Look on my works, ye mighty

Surprisingly, this story ended up filling me with a certain Zen-like calm:

The leader of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has sent a letter threatening litigation against a musician who canceled an annual Christmas Eve jazz concert at the institution.

Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s president, sent the letter after the musician, Chuck Redd, canceled the concert in protest of the site’s new name, the Trump-Kennedy Center.

Mr. Redd had hosted the show for nearly two decades. But he said he would not hold the concert after the members of the center’s board of trustees, handpicked by President Trump, voted last week to change the name.

Mr. Grenell, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead the Kennedy Center as part of his second-term takeover of the institution, asserted that Mr. Redd had engaged in “sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left.”

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Mr. Grenell wrote.

He added, “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

I’m well aware that many and indeed most supporters of Donald Trump, should they encounter this story, will agree both that Redd’s refusal to perform is a form of bullying, and that “bullying tactics” are a bad thing. This is because stupidity is their superpower.

Six days before Christmas, lettering was affixed to the facade of the building, leaving the following words, “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.”

Mr. Trump, who had been calling for the center to be renamed for months, expressed surprise that his handpicked board had moved to change the name. “I was surprised by it,” he told reporters. “I was honored by it.”

I don’t think it’s particularly unlikely that Trump was surprised by this development, because stupidity is his superpower as well. This, the most essential of right wing virtues, forms the strongest bond between himself and his followers.

Of course this is all indescribably disgusting on multiple levels that don’t require explanation to non-cult members, and can’t be explained to members of the Cult of Stupidity.

Still, even as I read this story my moment of zen arrived in my memory of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

My favorite detail in this particular context is the wonderful line “The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed,” with the double meaning of “mocked,” i.e., to imitate (a mock-up), and to scorn.

Shelley’s sonnet reminded me with special force of the ultimate emptiness of the vanity of kings and tyrants of every description. And it did so through the force of art, which in turn reminded me of the essential truth of his dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. That Donald Trump, and all his works, and all his pomps, will one day be as forgotten as Ramesses II, the most celebrated pharaoh of the New Kingdom, but now remembered mostly because a statute of him inspired one of the great poems in the English language, is a delightfully calming thought, or at least I find it to be. As is the related thought that soon Donald Trump’s corpse will be moving through the various stages of putrefaction.

There is a passage in the Buddhist sutra on mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, starting with a body “swollen and blue and festering,” progressing to one “being eaten by…different kinds of worms,” and moving on to a skeleton, “without flesh and blood, held together by the tendons.” The monks were told to keep meditating until they were calm and a smile appeared on their faces.

Mary Roach, Stiff