Crass - How The Left Will Never Accept That Trump Is As Bourgeois As They Come And As American As Apple Pie

Donald Trump keeps hammering on - one maddening, incomprehensible, unjustifiable action after another that enrages the Left.  Is it Venezuela, Iran, China, or Russia that keeps them up at night? No, it is the renovation of the Kennedy Center and the new Arc de Trump.  

The howling is as loud as its ever been.  Not even ICE has upset progressives this much, driven them to such frenzy and apoplectic hate; and it is because they can do nothing that the hysteria becomes even more fevered and wild.  It is all done with private money - from his enormous wealth and from that of his rich Mar-a-Lago, Wall Street, New York real estate cronies. 

And what is it that has thrown them into such apoplexy? Only the outrageous, unconscionably bourgeois taste of the man.  First it was the new White House ballroom, garish, Rococo, all glitter and gilt, mirrors, and marble, chandeliers and sconces...an abomination, a travesty.  How could he have?  How could he have destroyed the very fabric of American culture and turned the White House into some whore house?

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body. 

The ballroom, so outrageously tacky and out of place in the old, historical, revered building, would be one mighty fuck you to the presumptuous, elitist, insular cadres of progressive Washington.  

Yes, it would be decorated with appointments from Walmart and Target, yes it would have the faux grandeur, the preposterous imitative look of the grand ballroom of Versailles re-imaged by Hollywood, yes it would be bourgeois, lowbrow to its very posts, lintels, and sconces. And this was the point. 

 

Now the Kennedy Center, a reflection of the patrician tastes of the former President, the president of Robert Frost and Pablo Casals, who gave state dinners for the literati, the upper class, America's aristocracy and heirs to the cultural heritage of Europe, will be turned into a theme park, another Disneyland, a horror of bad taste and lowbrow ignorance. 

Worst of all, the most unbelievably crass, outlandish, gross, and disgusting display of boorish lack of culture is Trump's plan to build 'a monument to America', his term for an Arc de Triomphe-looking monstrosity, a tower of pure ugliness and horrific taste. 

What the Left will never understand, what they cannot possibly admit, what sticks in their craw and chokes them is the fact that Donald Trump is the first real, true American president.  He embodies not the faux cultural ambitions of a lace curtain Irish President whose father was a bootlegger, Irish bar fighter, and Nazi sympathizer and whose money got his son elected, but the actual, true, historical culture of America. 

As much as liberals cannot stomach the thought, Trump with his yachts, mansions, resorts, hotels, and arm candy; his Hollywood and Las Vegas persona, his unabashed love of glitz, glamour, and an ostentatious show of wealth and the marvelous eye candy, shiny chrome, low-cut dresses, and all night parties it can buy, is what 100 million of Americans voted for and more importantly want to be. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, one of us. 

He is the first president to understand and embody our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment rectitude. Issues have never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward was visceral and absolute.  There was no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus was the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Most are sons and daughters of Italians, Irish, Jews, African slaves, and border-bound Salvadorans.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

We are not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. We are decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our cars We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, teachers, mechanics, and rent collectors.

Progressives hate Trump's America for all its lowbrow instincts. They hate every sequin, every strand of tinsel, every waft of cheap perfume, every high-bosomed line dancer, ever bit of glitter.  They do not hate Trump because of his alleged and presumed crimes and misdemeanors, but because of who he is.  

Trump is an American president whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of America who want what they can't have - a bourgeois, cotton candy St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls. 

How to deal with such a betrayal?  No more Camelot, Kennebunkport, or Hyde Park; no more Renaissance Weekends, summers on the Vineyard or even vacations in Maui; but a full-blown, tinsel-bedecked, Rockettes, over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza.  Impossible to have envisaged by the coastal elites, a true American has acceded to the White House.

The furor of the Left is elitism at its very worst.  They simply cannot stand that a man with this foul, horrendously crass taste is in the White House.  Pennsylvania Avenue is crowded with beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, white women coming and going from the White House.  An Administration of white privilege, pure segregationist temperament, flaunts its brazen racism not with sophistication driven by the lowest form of cultural expression. 

 

They simply cannot stand Trump's exuberance, his uninhibited showmanship, his indifference to serious matters, and his bullying imposition of everything cheap and idolatrous. 

Get over it, man up, face facts - the era of presumptuousness, pomposity, and faux reformist sanctimony is over.  The American progressive Left is a dour, dumpy, humorless lot.  No joy, no exuberance, no delight - just morose, morbid predictions, scurrying criticism, and abominable hatred.  

Which is why progressives hate Donald Trump so much.  He has swept aside the doom and gloom of Washington, the fearmongering, manipulative insidiousness of the Left.  He has opened the windows, raised the flag, sung the National Anthem, and welcomed legions of baton-twirling majorettes, oompah marching bands, and the great American lowbrow culture in all its exuberance. 

The ballroom is symbol of this deliberate insouciance, an in-your-face statement that the real America, the people's America is back and back with a vengeance.  Love it or leave it, we are here to stay.

Trump Renamed The Kennedy Center And Nobody Came - Or Is It Because Classical Music Now Is Just Granny's Night Out?

Natasha Littleton was an occasional, somewhat indifferent patron of the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC's home of classical music and named after former President John F Kennedy assassinated in 1963.

 

Natasha renewed her subscription when her twin daughters were old enough to appreciate a formal concert and were well-behaved enough to sit through a longish performance.  This might be the impetus to get her back in the swing of high culture.  She had attended concerts, recitals, operas, and ballet when she was much younger; but found herself falling asleep during the pianissimos.  

She appreciated classical music but never really like it.  Most times unless there was a lot of tympanum and loud brass she was bored silly, and wondered why she was spending her Saturday nights cossetted and cooped up in a somber recital hall instead of going out dancing. 

Besides, she was a closet rock fan.  The concerts were dutiful pilgrimages, a nod to her patrician upbringing.  A well-brought up girl learned piano, went to concerts, took ballet lessons, and grew up to be a model of cultural sophistication, and Natasha was a good example.  She was brought to concert halls at an early age, banged away at the piano under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Goldberg, who lectured her each and every lesson.  'Adagio, my dear, does not mean fortissimo.  Play Schubert gently, gently'; but it never took, and Natasha made Brahms sound like honky-tonk. 

Once free of the harridan Mrs. Goldberg and the hectoring insistence of her mother, Natasha never again sat in a concert hall until the present day when, since old traditions die hard, she felt it was time to introduce her daughters to fine art. She started them off with a bang - The Nutcracker, a ballet with enough musical Sturm und Drang to keep anyone awake and all children interested - and then proceeded on down the line until she finally decided to see if culture had really taken a hold, and she bought tickets to the New York Philharmonic's Brahms' Symphony No. 4.  If a child could sit still through that drudgery, she was hooked. 

 

Little Elena had to go pee three times, and Katarina had to follow her - 'Is that what Brahms does to people?', Natasha embarrassed and discomfited wondered as she took the twins to the lobby.  The outing was a flop - Natasha herself was glad for the bathroom stops and wondered how long to Intermission, and vowed never again. 

Richard Dare, CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic put it this way in an article in the Huffington Post (The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained)

But this was classical music. And there are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.

I don't think classical music was intended to be listened to in this way. And I don't think it honors the art form for us to maintain such a cadaverous body of rules.

Dare, however, skirted the real issue - except for the rousing symphonies like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique or Beethoven's Ninth or the great organist J. Power Biggs'  bellowing, blasting Bach D Minor Toccata and Fugue, most classical music is a thudding bore. There is no way to change what Schumann wrote.  The conductor can tweak the score here and there all the while respecting the composer, but it still is Schumann, an endless score of dull, musical story lines which would put anyone to sleep. 

Music critic Peter Heilman wrote an article for Esquire (the New York Times turned him down, for although its readership had veered away from the classical and into the weeds of politics, high culture was still part of the editorial ethos of the paper) which laid it on the line:

If there were ever a total waste of time, a self-important show of faux culture and patrician recidivism, it is a classical music concert.  It is only because a persistent arrogant fidelity to European high culture that these plodding, throbbingly boring pieces ever get played.  Outside the concert hall - in clubs, outdoor concerts, everywhere on social media and up and down the radio dial - there is real, live, relevant music.  Blues, the great black experience, American roots, a heady blend of folk, rock, and country, salsa and meringue, Brazilian samba...all shout relevance.  Those immured in concert halls, falling asleep, fidgeting, and wanting to be anywhere but there, are a dying minority, and may they rest in peace.  Classical music is finished. 

Realizing the death throes of the genre, concert hall owners rely on the canon. The fewer concert-goers there are, the more conservative owners and producers feel they must be.  Why take the chance of alienating both old and young with a complex Liszt or Benjamin Britten?  Ironically but not surprisingly, the more predictable and over-performed the music, the less people enjoy it and stay away in even greater numbers.

Most symphony orchestras rarely play any 20th century music, and even 'the sprightly Mozart' cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  Compare this to a rock concert.  

Recently American President Donald Trump added his name to the Kennedy Center, and in a howl of protest from Washington's dyed-in-the-wool progressives, they stayed away in numbers.  The concert hall, once filled, was no empty. 

Now, to be honest, most of those who stayed away were secretly happy, for now there was a cover for their absence.  Subscribers had for years hesitated before writing the check, and now had good reason for doing so.  They were protesting the arrogant lunacy of Trump but were finally and once and for all ridding their lives of the intolerable boredom, the wasted, sedentary hours, the pretention, and the dumb supposition of understanding musical phrasing and key. 

There were rumors that Trump had plans to turn the Trump-Kennedy Center into a high-rent residential complex once the place went bankrupt - nice location overlooking the Potomac, convenient to downtown, easy access, and guaranteed fine living with all the amenities. 

'Putting the cart before the horse', wrote one unhappy editorial writer for the Washington Post who went on to claim that classical music was by no means dead, and that the next Democrat administration would revert to the Center's original name and restore Washington's high-cultural reputation. 

'Whistlin' Dixie', replied music critic Heilman, echoing the sentiments of all those patrons who had happily cancelled their subscriptions and were now back in the American saddle. 

Heavenly Bodies, The Real Foundation Of Conservatism - Beauty And The Ugly Women Of Social Justice

Bob Muzelle looked out at the White House from a bench in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue.  He was feeding the pigeons, nibbling at a ham and cheese sandwich, and wondering exactly why he was sitting here alone, disconsolate, and without the comfort of one of the beautiful young things coming and going from the seat of power.  

 

It wasn't that Bob wanted to change his stripes.  God forbid! He had been a lifelong progressive and would never think of backing down from that principled aerie.  The world needed more compassion, concern, community, likeminded association, and yes, collectivism; and he would fight for social justice for all his livelong days. 

It was just that the journey, however satisfying it had been in political terms, had been a washout when it came to good times.  One thing about progressives, he had to admit, there was no room in the canon for superficiality, externalities, and bourgeois attention to looks. As much as he hated to say it, the standard issue progressive woman was as ugly as sin - beautiful on the inside of course, filled with an inner charm and loveliness, but whatever that irresistibility was, it stayed deep within these wiry-haired wretches. 

'Maybe I'm being too harsh', he said as the pigeons he was feeding flapped off in a flurry after a young boy ran into the flock, startling them and sending them to the other end of the park.  'There was Esther Pilchman', he remembered, Jewish looking but with a Biblical, Mediterranean beauty as he imagined Jezebel or Delilah; but too many underground meetings, too many sunless summer days in the basement apartments of co-conspiring socialists, too little sleep and too many devil dogs had left her pudgy, sallow, and drawn - more suited to a Great Neck split level than a pasha's harem.  

'Or Patience Flowers?'  She had potential, Bob remembered.  She was at least blonde, which alone gave her a certain appeal, but in keeping with the ethos of the movement, never washed it, an anti-bourgeois sentiment as expressive as her refusal to wash both sides of the dinner plates. The bourgeois world is too stuffed to the gills with things for me to add even an iota.’

'Things' were never just things, but meaningless gestures, inane pastimes, distractions, and inanities.  Everything around her - dress, posture, attitude, preference, furniture, and accommodations were all bourgeois, signs of intellectual indolence and indifference. 

'And of course...'; but Bob stopped here before naming another of his colleagues.  They were all a dismal lot, and in comparison to the raving beauties walking up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, a sorry, tired-looking, ragged bunch. 

Bob had taken ugliness in stride, as a matter of course and as a sign of inner worth; but as he got older, immured in a Bethesda split-level with his hatchet-faced wife of thirty years, his eyes, thoughts, and desire turned to the Republican Party.  Trump's women were all lookers, women in positions of power who put on make up, had their hair done, wore designer suits, and were stunning examples of the deification of beauty. 

OK, maybe Kristi Noem was a bit too aggressive with the make up and eyeliner, a bit tarty and pasty-looking, and the other Cabinet women tried a bit too hard to look great; but the interns, the aides, the second and third in line were stunners, bright young things with that particular innocence and glorious good looks that shouted success.

Progressive women never got over this reverse ethos - the rest of America was trying to look Hollywood- and runway-ready while they never bothered to change their underwear, proud as they were of their 'female scent'. 

What was worse, the movement seemed to attract unappealing women.  From the days of the Jewish cabals on the Upper West Side, to the feminist clutches of the 70s, to the pierced, blue-haired, overweight harpies of Antifa, progressivism drew souls from the most unattractive, ugly corners of American society and let them loose. 

The Republican party from its patrician days, to the brush-clearing Reagan and Bush years, through one administration after another, was a crowd of beautiful people, wealthy, golf playing, Nantucket summering, tanned and healthy people who had no shame in parading their beauty, their stylish fashions, their perfect smiles, flaxen, silken hair, cornflower blue eyes, and a symmetry valued through the ages as the mark of female perfection. 

Bob had never even gotten within fifty feet of women like that and wouldn't have known what to do if he had.  There was something intimidating about beauty and the confidence that it instilled, something elite, upper class, indomitable. 'I never even tried', Bob said as the pigeons once again flocked around him as he tossed them bits of his lunch.

He never even had a proper wedding - that would have been too bourgeois, and his wife, as deeply committed to the progressive cause as he, adamantly refused.  Her parents were eager to splurge for their only daughter - an expensive band, ice sculptures, filet mignon, Moet Chandon champagne, and the finest French wines - but Corinne was having none of it.  They signed a few papers at City Hall, got drunk with friends in a Dupont Circle basement, and went back on duty the next day. 

A Republican wedding! Ahh, now that was something to write home about.  He remembered attending one, the marriage of the daughter of the Ambassador to the Court of St. James and a young Wall Street financier.  The only reason he had been invited was an old boy connection, a college friendship that had remained desultory at best for years; but in any case there he was amidst beauty, plenty, and shameless extravagance. He had loved it, and the memory stayed with him for years. 

Bell curve notwithstanding, there were no unattractive women at the wedding.  They were all beautiful and well-heeled, stunning, bright, and sunny while he sat their with his hatchet-faced wife now of many years, feeling as left out and irrelevant as ever. 

Now, Mrs. Wentworth's establishment was well-known in Washington power circles as the go-to place for sexual 'comfort'.  Adele Wentworth was a madame of impeccable honesty, trust, and secrecy; and as importantly managed over twenty engaging, seductive, and talented women. 

‘Anything you want', a colleague had once told Bob many years ago - a gift for good marketing and management - but she did indeed have everything from dark Persian seductresses to the most stunning Iowa farm girl blond ingenues. 

That was the whole point of prostitution at this level - not just an unencumbered roll in the hay, but a sexual fantasy, a delight, a dream; and so it was that for the first time in his long marriage Bob considered the possibility.  The more time passed, the more demanding the desire became until he began to make inquiries, where and how; until finally, up to here with stifled sexual urges, the biological clock ticking (he wasn't getting any younger), and the empty days and nights taking their toll, Bob consulted Mrs. Wentworth.  

'What would you like?' she asked, and the rest was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.  The girl was so nubile, so young, so fresh and beautiful, and so attentive, he quickly forgot that she was only a commercial lover.  That was exactly what Mrs. Wentworth had always promised - an out of body experience, an encounter in your dreams not your reality 

It is too much to ask for Bob to go to the dark side.  His progressivism was too ingrained, innate, and permanent to give up; but he finally got it, and now he understood.  There was indeed an existential side to the political divide, and he had chosen the miserable, scratchy, unpleasant, and ineffably unattractive one.  Conservatives were not chattel to political fantasy.  Their individualism, belief in free enterprise and expression, acquisition through merit, and uncommon rejection of idealism gave them a leg up on beauty.  It in fact was at the very heart of conservatism, its hallmark, its ethos and meme. 

Bob kicked a pigeon for no reason other than it was there, so mired in his own miserable life.  The beautiful blonde woman from Mrs. Wentworth was only a stranger passing in the night, and he returned the next day to his predictably sodden marriage, job, and future.  'Goddamn it!', he shouted at the pigeon as it careened off into the bushes.