For 40 years, the Kennedy Center Honors — one of Washington’s premier social events, and the most lucrative fundraiser on the arts institution’s calendar — has managed to sidestep partisan politics. Honorees have been known to grouse about the policies of the president whose hand they have to shake. But no luminary in music, film, theater, dance or television has ever refused the invitation that is annually extended to the new inductees to meet the leader of the free world, in the people’s house.

Until now.

With the honorees in open revolt, and three of them — television impresario Norman Lear, dancer Carmen de Lavallade and recording artist Lionel Richie — declaring they would boycott or were considering not attending a White House reception to celebrate them, President Trump pulled the plug Saturday on his role in the festivities. This meant that, for the first time since the Honors were established in 1978, a president or a first lady will not be throwing the coveted pre-gala party at the White House for the honorees, and will not attend the show — this year to be held Dec. 3 in the Opera House and later broadcast nationally on CBS.

Although Kennedy Center officials say the other elements of the weekend-long Honors celebration will go on as planned — including the glittering State Department dinner on the night of Saturday, Dec. 2, presumably still to be hosted by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — the toxins in the political bloodstream have now infected a beloved national tradition. Viewers across the country are accustomed, on the evening the gala is televised, to cameras panning the Opera House’s presidential box for shots of the proud honorees seated with the president and first lady. (Three times, presidents have had to bow out because of other responsibilities: Jimmy Carter during the 1979 hostage crisis and George Bush and Bill Clinton, who were in Europe in 1989 and 1994, but the first ladies attended as usual. Barack Obama arrived late to the 2015 gala after delivering a national address on the San Bernardino, Calif., attack.)

You can love or even love to hate the entirely subjective nature of the Honors and the show’s highly sentimental tributes. Still, the occasion remains an important one for many Americans. The Honors may be governed and selected by a nonprofit institution occupying a national memorial, but they are what passes in this country for knighthoods for the performing arts: the highest-profile awards bestowed for lifetime achievement in popular and high culture. Now that the culture wars have intervened, stoked by a president who has alienated many artists throughout the nation, one wonders whether the political taint will be so easily removed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle...m=.0f4494c2ca7e

Good for Trump. If nothing else, the words "Kennedy" and "Honor" in the same phrase is an oxymoron.