Good and bad news in the White House’s push for more balance and less bile.

G reetings from the Swamp, quiet this last week in August and balmy rather than hot and humid. I’m in Baltimore for yet another memorial service, my fourth this summer, so, for a pick-me-up, I added a tour of the White House to my plans. I hadn’t seen the public rooms since the ’80s so I queued with a hundred or so fellow tourists for a self-guided amble. I’ll write about my visit soon.

I also visited four of the eight Smithsonian museums tagged for new, in-depth monitoring and redemption, according to a detailed, let’s-work-together August 12 letter from White House culture honchos to Smithsonian boss Lonnie Bunch. As a follow-up, on August 21, the White House released a raft of examples of Smithsonian race-baiting, fake history, DEI promotion, gender dysphoria ballyhoo, Hate America First ideology, and art that appalls in content — an expensive, commissioned portrait of the liar and fraud Dr. Fauci tops the list — and in quality. On August 19, President Trump tossed a Truth Social grenade at the Castle. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” he wrote, “where everything discussed is how horrible the country is, how bad Slavery was. . . . Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” And, as a grace note, “WOKE is BROKE.” Agreed.

First, it’s “We’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” Then it’s “You’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good, baby, you’re no good.” Then, via Trump, his own bad cop, with change on the agenda and channeling everyone’s inner boondocks, “You can do it the easy way, or you can do it the hard way.” This might have come from The Godfather, Shakespeare, or the Book of Exodus. Pharaoh, as hubristic as anyone in Washington, did it the hard way. Trump said the Smithsonian will get the same scrutiny as do the elite universities that are now in his sights and sweating.

What to make of all this? The Smithsonian has three problems, or call them challenges, weaknesses, liabilities, prejudices, delusions, manias, or, at worst, strikes-you’re-out. Its philosophy, personnel, and politics make for a fine pickle indeed. I think nothing better expresses the Smithsonian’s philosophical mindset than the horrifying “Talking About Race” curriculum promoted in 2020 by the Museum of African American History and Culture and the malicious, delusional 1619 Project, which the New York Times engineered and published but the Smithsonian sponsored. “We’re a great legitimizer,” Lonnie Bunch said of the 1619 Project. He promoted Black Lives Matter from the days of the Ferguson race riots in 2014.

“Talking About Race” first appeared in Smithsonian teacher materials in summer 2020 and reflects Black Lives Matter talking points. “Whiteness,” to be deplored and remediated, includes objective, rational, linear thinking, hard work, self-reliance, planning for the future, Christianity as a norm, “the King’s English,” the primacy of property, “win at all costs,” “be polite,” Barbie looks (though Ken doesn’t get a shout-out), “master and control nature,” and on and on. Whiteness is, children were taught, “an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others.”

Is this the Smithsonian we want? Is it sound scholarship? Of course not. It’s propaganda. When pelted with garbage over “Talking About Race,” the Smithsonian said “oops” and pulled it from its teaching materials, but the institutional and top brass philosophy never changed. That’s the mindset, packed to the gills with false values, and it’s not only on race. The climate hysteria, settler colonialism, trans ideology, and identity politics are core engrossments. Together with race, they infect a chunk of the Smithsonian, especially at the art museums and the history museums. As much as I admire Bunch for establishing the African-American history museum and for building its gorgeous home, he should have been canned then. He believes this trash.

Not that the Smithsonian’s curators need Lonnie Bunch to tell them how to think. They’re as woke as can be, and Washington woke. They hate Trump. Subway-grinder-hurling, “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi” hate. The four I visited — the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the American History Museum, and the Air and Space Museum — reflect the philosophy. This leads us to the curators, who develop the exhibitions, arrange and interpret the art in the permanent collection spaces, and lead the charge in acquisitions.

There’s good news and bad news. Two years ago, I reviewed ¡Presente! at the American History Museum, a large space of which is the temporary home of the Museum of the American Latino. That’s the new soon-to-be-built or, I hope and pray, soon-to-be-axed Smithsonian museum. I nearly danced the Macarena when I got to the museum and learned that ¡Presente! was lo que el viento se llevo, which I think is Spanish for “gone with the wind.” Bulldozed, to make way for a show opening next year on the history of salsa — the dance, not the condiment.

No Scarlett and no Rhett in ¡Presente! Only victim after victim in this maze of duplicity that claimed to be the Smithsonian’s account of American Latino history. The Trump salvos at the Smithsonian draw much from the exhibition, which covers 5,000 square feet, concocting as it does a running theme of oppression by the gringo. What were the curators behind ¡Presente! hoping to achieve? They wanted a corps of young visitors to leave the show resentful, angry, guilty, disempowered as individuals, and hopeless. They think that’s education.

As part of the Smithsonian’s debug and resurrection, I’d suggest again that Congress kill the billion-dollar Latino museum Frankenstein. “Latino” is a fake, insidious classification, since what we call “Latino” or “Hispanic” encompasses a dozen, at least, very different cultures with little in common. A Washington-based, government-owned museum would inevitably present an artificial history with federal politics as the filter. Privileged would be heroes and stories set in Washington, not those in L.A., Miami, Santa Fe, South Texas, New York, and dozens of other places in the country. I’d send money to the local museums so they can tell their own stories. When Latino congressmen slammed ¡Presente! for its left-wing poison, Bunch and Latino museum jefes said “Oops, nada más,” promised the salsa show, and served tapas. Build this monstrosity and it’ll be “always más.”

I visited the Air and Space Museum, which was packed with happy tourists looking at the Apollo 11 command module, Wright brothers’ planes, John Glenn’s Mercury capsule, and, my favorite, a 1959 Corvette, from the era when cars were art. My nose for intellectual, moral, and economic fraud drew me to what the Trump sleuths missed. That’s “Aerospace and Its Changing Environment,” the Smithsonian’s premier climate con gallery and an insistent, simplistic shrine to cant.

Fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, cars, agriculture, and airplanes heat and, gradually, destroy the Earth, I read over and over. Bird-killing wind turbines and solar panels made in China will save the Earth. So sayeth Bill Nye, an idiot, and Kofi Annan, not a terrible person but an irrelevancy, as are the new climate satellites that, I learned, see climate apocalypse now. They’ve been operational since the 1980s, but the Earth’s 4 billion years old. The climate’s always changing. We don’t know why, but the exhibition peddles certainty and the Green New Deal. I think the Smithsonian staffers who organized it are incurious, rote thinkers. Here in Vermont, and I admit we’ve got lots of zanies in places of power, cow farts loom large among those obsessed with the weather. At the Smithsonian, brain farts are a bigger problem.

The bad news is that the climate show is permanent, as far as the museum’s master are concerned. The good news is that the bulldozers, shredders, rear loaders, cart tippers, and trash compactors — having razed ¡Presente! — are well oiled, warmed up, and ready to go.

Good and bad news about the Smithsonian American Art Museum, too. The Shape of Power, the museum’s race-driven American sculpture survey, closes in two weeks. That’s the good news. I’d seen it before, quickly, when it opened, but didn’t spend long enough to absorb it. I wrote that it was both bad and dull — a trick, since a bad show’s easy and fun to mock — but this clunker left me cold. It’s a bore in part because I’ve seen so many Smithsonian museums like it.

This round, I read the labels and looked closely at the art. Washington owned slaves. White marble sculpture expresses racial hierarchies (an old woke saw, I know, but it would be news to Michelangelo and Bernini). The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings and racism in America were of a piece. The border wall’s bad. What does a more equitable future look like, the curators ask, one freed from colonialism, oppression, and racism? Most of the art’s mediocre, and that’s diplomatic.

I think the Smithsonian’s art curators — and this includes the American art museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Renwick — pick their themes, outline their labels, and then look for art that fits. The exhibition that develops is, as a consequence, gratuitous and polemical. The art’s secondary; an illustration or, worse, a target. American sculpture’s a vast subject running from gravestone carvers in early New England to Hiram Powers, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Louise Nevelson, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, and hundreds more. Few focus on race. A curator can cherry-pick and make any point he or she wants. The National Portrait Gallery just redid its galleries of portraits from colonial times to 1900. Out of Many, the new America 250 display, is mostly about slavery and the conquest of Native American tribes. Can’t the curators do anything else? These are part of the story but are made to be the story.

The Smithsonian can do better and has. State Fair: Growing American Craft, a new exhibition I saw at the Renwick Gallery, is both engaging and illuminating. The Renwick, across from the Old Executive Office Building, specializes in American craft. The exhibition spotlights crafts from a dozen or so state fairs from the late 19th century to today, with quilts galore, seed art, a chapel made from gold fringe walls and piñata corncobs, ceramics, knitwear, and lots of other media, everyday and far-fetched, some kitschy and very fun. I’ll write more about it in a couple of weeks.

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work, which opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October, is unlikely, I’m relieved to say, to horrify. When I learned a few months ago that the Smithsonian would give Moses — to us, in southwestern Vermont, a local luminary along with Norman Rockwell and Robert Frost — I wondered what would happen. The worse thing said about her was that she’s actually from New York, a couple of miles from the Vermont line. Was she a stealth white supremacist, the granny Klannie of Eagle Bridge? No, it’s a look at her art and life “shaped by ingenuity, labor, a doggedly positive outlook and a distilled understanding of a life well lived.” I hope the show delivers. The Moses family, prolific here, are deft with pitchforks.

On my sweep through the Smithsonian, I didn’t get to the other Trump target museums. The Museum of the American Indian, the contemporary art-heavy Hirshhorn, the Museum of Natural History, and the African American History and Culture Museum were spared my red wig, aviator sunglasses, and fake mustache disguise.

All of my bons mots take us to politics, raw reality, and a choice between the easy way and the hard way. In the last two weeks, I’ve read predictions of gloom and doom, intellectual evisceration, and, of course, the rise of the new Nazis in the face of the Trump reforms. On the Smithsonian’s horizon are state-approved history, mythmaking, and an assault on multiple voices. That’s what we have now. What we need is more balance, fewer curatorial polemics, and space for the art to commune directly with visitors.

Do these undermine what’s called the Smithsonian’s independence? The Smithsonian isn’t independent, however much academics, artists, art critics, the staff, and Georgetown bien-pensant society believe otherwise. Its buildings are owned by the government. So are its collections, from the Spirit of Saint Louis to the Hope Diamond, the pandas at the zoo, and the Obama portraits. Nearly all its employees are federal workers, incidentally, the most perk-endowed cohort in the history of day jobs. The Smithsonian gets two-thirds of its money from Congress. Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, signed the August 12 White House letter noting that change is in the air and giving the Smithsonian a long to-do list. He pays the Smithsonian’s bills, more or less. Nearly all members of the Smithsonian’s fiduciary board are either elected officials or political appointees.

Now, a slice of my philosophy, or a note on what should be obvious. Everyone working for the government, in government digs, and spending government money is accountable to a higher power, and I don’t mean God, Allah, Zeus, Baal, or Gilgamesh. The curators at the Smithsonian don’t have tenure. They work in government museums. They need to show — and naturally possess — a dollop of restraint and respect for balance. That’s both common sense and good politics.

Asking what interests the visitors is a good thing. When living off tax dollars, poking sticks in the collective eyes of half the country is a bad thing. It’s impolitic, but it’s also hubristic and self-aggrandizing. “Keep it positive for America 250” is a perfectly reasonable mandate. The Smithsonian can do it the easy way or do it the hard way.