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I live in a country in which public policy—though it would never be voiced by its perpetrators in these terms—is to treat beauty as a privilege rather than a right.
Beauty is a subject I return to again and again. It can never be exhausted because the created world gives birth every second to countless somethings so breathtakingly beautiful that we forget, even if just for that second, all the hurts and fears. I take my sweet little dog for walks near our house every day, passing the pinons and junipers, the chollas, the mountain bluebirds and all their avian companions, the angel’s trumpet just now springing its wild white flowers from ground that was bare two months ago, the clouds—the clouds at 6500 feet ceaselessly fill our eyes with their mesmeric, ever-changing gorgeousness—and because nothing less than gratitude can meet the moment, I give thanks.
“The best things in life are free,” the old song goes, “the moon belongs to everyone.” The song is true. Every one of us has been stopped in our tracks by a melody, a scent carried on the breeze, by catching a glimpse of a beloved, staring into the heart of a rose, being ambushed by the first blush of a startling sunrise, by the sun at evening dropping past the distant horizon and flooding the clouds with rose and gold. Some people collect big-ticket art and others fix their kids’ drawings to the refrigerator with magnets. Under the worst conditions possible, refugees in camps sing together or make plays that tell their stories. Inmates in solitary save up soap or jello or toothpicks to make paintings or carve figures of the world they miss. Some of us compose little poems to mark occasions; others dance with joy, others take photographs that capture beauty that asks to be remembered. As individuals, we all have these capacities.
Why, then, do we tolerate it when some of these same human beings, given power to make policy or otherwise intervene in our collectivity, forget everything that is known about beauty and its power and proceed instead to treat it as a trivial sidebar to the real business of being human, enriching themselves and their masters?
Let me say it again. I live in a country in which public policy—though it would never be voiced by its perpetrators in these terms—is to treat beauty as a privilege rather than a right.
This is expressed in two main ways. The first and most egregious is the shameful practice of punishing the poor and excluded for their poverty and suffering. There are countless tiny examples, such as the person who chides the mother on public assistance for using SNAP benefits to buy her kids a treat, as if any human being should be grateful for a steady diet of government cheese and Oliver Twist-like gruel.
The biggest examples (and paradoxically the most often overlooked) have to do with public provision of social goods. If you don’t see the very clear statement of value made by public housing, the poorest public schools, the most anorexic healthcare, the streets and lots that host these structures, look again. Policymakers are saying that it’s just fine and dandy to nearly double the military budget to equip Trump to attack his personal enemies, that the proposed $1.3 trillion is a necessity and that they must cut health, housing, and education to make up the difference. Come to them with proposals to improve low-income environments and they lie that their pockets are empty.
Imagine this: what if it were required that every unit of public housing be designed in collaboration with the people who will live in it, and that beauty must be placed on a par with criteria such as making the construction safe, sturdy, and environmentally sound? Close your eyes for a minute, think of the most prisonlike and neglected of public housing environments, and imagine in their place the beauty and harmony most of those with sufficient resources would desire in their own homes.
Why isn’t this a reality for everyone? Not because it’s too expensive and other necessities have priority. Compared to Trump’s horrifying 40 percent increase in the military budget, an autocrat’s dream, the additional costs would be a rounding error. The real reason has very little to do with money and everything to do with the punishment-loving cult of greedy foxes in charge of the henhouse of our commonwealth. They believe that poverty and oppression are crimes, and that the people who commit them by being born in the wrong place or time or with the wrong identity deserve to be punished for them. The cruelty is appalling and disgusting, and one of the most repellent things about it is that it has been dressed up as prudence or thrift or necessity so fully and so often that many people cannot see it for what it is.
The other expression of this grave delusion is to grant favor and resource to crooks whose idea of beauty in the public realm is to decorate their own egos with gilded monstrosities they believe to be beauty at its highest. We don’t need any further examples once Trump comes to mind, although it would be easy to find plenty. Trump’s execrable arch, his botch of the reflecting pool, his demolition of the White House’s rose garden and erection of a ruinously expensive and unneeded ballroom in its place, his murder of the Kennedy Center and most of the public programs that have historically supported makers of beauty and meaning, however imperfectly; each tells the same story.
For this lover of destruction, the chief virtue of remaking the nation’s capital in his own image is that each component is bigger and more expensive than the landmarks he sees as competitors. He even presented a chart of the reflecting pool turned on end so he could claim it was the biggest erection in Washington. It is sad that his brokenness has completely eclipsed the meaning of beauty. It is sadder still and also infuriating that the spineless officials who serve him allow these acts of desecration to go forward, pretending to embrace them in the hope of being granted favor by this deranged self-appointed monarch.
The truth is this: beauty is a human right such as liberty, respect, wellbeing, and equity. If we have hope of wresting the body politic from the grip of those whose indifference or hostility to human rights is damaging us all, we had better start saying so and acting like we believe it.
“The Best Things in Life Are Free,” Ken Peplowski Quintet with Harry “Sweets” Edison.