On pyrrhic victories

If the Kennedy Center had a head it would so be in a cardboard box right now

The Kennedy Center is closing, and I’m thinking about the end of the movie Se7en. Specifically the part where Detective Mills (played by a young and luscious Brad Pitt), having just been presented with a cardboard box containing his wife’s severed head, points his gun at the man responsible (Kevin Spacey) and pulls the trigger.

This is known as a pyrrhic victory: the hero has won, but in winning, he loses. And this is an especially bleak example of the trope, because it’s not just that Brad Pitt’s wife is dead; it’s that Kevin Spacey killed her so that Brad Pitt would kill him. In pulling the trigger, Brad Pitt relinquishes his agency to the architect of his ruin.

Obviously, this is not a perfect analogy for what’s going on with the Kennedy Center. Among other things, no cardboard boxes with severed heads inside have appeared on the scene (yet). And yes, yes, there’s a compelling argument to be made that Donald Trump picked this fight, and lost it, and has nobody to blame but himself. Jeffrey Blehar, writing in National Review, put it best:

I think President Trump is many things, but a fool is not one of them; he knows exactly how much he is hated, and he is especially well-informed about who specifically hates him. He renamed the Kennedy Center after himself precisely because in his limited time left in office, he was amused by the idea of watching luminaries from the hated artistic class forced to bow and scrape and play in King Trump’s Beautiful Memorial Building. It really goes no deeper than that. The original source of most of his impulses — and most of his biggest errors — is vanity and ego gratification, after all.

You’ll find no argument here; all of this is true. Donald Trump, King of the Pissing Contest, news at 11.

And yet, what I keep coming back to is: just because Donald Trump insists on engaging in these idiotic pissing contests, we don’t all have to piss back. It is a choice to piss back. And the thing we’re all pissing on is a blameless cultural institution that needed our help and did nothing wrong!

After the announcement of the Kennedy Center closure, a certain contingent of lefty commentators could be found on Twitter, gloating. “Everything Trump touches dies!” they cackled, which I suppose is one way of looking at it. But it does sort of conveniently gloss over the part where in between Trump touching the animal and the animal dying, a whole bunch of other people came running in with knives and stabbed the animal 72 times — and that if this second thing hadn’t happened, the animal would have been fine, if slightly embarrassed at spending the next three years of its life wearing a really stupid outfit.

It’s just all very “look what he made us do,” in a way that fails to recognize where the power to cripple this institution actually lay. Donald Trump putting his name on the building was tacky and trollish and unbecoming of a President (business as usual, in other words), but it’s still just a name on a building. It’s graffiti. The damage to the foundations was done by the donors and ticketholders and artists who were so outraged by the graffiti that they decided to deprive the Kennedy Center of the resources it needed to keep the doors open and the lights on.

Is this the end of the world, no; could it be worse, of course. Let’s count our blessings that it was just the national seat of American culture Trump took an interest in, and not the pandas at the National Zoo. But there was another path available, one where instead of taking maximum umbrage and meeting Trump’s provocations in kind, performers like Philip Glass or Issa Rae just rolled their eyes and went about their business— which is to say, art, and which is so much more important and worthwhile than politics, and I refuse to believe I’m the only person who thinks so.

What I find bewildering, and genuinely kind of heartbreaking, is that these artists don’t think so.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why people who feel about Donald Trump the way my husband feels about UNC basketball (that is, people who once visibly recoiled when their wife unwittingly sauntered into the boudoir wearing lingerie in a certain shade of baby blue) might think that whatever damage done to the Kennedy Center is more than worth it for the satisfaction of having made the President look foolish.

But for anyone else, and especially an artist, to look at what’s happened here — not just the closure of America’s national seat of culture during a year when it would have been really incredibly wonderful to have it open, but the loss to the DC cultural scene, the displacement of the National Symphony Orchestra and National Opera, the however many thousands of artists and administrators and so on who just lost their livelihoods— and be like, “Yes, good, this is as it should be”? This, I understand less. It just seems like an awful lot of collateral damage, an awful lot of material harm inflicted on people who don’t deserve it and have done nothing wrong.

And yes, yes, none of this would have happened if Donald Trump had just not.

But also, none of this would have happened if he had, and everyone else had just not. And since Donald Trump is an egomaniacal goblin whose sole operating principle is I will do what I want and to hell with you, look, I don’t like it any more than you do, but someone is eventually going to have to grit their teeth and be the change they want to see in the world.

Or we could just keep laying waste to everything, forever, but I’d certainly prefer the other thing.