Intent on ruling all U.S. life, now Trump wants to boss the arts around

Another twist in a story already bent out of shape. Besides holding sway over all American life, now Trump wants to run the art world, beginning with making himself chairman of the board for the Kennedy Center.

The Kennedy Center is a performing arts venue deemed a “national cultural center,” But the way things are going in the Oval Office, it’s only a matter of time before Trump moves in on the visual arts.

Blacklisting, then, will come. Trump’s action at the Kennedy Center conjures a tragic time in history that surfaced in 1977 when a list was found in England detailing 16,500 artworks that Adolf Hitler had tagged “degenerate.'' .

The painters who were blacklisted included Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso - even Rembrandt, because he portrayed Jews.

To show his countrymen what he considered degenerate, Hitler put on an exhibit 650 of the condemned works with red stickers that said, “Paid for by the taxes of German working people.'' Is there anyone on the planet who thinks Trump won’t pull the same stunt?

Republicans in Congress tried censorship in the early ‘90s when they condemned Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic art. And they used a similar tactic by pointing out the U.S. tax dollars that supported it.

So, what should art look like? Hitler believed that it should be a refuge, an escape from reality into a world of bucolic innocence, of Arcadian rural settings uncontaminated by real life, by a “rotting world,'' as he put it.

But even before the Mapplethorpe affair, the notion of suitability in art raised its thick skull. That’s when the U.S. government censorship of art began ahead of Germany's.

In 1934, a painting hanging at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. – “Our Fleet's In'' by Paul Cadmus - was removed at the insistence of the U.S. Navy because of the subject matter: sailors reveling with women.

Wondering why the Navy department didn’t call for the removal of the Rogers an Hammerstein song “There is Nothing like a Dame” enthusiastically sung by sailors in the Broadway musical “South Pacific.”

In another instance of art censoring, the U.S. government allowed a foreign power to censor a show on American soil. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art canceled a show of biblical artifacts from an East Jerusalem museum in 1982 as a result of pressure from the Arab world, which contested Israel's control of the area.

Then there’s the Rev. Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association and activist bent on combatting “indecency” in art, who has said that picture-making should be “morally and spiritually uplifting.''

But even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda and public education, thought that allowing only uplifting art to the exclusion of all others was a bad idea: “To have only classicism on the one hand and harmless trivialization on the other is not enough for our time,'' he said.

Hitler disagreed and removed 16,500 artworks from view, “Art must be part of the community, amenable to external demands.''

All of which makes a German movie made in 1926 prophetic. In Fritz Lang's ``Metropolis,'' he showed the result of social control: In the future, people would move in depersonalized, orderly ways - silently and anonymous.

Hitler lives.

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