Calling all Artists and Animal Lovers

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

—John F Kennedy

 

The long arm of our present Administration knows no bounds—food, health defense, media, books, Medicare, grants, and now art and animals. Folks, is this really what we wanted?

 

Why is Our President chairing the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C

Oh yeah. He wants to control everything. What we listen to, what we watch, what we read, what we eat. He doesn’t even seem to take pleasure in winning, but wants to crush the opponent. Do you think he and his cohort are cutting back on any of their luxuries?

Why is this happening?

We, the people, are more than him. He showed his colors before the election, and people voted for him anyway. Long ago, I heard that when an organization interferes with your food, they are a cult. Watch them, no matter how good they sound.

"In 1958, former President Eisenhower signed bipartisan legislation to create a national arts center in Washington. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, raised $30 million for the project. The building was dedicated to Kennedy two months after his assassination in 1963.”

Fast forward to 2025:

"Several entertainers have announced that they are severing ties with the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., now that the President has assumed the chairmanship of the organization."

Screenwriter Shonda Rhimes known for her work on shows such as Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder. Actress and producer Issa Rae, who created and starred in HBO's Insecure, announced on Instagram that she was canceling her upcoming sold-out appearance. When visiting the Kennedy Center's website for her event, users encounter a 404 error message.

"Hey D.C. Fam," she wrote, "Thank you so much for selling out the Kennedy Center for 'An Evening With [Me]'. Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I've decided to cancel my appearance at this venue."

Singer and songwriter Ben Folds announced on Facebook that he is resigning as an advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra.

"Not for me," he said. He thanked his colleagues, and added, "Mostly, and above all, I will miss the musicians of our nation's symphony orchestra – just the best!"

The rock band Low Cut Connie also pulled out of their scheduled performance: "I was very excited to perform as part of this wonderful institution's Social Impact series, which emphasizes community, joy, justice and equity through the arts. Upon learning that this institution that has run non-partisan for 54 years is now chaired by President Trump himself and his regime, I decided I will not perform there."

If that wasn't enough, now he is going after The US Fish and Wildlife Service, the nation's only government agency dedicated to conserving plants and animals.

*Vox has learned that the agency has frozen its vast portfolio of international conservation grants. The agency, which supports wildlife protection in the US and overseas, ordered many organizations it funds to stop work related to their grants and cut its communication with them. According to USFWS's internal communication, which was shared anonymously with Vox, the agency has frozen grants for international projects that amount to tens of millions of dollars.

 
 

The freeze jeopardizes dozens of projects to conserve wildlife worldwide, from imperiled sea turtles in Central America to elephants in Africa. Grant programs from the federal government protect species whose habitats straddle borders, and they also benefit Americans by reducing the risk of pathogens like coronaviruses from spilling into human populations.

Stop this human train wreck.

Stand up to a bully. 

 

The Muse Newsletter

 Expect the second free issue here on March 1, 2025

Motive and Opportunity

I’m sitting in the car waiting for my grandson.  Moments ago, I read a post by Grant Faulkner, who in 2016 was the Executive Director at National Novel Writing Month.

“I’ve been remembering the 2016 election this week,” he wrote.

Normally, he said, November draws thousands of writers; however, after Trump’s election in 2016, writers’ stories literally collapsed.

It wasn’t just the NaNoWriMo writers. (Writers who commit to write 50,000 words for a novel in 30 days.) Many of his friends and professional writers stopped writing.

They were traumatized.

Faulkner said before that November, he didn’t believe in writer’s block, but then he saw that writing is difficult and sometimes impossible for a battered brain.

Trauma and depression can turn off the spigot of creativity.

 

“It’s easy to think that our art is trivial when it’s up against such a menacing and malevolent block of history as we’re living through, but the opposite is actually true: our art isn’t trivial; it’s what can deliver us.”

 

Faulkner said that James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953, Notes of a Native Son, 1955) expressed the importance of the role of the artist better than he could:

 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

 

Howard Zinn’s quote, “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” provided Faulkner with hope because we need to see that “compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness” are a part of every era.

 

Don’t let them destroy your connection to life and the joy of living. Appreciate the world we live in and the fantastic beauty surrounding us.

I look up from behind the steering wheel and notice that the great flock of Canadian Geese I admired before settling into this page have dwindled to about 25.

The 25 are scattered about the grass, their white breasts glowing like snow patches left after the bulk of snow has been absorbed into the ground. Some are preening, and occasionally, one—male or female, I can’t tell the difference –will spread their wings in a morning wake-up stretch, revealing dark feathers beneath.

(Like some of us, some geese are slower to wake up or are simply basking in the glory of the day before getting to work.)

The day is overcast. As am I.

As I reflect, I wonder how many of us who lived through the Second World War are alive today. Do they despair that the U.S., the land of the free, the home of the brave, has opened its doors to Tyranny?

 I don’t know.

 

Monty Python:

“Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how’d you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.”

--Dennis (Michael Palin)

 

I went to sleep last night more hopeful than days earlier. I wondered if somebody had thrown a monkey wrench in our electoral process.

Could it be that the numbers are off? Could more than 50% of the voting population see the danger of what just happened with the Presidential election?

Motive and Opportunity?

Do you have questions regarding the outcome of the election??

Oh, I know, Trump got the 270 electoral votes that declared him a winner. Harris conceded. It was over just like that.

The losers were standing around, going, “Huh?”

No one stormed the Capital. No hangman nooses hung from platforms. No one was clubbed to death. Harris promised a peaceful transfer of power. No one was yelling that the election had been stolen from them. No person clutched the white house carpet like a feral cat we were trying to extract from its cage.

That was quick and easy.  Sap, it was over.

But wait!  Were we really that wrong? Did we so believe in the goodness of humanity that we ignored the fact that a man running for the Presidency once kept speeches of Hitler on his bedside table? Did we forget that the President-elect once said he wanted his General to be like Hitler’s Generals?

 

See, people don’t remember WWII.

You might say I’m stupid or ignorant but look at it.

Number one: Trump faces criminal charges which, if elected, he can pardon.

Number Two: One of the wealthiest men in the world, who gave one person per week a million dollars to persuade them to register—no tampering with the election- he didn’t tell them how to vote. This person fired his workers because they went on strike. This person said the “Alpha Males” should run the country.

 “Musk, who has a history of sparring with regulators, also faces government investigations into his companies that could result in more lawsuits or even criminal prosecutions.”—Bloomberg News

“Bloomberg has identified more than half a dozen ongoing legal fights in which Musk is a defendant or a plaintiff, as well as about a dozen others involving his companies.”

Before the election, Elon Musk said, “If Trump doesn’t win, I’m F*****.”

After the election, he made 60 million dollars.

(“Tesla headed for a $2 trillion valuation after Musk’s ‘big bet’ on a Trump win.” Analysts say.") –story by Breck Dumas.

 

Follow the money, say the lawyers.

Motive and Opportunity? ask the courts.

Indeed, we have motive. Do we have opportunity?

I don’t know.

“Elon Musk said his satellite internet venture Starlink now has more than 1,500 active satellites in orbit above Earth.” –story by Kellen Beck

Could any of those satellites interfere with the ballots and their outcome?

Does anyone know?

Does anyone else smell what I smell?

Hey, there are good rats too, my kids had one.

Calling All Entrepreneurs, or Maybe I’m Whistling Dixie

 

For you Entrepreneurs, I am passing on information I got from one of my favorite writing gurus Steven Pressfield. He borrowed it from Dan Sullivan, a Strategic coach.

 

(So, this is he said, he said, she said.) 

 

Sullivan says that every entrepreneur must make this statement: 

 

“I will expect no remuneration until I have created value for someone else.”

 

(That just says you shouldn’t expect to be paid unless you give your precipitant something of value. It’s doesn’t say you shouldn’t create to give value to yourself.)

 

To further quote: “Create value” is a hard-boiled business term. There’s no art to it. No romance. But you and I, as writers and dancers and actors and photographers, live exactly by that dynamic—whether we realize it or not.

 

“We write a book. It’s got to find readers. It’s got to sell. It has to ‘create value’ for the person who lays out hard American greenbacks for the privilege of scanning through its pages. Otherwise, we’re not artists; we’re artistes. (A person with artistic pretensions.) We’re living in a dream world.”

 

 

For a long time, I have written because I liked being in a “Zone.” That is going with the flow, entering into a no-time space. But if being in the zone doesn’t produce anything of value, then I might as well be meditating. At least not expect to be paid for spewing my thoughts onto paper.

 

This is a hard look at the facts.

 

“Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t” (The title of one of Pressfield’s books.) Not that you shouldn’t write; you should keep doing it until your work isn’t sh*t. That’s his point.

 

 

 

I’ve followed blogs, only to have them drift away, or I got tired of them and just stopped reading. 

 

I know those writers have put time and effort into writing their posts. They are sharing their lives, but readers, of which I am one, have so much time, and where we use it becomes of primary importance. 

 

I’m sure that applies to you as well.

 

I wonder, as a blogger, if I have added value. 

 

Yes, at times.

 

Some say blogs are passe’. I don’t know. Seth Godin, a primer blogger, blogs every day and says that everyone ought to. It’s a process. It teaches us to observe, to think of something every day that we haven’t thought of a million times before. But that’s for our own edification.

 

I do believe that expressing oneself creatively has value to oneself whether anyone sees it or not. Most creatives who are are expressing themselves in some manner, are not out in the streets raising a ruckus. They just love doing whatever they are doing—writing video games, making videos, painting, sewing, knitting, painting, you know, whatever.

 

As a blogger, I’ve been learning, and I am grateful to all the readers who have traveled with me. 

 

I’m at a crossroads. Should I keep blogging, or is it time to move on?