A bust at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Sad anniversaries have inspired a number of weighty questions this week. What is the sustaining importance of John F. Kennedy? Why do his presidency and his truncated life still inspire us? Although the books on my parents’ floor-to-ceiling bookshelves have long-since been dispersed, somehow I can still remember their smell, and remember the titles. William Manchester’s The Death of a President and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House were books that I consulted as a young reader. I suppose most DC homes in the 1960s and 70s had such books, for the mysteries surrounding Kennedy’s death had yet to be understood conclusively.
Kennedy mattered the most to me because of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I remember my parents dressing up to attend the opening of the Center in September of 1971, and I remember examining that huge bust of Kennedy in the great hall during intermissions of the many shows my father the theatre critic took me to over the years. If I am remembering correctly, my father was working as a stage director and as a staff member for the Actors Equity Association during the Kennedy administration, and therefore he so appreciated our country being led by an advocate for the arts.
Less than a month before he was killed, President Kennedy gave stirring remarks about the arts at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The occasion for his speech was the death in January of that year of Robert Frost, who has read an inaugural poem for Kennedy just a couple years previously. In addition to praising Frost, Kennedy said this:
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
Considering these words, we might wonder anew if the importance of our greatest presidents is established not merely by what they accomplish during their presidencies, but also by how they were able to focus our attentions and inspire our spirits. A president does this with the written word. On this occasion of the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, we might remember our greatest presidents for what they (and their speechwriters) wrote. Lincoln inspired us all with his rhetoric, and rhetoricians such as Ted Sorensen (for Kennedy) and Peggy Noonan (for Reagan) helped Americans believe in the hopes and visions of their bosses. The late Ted Sorensen, whom Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank,” even helped President Obama with his first inaugural address, which perhaps helps to account for some of the elated optimism that so many Americans felt during that time.
Tonight expect questions on explorers, web-based e-learning, presidential elections, painters who love France, fun with prime numbers, two anagrams, US Presidents, bookstores, music genres, mistakes, friends of Imelda, iconic films, the seven seas, magazines, baseball numbers, John F. Kennedy, knees, comedy, British letters, Minnesota, jungles, Sacramento travel, TV shows that evolve with technology, rappers, tanning salons, Saturday Night Live, negotiated exits, khaki dramas, self-reliant film heroes, big-budget films, hydronium, and Shakespeare.
I hope that you enjoy the Thanksgiving break with your families, and that some of those family members can join you soon at the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos, Slogans, and Ad Campaigns. What action star does the splits between two Volvo trucks in a new ad that went up on YouTube on Wednesday and already has been viewed more than 17 million times?
- Newspaper Headlines – The Art World. At Christie’s in New York City, Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for US$142.4 million, a record price for a work of art sold at auction. The painter, who died in 1992, shares a last name with what kind of food, and shares a first and last name with what English “creator of Empiricism”?
- US Cities. What state capital is 1976 miles from Seattle, 1782 miles from Los Angeles, 1023 miles from Denver, 943 miles from Boston, 814 miles from Miami, and 759 miles from New York City?
- Food and Drink. An “aubergine” in British English is called what in American English?
- Pop Culture – Music. People Magazine paid $6 million for the first photos of the twins of Marc Anthony and what singer and actress?