Larry Wilson: As a boorish president tries to revise history, and art

For my sins, whenever the current president — an oft-bankrupt businessman who I heard made some scratch playing a mock-tough boss on a reality TV show — signs an executive order, I get a copy of it sent immediately to my inbox.

Since this unusual fellow has made part of his political bones by claiming that those of us in the Fourth Estate are really just fake news, I’m not quite sure why his highly experienced 27-year-old press secretary feels the need to feed the press so quickly with the latest from the current president’s poison pen.

By the administration’s logic, aren’t we just going to tart it up with our false mumbo jumbo?

Anyway, they all come very quickly, verbatim, and I’ve gotta confess up front that I rarely open the emails. Like most of us, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and the senders never got the memo that was sent — what, 30 years ago? maybe that’s the problem — saying that all-caps in your subject field is an internet no-no. Yelling, and all that. Most days, I’ve got actual work to do. Horseman, pass by.

But this one missive with a White House return address appeared at a lull in the action — 3:55 p.m. PDT Thursday — and lured me in with its loud come-on: “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY.”

Nothing wrong in theory with that idea, even when it’s shouted.

So I click on the click bait, and, man alive, are we swimming in the deep end now.

While it’s hard to believe that our current president spends a lot of time in museums, busy as he is planning fancy Gaza resorts, someone in his administration has darkened the cultural door, and has noticed what is indeed the amazing transformation over the last decade of the way language on the little wall cards — describing the provenance, ownership, materials used of the picture you are gazing at — has changed dramatically.

It’s no longer “‘Wild Horses,’ pen and ink, c. 1936, by Jane Jones, collection of Charles Gotrocks.” It’s “… Gotrocks, whose family fortune came from coal, and is therefore poisoning the air we breathe and warming the planet as we speak, has deeper problems than that. A Southern branch of his family essentially created transatlantic chattel slavery, and his money is therefore steeped in sin.”

And, you know what? I don’t have a problem with that truth-telling.

But someone in the current administration does. And that’s what Thursday’s crazy executive order aimed at taking us back to an art world of naivete goes to: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” it begins.

The executive order is particularly obsessed with the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, and doesn’t much care for its National Museum of African American History and Culture, for instance, because, ipso facto, it deals with the uncomfortable subject of race. And, you know, occasionally refers to chattel slavery in “a negative light.” And so, going forward, as it were: “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

Even “the National Zoo” is in the spotlight, as the current president is “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”

But the main takeaway here, from a president one hadn’t previously known to be interested in aesthetics beyond a predilection for neckties below the belt, is the executive ordering of a mandatory national art style: “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

Hudson River School, si. Kara Walker, no. Roger that.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.