Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures

The Column: 06.03.24

A glorious Friday night at the Met Museum in New York, the great halls packed with thousands of teenagers for Teen Night, admission is whatever you care to drop in the box, a couple bucks, the change in your pocket, high school kids mobbing the joint, the Picasso lady, the naked Venus, the Rodin folks, a 15^th-century lady, the naked man with a sword, all looking down on rivers of youthful energy, and a teen gospel choir sings in one marble stairway and a brass jazz band plays in another and a dance troupe from India performs in a gallery — everywhere you look, something is happening. There is no dress code, nobody lecturing us on what this naked man’s nakedness means. It’s not the silent sacred temple it usually is; the kids are mingling, searching, scouting, sitting on the floors, jabbering, holding their cell phones high to take videos, the place is electric with youth. The guards, of course, are a little edgy, but I don’t see any lurking or skulking, just an incredible lightheartedness. My sweetheart is fascinated by the dancers, their ornate costumes, their quickness and balance, the chanting and drumming. I feel drunk on the happiness of the urban young amid all the antiquities. I am an antiquity myself and I realize the Met’s goal is to broaden its base by creating joy where there had only been awesomeness, but walking through the building makes me incredibly happy about the future of the country and the world. It just plain does.

I’m an old Democrat; I am descended from worriers. On this Friday I’ve read disturbing news, I’ve had long phone conversations about the unreality of American politics, about creeping antisemitism, the long shadow of authoritarianism, the health problems of old pals, but walking into the Met has blown all that away and I haven’t even looked at a Rothko or the van Gogh “Irises” — it’s simply the exuberance of youth.

It’s all the more powerful after weeks of the trial at the courthouse downtown of the Most Famous Living New Yorker, a 77-year-old conman from Queens, a humorless huckster who’s seldom seen smiling, only grimacing, and who’s never hugged a small child or petted a dog or embraced his wife or told a joke, whose campaign platform is simply, “The country is going to hell and only I can save it.”

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras.

I admire the twelve Manhattanites who made the daily trek, probably by subway, to the courthouse on Centre Street and walked in anonymity through the crowds of curious waiting to get a glimpse of Mr. Big. Each of the twelve, plus the alternate jurors, made their way to a back entrance to rendezvous with a court official and a couple of cops to be escorted upstairs to a dismal waiting room to sit and drink bad coffee until called to the courtroom. Each of them must have devoutly wished, in the course of the six weeks, that he or she could be rescued from this morass of haggling and droning and resume normal life. Each person who made it through the initial screening was obligated to serve — no excuses — and was paid $40 per day, no reimbursement for transportation, and was sworn to judge the facts according to the evidence, without prejudice or sympathy, following the rules of law as explained by the judge.

The U.S. Senate twice failed to faithfully consider far more serious charges against this man. Between the solemnity of the courtroom and the carnival of politics, there is a vast gap. Our system of laws is basic to our way of life. You and I are aware of this every day of our lives. But millions of our fellow Americans have bought into falsehood, that the 2020 election was stolen.

Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that.

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