Lee Siegel
Vladimir Putin will probably spend much of this Friday’s meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska distracting America’s megalomaniac by appealing to his vanity — congratulations on taking over the Kennedy Center! One aspect of the new America will definitely intrigue Putin. How is it that in the most advanced capitalist economy in the world, where a hyper-critical counterculture is the dominant rhythm of everyday life, Trump is managing to put in place the sunniness once enforced by the Soviet regime?
It is more than passing strange. In the Soviet era, so-called socialist realism was enforced in the fine arts, which depicted happy collective farmfolk; academics portrayed the Russian Revolution in lectures and books as the dawn of the world’s first workers’ paradise. The media published one glowing economic report after another; posters depicting radiant construction workers hung everywhere; new composers vied to embed heroic anthems to communism in their symphonies. A few lines critical of Stalin in a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Mandelstam read to a small group of friends resulted in a betrayal, the poet’s arrest and his death in a gulag. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” Mandelstam had once wryly written. “It gets people killed.”
A drab, Philistine approach to culture is essential to a repressive regime, and for the Philistine Trump and his band of intellectual and cultural mediocrities, attempts to coerce American institutions into an optimistic sameness blend seamlessly with the coarseness of their taste. From universities to the Smithsonian, Trump wants an official American culture that projects only the “greatness” of America, with no flaws or blemishes. He dismisses reporters who criticise him as “scum” or “evil”. He has made it clear that, from government agencies to private banks like Goldman Sachs, he desires economic statistics that report only positive news. Like a dime-store Lenin, his giant portrait now hangs in front of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington.
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