I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Sabina, in Kundera’s novel, lives a life of detachment and non-commitment — a life of lightness. She is a restless wanderer. She engages in an affair with Franz, who is married to her friend Marie-Claude. Marie-Claude owns a gallery in which Sabina has exhibited her paintings. So Sabina is betraying a friend and colleague with her affair.
Sabina’s first betrayal was of her father, who confined her to the house when she was fourteen so that she would not see the boy her age that she had fallen in love with. Her father also made fun of Picasso’s art, so Sabina made a betrayal out of that by loving cubism. She went to art school in Prague, feeling she had betrayed her father, who also painted — but he painted “woodland sunsets and roses in vases,” which she found kitschy.
She betrayed her father again by marrying a “second-rate actor” who “had a reputation for being eccentric. Her husband was unacceptable to her father.
After her mother passes away, her father takes his own life out of grief. Sabina questions her betrayals:
Suddenly she felt pangs of conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had painted vases filled with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that he was afraid of his fourteen-year-old daughter’s coming home pregnant? Was it really so laughable that he could not go on living without his wife?
After that she sought to “betray her own betrayal.” She left her husband. But this did not reverse the betrayal of her father:
But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.
Kundera’s idea of kitsch
Kitsch, to Kundera, is the comforting image of existence from which everything troubling, contradictory, or unacceptable has been excluded.
Sabina says to Tomas, with whom she also has a relationship:
“The reason I like you,” she would say to him, “is you’re the complete opposite of Kitsch. In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster.”
That’s because Tomas doesn’t conform to societal expectations. With women, he followed his “rule of threes”:
To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would meet each of his long-term mistresses only at intervals. he considered this method flawless and propagated it among his friends: “The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
As an artist, Sabina is opposed to kitsch. In Prague, as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was “not allowed to paint like Picasso.” The Communist party in control of her country at the time prevented it, instead prescribing “socialist realism” and the creation of portraits of Communist statesman.
Kitsch, to Kundera, seeks to eliminate what is unpleasant in life, for example, defecation:
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
“Kitsch” is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the world; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Politics and kitsch
Politicians deal in kitsch:
Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.
Kundera writes of totalitarian kitsch:
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be fanished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”
The current Republican party decries any kind of individualism: the pink or purple hair of an activist, the gender transitions some people choose to undertake, polyamory. (Note that these can become kitsch when undertaken slavishly following the herd).
Perhaps the most stunning example of the current presidential administration’s devotion to kitsch is in the recent executive order declaring that federal museums should become “solemn and uplifting public monuments” presenting America’s “consistent progress” and “unmatched record” of advancing human flourishing rather than telling history the way it actually was. This March 2025 order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” condemned narratives that generate “national shame” and ordered the removal of “divisive” or “improper” ideology. In 2025 and 2026, the White House undertook reviews of exhibitions to ensure that museums reflected national “unity, progress, and enduring values.”
The Trump administration ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, and instructed the National Park Service to install temporary signs outside the National Museum of American History complaining about the museum’s presentation of American history.
I could go on, of course, describing other ways in which Trump’s administration and party is devoted to kitsch. His supporters delight in this, finding a sanitized, simplified version of life more pleasant and easier to accept than a realistic one.
Kitsch and the adulteress
Sabina is not an adulteress though she does engage in an affair with her friend and colleague’s husband. Adultery is where kitsch gives easy answers: “once a cheater always a cheater,” for example — labeling the adulterer or adulteress as bad, as wrong, as shameful. Alternatively, an individualist version of kitsch might say that adultery is freeing, a throwing off of societal shackles.
But the reality of adultery is more complicated, as I’m expressing in the assemblage I’m building for the WCACO’s Unaltered Books show. An adulteress is not just selfish and destructive and not just, on the other hand, liberated and courageous. She may be many things all at once: selfish, courageous, destructive, seeking aliveness, dishonest, trapped, loving, brave.
Anti-kitsch allows for all aspects of life, for contradictory truths, to exist together at once.