Mixing high and low culture is what this country’s all about.
Mixing high and low culture is what this country’s all about.
P arty at the White House! Trump turned 80, and the country’s approaching its 250th birthday, so why not throw a UFC cage-fighting event? It did not please everyone. Granted, it may have been a bit déclassé, but it’s better than bare-breasted transsexuals on the White House lawn.
“What?” says the person suddenly concerned with public decorum. “That never happened.”
“Yes, it did.” You load up Grok, ask it for confirmation, show the person a news story. “See?”
“Well, that’s Grok. You can’t expect truth from a trillionaire disinformation artist.”
Sigh. “Okay. Let us google it. Here. See?”
“Well, okay, but that’s inclusive. That’s validating and accepting of marginalized people. Trump’s party on the White House lawn made no effort to acknowledge the contribution of trans people in the Revolution. How do we know that Betsy Ross wasn’t really Ross Betsy?”
Some cage-match critics noted that previous presidents were interested in High Culture. JFK invited Pablo Casals to the White House, hobnobbed with Lenny Bernstein. True! The idea that Kennedy would listen to the concert and close his eyes transfixed by Casals’s interpretation of the moody fury of Elgar’s cello concerto, though, seems a bit much.
You can, on the other hand, imagine Trump really enjoying the U.S. Army Band playing the Star Wars theme. He has a keener grasp on the American demotic, which is why the party had the tone of a Super Bowl instead of a concert where well-bred people gradually lose interest in a Charles Ives symphony.
But we can do both, no? The great thing about American art is its mix of high and low. Rude and sophisticated. It’s all there in the clarinet glissando in Rhapsody in Blue, a naughty lewd prelude to exuberant sublimity.
This is not to say that Vanilla Ice is Gershwin, or UFC fighters are the modern version of Jerome Robbins’s choreographed Sharks and Jets. The culture is cruder than it was at the Bicentennial, but it’s not because a guy from Queens is president. It’s the result of the leftist long march through the galleries and concert halls, the delight in shocking the bourgeoisie, the equation of meritocracy and standards with privilege and oppression, the sophomoric belief that crudity equals authenticity. They hate rude populist art only if they suspect that the creator might have the wrong opinion on tax rates and Gaza.
The brilliant heritage of the art of Western civilization has a depth and breadth that came from a restless questing spirit, and while it was often pushing back against conservative conceptions at the time, the political right ought to be its protector and champion today. When the moderate and decent grow weary of the depredations of modern culture, we’ll be here, ready to share what’s good.
And when we run out of the good stuff, then we can do cage matches again.