Sidebar for Plaintiffs

Last week I was at Lincoln Center for a superb all-Shostakovich chamber music program.

Whenever I listen to Shosti (my nickname, regrets, easier to type), I check to see when he composed each work. Was it BS or AS? Or, most wretchedly, DS? To place the work in one of the three categories, the year 1953 is key. It’s when Stalin died. (The first of the three pieces was BS; the next two, AS. Key: BS=before Stalin; AS=after Stalin; DS=during Stalin, but you figured that out, didn’t you?)

Stalin was the kind of guy who liked what he liked and knew what he liked. No arguments. What he didn’t like…well, he stopped everybody from being exposed to what he didn’t like, lest the masses be corrupted by it.

A prime example was Shosti’s awesome opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Stalin stomped out of the opera’s first performance in 1936 and immediately thereafter, his kultur kurse on Shosti was laid down. First came Pravda, which issued an editorial condemning “Lady Macbeth as ‘chaos instead of music’ and ‘intentionally unharmonious muddled flow of sounds’ that violated the principles of Socialist Realism.”

Then Stalin’s censorship bureaus stepped in, dutifully coming up with accusatory terminology, elusive enough to sound vaguely high-minded, and meaningless enough to drive the accused artist nuts trying to work out how he or she could correct whatever mistake he’d made that got him culturally cancelled. Because, until “the mistake” was corrected, the artist couldn’t perform or publish the work anywhere. That is, couldn’t eke out a living.

Even BS, Shostakovich was seriously physically ill off and on throughout his life and, to use an appropriately au courant metaphor, Stalin was a virulent anti-vaxxer.

I’ve assembled a partial glossary created by Stalin’s various censorship bureaus used to cancel Shostakovich and other artists’ work:

• Formalism
• Petty-bourgeois
• Abstract
• Individualistic
• Dangerous to Soviet culture, a/k/a “Socialist Realism”
• Destructive to the State.

Stalin’s cancel culture was serious stuff. The threat of ultimate cancellation hovered like a deadly drone over frail Shostakovich’s head for almost twenty years.

Now let’s consider Trump’s efforts to cancel culture he doesn’t like. How many mistakes is he making in his attempts to imitate Stalin? Or Hitler?

Stalin and Hitler were not geniuses but, aside from the paranoia which warped their brains, they were not stupid. Trump is stupid.

Stalin had murderous minions whom he kept loyal, i.e., terrorized, by having the NKVD (KGB predecessor) disappear and liquidate one or two every once in a while. A cleansing process, of sorts.

Instead of loyal minions, Trump has manager-minions, because he is incapable of doing anything himself (see above, re stupid). Despite the general notion that all the Republicans in Congress and the Cabinet are scared of him, the only liquidations I’ve observed have been effected by individual Republicans themselves — by losing elections or otherwise leaving Congress. (I’m terming this action “self-liquidation.”)

However terrifying Trump and his MMs are to our immigrant countryfolk, he hasn’t scared the people of Minnesota or all the other cities where he’s sent his stormtroopers. If you want to scare people, you don’t send an undisciplined mob theatrically costumed as LOTR orcs. And Tom Homan and/or Kristi Noem do not have the, uh — what’s that word? — gravitas of Heinrich Himmler or Lavrentiy Beria.

And Trump’s attempt at creating a Gulag is floundering, thanks to Congresspeople, dedicated non-profit civil rights agencies, journalists and our own loud voices raised in disgust and contempt. (One surprising loud voice is Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker’s. Call it NIMBY, if you will, but it’s still an objection.)

Let’s see. Who else isn’t scared of Trump? A whole heap of judges, states Attorneys General, civil rights lawyers and federal grand juries. Trump’s cabinet hasn’t even managed to deliver a persuasive simulacrum of terror, although their serial TV romcom is succeeding marvelously in buffoonery.

And how about Bad Bunny? Seriously asustado.

But where Trump and his MMs really fail at successful national terrorism — and never forget that everything Trump has done in his life has been a failure, except the 2016 election which was much less of a Trump success than an abject GOP collapse — is in coming up with a condemnatory vocabulary with a smidgen of Soviet pseudo-intellectual panache.

Here’s a short list of Trump’s cancel culture lingo:

• Real loser
• Sad
• Bad
• Stupid
• Shithole
• Nasty
• Fake
• “A total disaster, really, really terrible, just a disaster.”

Oh wow. Totally scares me to death. And it must have scared away all the prominent artists from performing at the Kennedy Center — oh wait! Trump didn’t “cancel” them; they canceled Trump. They themselves are performing elsewhere. A total Trump screw-up. Their cancellations forced Trump to shut down the Kennedy Center.

I can hear the ghost of Stalin saying, “Huh?”