.
That is not boycott.
That is continuity,the unbroken lineage of artists who refused the easy platform in favor of the right one.
The arts have always been civilization’s conscience.
When power rots, art does not applaud.
It withdraws, and in doing so, it exposes the decay.
The real derangement is pretending this doesn’t matter.
It matters.
And history is watching.
— Michael Jochum
Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
The latest wave of cancellations, from The Cookers, Doug Varone and Dancers, Chuck Redd, Kristy Lee, Rhiannon Giddens, Issa Rae, and the abandoned return of Hamilton, is not political theater.
(Note from Jenn: Find Michael on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mjjochum)
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