(N.B.: This is a light-hearted outline of potential performances at the Trump Kennedy Center)
Since President Trump took over the Kennedy Center, speculation has been rife as to how he will change its program. He purged the Center’s board because they did not “share our vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” and has promised to ax “drag shows and other anti-American propaganda.” The latter phrase has a distinctly totalitarian ring about it, recalling a time when art deviating from the leader’s preference was criminalized as “anti-Soviet.” The echo is, of course, deliberate. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last Thursday, Steve Bannon, the populist panjandrum locked in Politburo-like struggle with the tech oligarchs, said that he would “take the elites … down to the D.C. Gulag,” albeit “for just one night.”
As it happens, Bannon was referring to the Kennedy Center. Besides his Stalinist badinage, this low-rent Machiavelli made another, more startling prediction: that the venue would soon host the J6 Prison Choir (J6PC), whose constitution needs no explanation. The J6PC has only one listing on Spotify, a ghoulish auditive collage of Trump reciting the Pledge with a Xanaxed rendition of the anthem, edited to sound as coming from a deep mineshaft. Yet this record dates from March 2023, long before Trump’s return to office. Now that the Choir’s members are all comfortably pardoned, we may expect them to put on something cheerier, jubilant and colorful. Insofar as the current right sees outraging liberal propriety as an intrinsic good, it might use the J6PC to enact some epic-scale trolling. The mind reels at contemplating the possibilities.
For example, could we see a glittering paean to Trump, à la Mel Brooks’ The Producers? Anti-drag crusade notwithstanding, Trump’s style has always had a camp side to it, and few things are campier than musicals idolizing politicians. Or perhaps a dramatic staging of “J6” itself? We know that the President loves Turandot, but if there is one opera January 6 resembled, it is surely Tosca, a harebrained plot redeemed by its sheer hysteria and crumminess. A congenial spectacle could be made out of January 6, with the final blanket pardon offering the same improvement that a trampoline behind the parapet once produced in a famous Tosca performance.
To be sure, full-scale opera might be beyond the range of the J6PC. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a few spins on time-honored American songs. If so, I privately hope that the program resembles my conjecture below:
- “(Fraud in) Georgia on my Mind”
- “Go Take Your Guns to Town”
- “We Didn’t Start the Riot”
- “Tie a Yellow Rope Round the Ole V.P.”
- “Sittin’ on the Edge of the Dais”
- “(There’s Just One) Party in the U.S.A.”
- “American Idiot” (ft. YMCA)
Edited By: Eric Omorogieva