by Barry Goldman
The iconic Aretha Franklin performance of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman came across my feed the other day. You can watch it here. The occasion was the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors celebrating Carole King. The video went viral right away, and it has resurfaced and gone viral again periodically ever since. You can see Carole King with her heart nearly bursting out of her chest. You can see Michelle and Barack Obama singing along. About one minute in, Obama wipes a tear from his eye. At 3:12 Aretha drops the mink – a classic gospel move – and brings the audience to its feet. Aretha’s voice soars and the audience roars. It’s glorious.
David Remnick wrote about the performance in The New Yorker a few weeks later. He said:
Watch it if you haven’t: in under five minutes, your life will improve by a minimum of forty-seven per cent.
I’ve watched the clip at least 10 times while writing this piece and I tear up every time. It is a case of what Rachel Feintzeig calls “collective effervescence.”
When you’re surrounded by people experiencing the exact same emotion as you… the feeling multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened. Increasingly, I believe this is what makes life worth living.
Dave Barry says, “Aretha Franklin is — I will fight you on this — the greatest female singer of all time.”
That’s part of it. Aretha is great. Carole King is great. It’s a towering performance of a terrific song. The moment is a joyful celebration of human achievement. It’s one of those experiences that makes you think perhaps our species is redeemable after all. But there is more to it than that. There is another reason I weep when I watch this clip. I weep for what we have lost.
Of course, we lost Aretha. She died in 2018. But we also seem to have lost the Kennedy Center. First, Trump tried to put his name on it. Then he closed it. And now he’s threatening to tear it down if the courts don’t let him “renovate” it.
It’s as if Trump can’t bear the fact that he lives in a town with a building where Aretha sang to Carole King and Obama wept with joy. No doubt there are higher-brow references that I would think of if I were a higher-brow guy. But what I keep thinking about is the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine. The Meanies hated music. And color. And everything free or fun. Trump is an Orange Meanie.
He wants to sell off the national parks to private developers and open them to lumber companies and mining interests. He wants to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. He wants to weaken the endangered species act. If there is something wild and free, he wants to kill it. He wants to sell off the herds of wild stallions that live on federal land and slaughter them for meat.
The great line from Boswell’s Life of Johnson comes to mind: He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.
Trump is not only cruel and stupid himself, he is the cause of cruelty and stupidity in others. He is not only tasteless, crude and vulgar himself, he is the cause of tastelessness, crudeness and vulgarity in others.
He pulled up the rose garden and staged a cage match on the White House lawn. Of course he did. Because a rose garden by its very nature is offensive to someone like Trump. Pulling up the rose garden and slaughtering the stallions are far from Trump’s most egregious offenses, but they are perhaps the most emblematic.
And we elected him. Twice. I weep for what have lost, for what we could have been, and for what we have become.
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