Splice Today

The Comfort of Ignorance

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:29:32 -0500

The Right has been hard pressed-though not completely unsuccessful-at finding political gain as President Obama brings historic health care reform closer to reality; education reform into the realm of the possible; and a greater respect for the US on the world stage. Cries of death panels, birth certificates, dithering, supplicating-all stoked by the fires of umbrage-umbrage over every conceivable issue, large and small.

Earlier this year, visual arts professor and contributor for The American Prospect Sharon L. Butler characterized the growing enthusiasm within the art community for what an Obama Administration would mean to this country's cultivation of the arts and humanities:

As Obama tries to steer the country back on track, visual artists and the curators who select and organize their exhibitions are likely to be energized both by a new sense of inclusion and patriotism and by a quieter, more down-to-earth confidence born of the administration's pro-arts policies.

But as for the hope that "the ‘culture wars' that erupted in the 1990s between the arts community and the Christian right will be buried once and for all," the Right has reached for an old standby-the arts as something demeaning, something weak.

Loyal conservative soldiers launched two distinct broadsides against the Obama Administration recently focusing first on the National Endowment for the Arts and then the First Family's art selections for the White House.

Patrick Courrielche, writing for Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, reported at length on a conference call involving NEA officials and dozens of players in the arts community, a community long undervalued if not ignored outright. The highest charge leveled by the Administration's critics alleges the NEA, a government institution, has used its relationship with a rabidly pro-Obama demographic for political gain. As Courrielche put it, "The making of a machine appeared to be in its infancy, initiated by the NEA, to corral artists to address specific issues."

The issue, fully covered by the Los Angeles Times' excellent culture beat, centers on NEA Director of Communications Yosi Sargent, who worked with Sheppard Fairey (now in a whole heap of trouble completely of his own making) and the "Hope" poster campaign. In the conversation's transcript, Sargent explicitly asks the artists commit their energies to rallying support and volunteers for the Administration's agenda. Later, when asked for specifics, Sargent stayed mum, saying there were legal issues in such explicit instruction.

Did Sargent cross a specific linguistic line early on in the conversation? Sure. He then dialed down the rhetoric. And then he was demoted. And then he resigned knowing full well the conservative avalanche of umbrage would not abate. Remarkably—or not—not a single conservative critic had the presence of mind or a sense of relativity to consider the Bush Administration's firing of Department of Justice officials for blatantly political reasons. One way to put this in perspective is budgetary: The DOJ is a $27.7 billion agency—the NEA a $155 million one. Nor did the disastrous Valerie Plame issue come up in conversation, nor did President Bush's taxpayer-funded ($2.2 billion) White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives which funded such bland, non-inflammatory or apolitical groups such as the Abstinence Education Program. The Right was given a free pass to drool all over this issue.

But this is not to say the NEA was faultless—indeed, it took immediate and thorough actions to quell the situation and restore the agency's impartiality. It is difficult—impossible—to recall a single instance during the Bush Administration when a Republican agency director responded quickly and diligently to an uproar from the opposition. Indeed, Scooter Libby was the top of a mountain of lower-level Bush Administration officials who enjoyed the full weight of an Administration that never admitted wrongdoing' the length and breadth of that Administration's politicization of various departments utterly trivializes Courrielche's hysterical "fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state." 1984 this ain't.

As for the arts community being so vehemently pro-Obama, it wouldn't have hurt if anyone had noticed that the chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, was a Republican congressman for 30 years. He voted to impeach President Clinton; investigated him and the First Lady during the Whitewater controversy; voted against military intervention in Iraq; and opposed Newt Gingrich's bid for the Speakership. The fact that this even has to be pointed out is galling.

Though this issue surrounding the NEA initially held the smallest of kernels of truth before it precipitated congressional Republican chest beating and conservative blogospheric histrionics, the second broadside from the right strikes closer to Obama's home.

At issue are two paintings, the first Alma Thomas's "Watusi (Hard Edge)." Michelle Malkin happened upon a small-time blogger's astounding realization that Thomas' piece is, once rotated on its side, a near mirror image (excluding color) of Matisse's "L'Escargot":

I have been on a rant about this for three days. But I mean, really. Look up both images on Google, turn Thomas' 90 degrees to the left (right?) and you tell me if this work should be included in the new White House Collection of American Art, not to mention how the ____ did it ever get chosen for the Hirshhorn in the first place? Can anyone say plagiarism? American art? I don't think so!"

The blogger's misbegotten notion of artistic plagiarism fuels this response from Malkin, "I know, I know. Cries of ‘RAAAAACIST' in 3, 2, 1..."

The sounds she's hearing are not cries, but a collective slapping of the forehead. Thomas' painting is obviously—obviously—based on the Matisse. In fact, that is the point. Art has a rich tradition of defining its present iterations through the lens of the past, and in the mad rush from the right to condemn, to shoot the moon with every perceived flaw, the notion that such a genre of art is, well, conservative is simply missed.

Charades like these only deepen liberals' hateful condescension-both cultural and intellectual-toward conservatives. Another rubber bone for the Right to froth on involves Ed Ruscha's "I Think I'll ... "—which is a cloud of phrases like "Maybe"; "I think I'll"; "Maybe ... no." You can already hear the heavy breathing; perfect example of Obama's waffling, dithering and indecision. And, again, your hand meets for your forehead:

But back to the Ruscha and its purported embrace of indecision. In fact, what it conveys perfectly is not waffling, but thinking. Like so much of the work the Obamas have chosen, it highlights a central difference between two states of mind, the progressive and conservative. "I Think I'll ... " effortlessly and efficiently transmits a psychic inclination that accepts paradox and allows that the world is not only good or evil. The hallmark, so far, of Obama's administration has not actually been indecision, or Clintonian triangulation. It's been a hanging back, waiting till all the facts come in, and for all the ideas to be floated, and then making a (decisive) move. This painting embodies that inclination, and it's not the only one in the collection that does so.

No, the Right certainly isn't alone in its harping; the Left found plenty of fun in President Bush's malapropisms and wayward grammar. (For some reverse bathos, check out Slate's compendium of Bidenisms.)

What pulls at my oil-and-canvas, swinishly liberal heart is how much the Right glorifies in the muddying of nuance, the huge-pile-of-bird-shit-on-the-windshield politics. With aplomb the Right sinks its teeth deeper into the ankle of intellectualism and congratulates itself for taking down the elites. History has never been kind to the consciously ignorant, and if conscious ignorance is all the Right has got—its Becks and Palins—then history will continue to repeat itself.

Help put officer Jason Anderson in jail for a long, long time

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:03:40 -0500

Britain and America: The End of the Affair

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:57:11 -0500

It says much about Britain’s rapidly disappearing ‘special relationship’ with America that when I happened to mention to some of our senior military officers that I was visiting Washington, they begged me to find out what the Obama administration was thinking about Afghanistan. It is not just that the transatlantic lines of communication, so strong just a few years ago, have fallen into disuse. There is now a feeling that, even if we reached the Oval Office, there would be no one willing to take Britain’s call.

Tea Party rally gets owned: The story of "Robert Erickson"

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:28:42 -0500

Michelle Bachmann rally violated house rules?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:08:17 -0500

A recent rally against health-care reform, organized on the Capitol steps by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), may have violated House rules.

Headline Fails

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:22:26 -0500

No love for the Unions - Steelworkers partner with MONDRAGON

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:27:44 -0500

Big news from last week largely overlooked by the mainstream media: The United Steelworkers will join forces with MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A., the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, to start worker-owned factories in Canada and the United States.

Ah, there's hope yet

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:07:07 -0500

Will Phillips isn't like other boys his age. For one thing, he's smart. Scary smart. A student in the West Fork School District in Washington County, he skipped a grade this year, going directly from the third to the fifth. When his family goes for a drive, discussions are much more apt to be about Teddy Roosevelt and terraforming Mars than they are about Spongebob Squarepants and what's playing on Radio Disney.

Sarah Palin's Media Enabler

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:54:57 -0500

There’s no pleasure in criticizing a journalist whose work is, by and large, admirable, but recently I’ve felt like a rubber-necker at the scene of a nasty car accident as Matthew Continetti, associate editor at The Weekly Standard, has publicly auditioned for a key role in Sarah Palin’s likely 2012 presidential campaign. It’s my hope that the GOP will dodge the Palin bullet, sooner rather than later, as she embarks on her much-ballyhooed book tour promoting the score-settling Going Rouge and the former Alaska governor inevitably makes a series of gaffes that will relegate her to the status of a really, really popular reality TV show star—but I suppose it’s too early to discount any candidate, no matter how discredited.

The 28-year-old Continetti, whose The Persecution of Sarah Palin was just released, has, in a Nov. 16 Standard cover story “The Palin Persuasion” and Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Can Sarah Palin Make a Comeback” laid out a very thin case for Palin inspiring a populist movement in the United States that, on behalf of “average Americans,” will topple the elites that rule both the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s a bit strange that Continetti, a prolific writer who works in Washington, D.C., and is a graduate of Columbia University—therefore a de facto elitist (or at least part the political/media establishment he derides)—is making the case that Palin is an heir to the populism of Andrew Jackson, Williams Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan, but there are worse ways to put bread on the table.

Leaving aside Jackson and the thrice-failed presidential candidate Bryan, where Continetti’s argument falls apart is in his comparison of Reagan and Palin. In the Standard he wrote: “Cosmopolitans detested [Reagan in 1980] because he represented the provincial folkways of small town America.” While it’s true that liberals scoffed at Reagan’s supposed lack of intellect when he ran against the hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980 (a year before Continetti was born) and that the 40^th president didn’t attend an Ivy League college, he was no stranger to the powerful, and elite, individuals and institutions that Continetti hopes Palin and “the folks” can beat back with her alleged surfeit of “common sense.”

Palin didn’t even finish her first term as governor of Alaska, resigning earlier this year with no coherent explanation. By contrast, Reagan was, by the time he ran against Carter, a well-known Hollywood figure, television spokesman for General Electric, two-term governor of California and came close to defeating the incumbent Gerald Ford in the ’76 GOP presidential primary. He wasn’t so much a populist as a hardline conservative—the deserved beneficiary of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful but extraordinarily influential ’64 campaign against Lyndon Johnson—who also had the fortune to run against a Democrat hobbled by a miserable economy and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan had been collecting Republican chits for years before his ’80 victory and unlike Palin (and Barack Obama, for that matter) was a well-known political commodity. Last year, Palin was inexplicably plucked from obscurity by a befuddled John McCain (a blot on the Arizona senator’s legacy that might be worse than his crusade for campaign finance “reform”); Reagan governed California for eight years.

At least Continetti admits that Palin has yet to articulate a conservative agenda that will compete with Obama’s indecisive liberalism, although he made me gag by writing that the Alaskan, “has an intuitive faith in builders and traders, in hockey moms and plumbers.” I’m not making this up. He ups the ante even further, with perhaps unintentional condescension, saying that while “bankers drive economic policy, Joe Six Pack is left out in the cold.” He also writes, “Palin has Jacksonian instincts, but she still hasn’t forged her own political persuasion. Time to add flesh to the bone.”

And that’s what Continetti does, suggesting various stances Palin could take on health care, energy, punitive regulation, the folly of “green” band-aids, the bailouts of corporations and “let[ting] new businesses replace the old.” In his Journal article, Continetti is even more blatant in his unofficial role as Palin’s aide/cheerleader by offering the mooseburger chef advice for talking points on her book tour. While acknowledging that Palin’s favorable rating in an October Gallup poll was an abysmal 40 percent and an electorally impossible 48 percent unfavorable tally among independents—the key to any election, as Democrats found out to their horror in New Jersey and Virginia earlier this month—Continetti’s confident she can turn that around.

Conceding that “Alaska trivia” isn’t enough to constitute a platform, Continetti writes:

She might mention … that the Democrats’ health-care plan would hike taxes, raise the cost of doing business, and lead to rationing down the line. She might point out that, on top of health care, the stimulus and bailouts, President Obama’s 2010 budget will further bury the United States in debt. Every time the media [which admittedly had great sport ridiculing Palin in 2008, often unfairly, although she provided plenty of ammunition] try to shift the conversation to personal gossip or past mistakes, Ms. Palin should pull it right back to how the Obama agenda will hurt the middle class. Oprah will be aghast. The Democrats will be outraged. But independents will be listening. And the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin will have begun.

I happen to agree with most of Continetti’s economic views, but he’s signed on to the wrong candidate, a woman who’s so politically damaged, so close to a national punchline, a joke, that it’s inconceivable, as he insists, “independents will be listening [to her].” Granted, Continetti has carved out his journalistic niche as a Palin advocate, and I wish him the best on his book sales, but if he has as much common sense as the “average American” he extols, he’ll sock away the profits since being tied to Sarah Palin isn’t the wisest career path.

The Stupak Conundrum

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:44:55 -0500

Politics and theology are a toxic mix. So, too, are ideas and ideals. For the most part they should butt out of each other’s business. Politicians won’t abide by theologians’ homilies and theologians won’t satisfy politicians. And ideals often get in the way of good ideas getting done.

Yet on matters of ethics and faith they often cautiously intersect. In a pluralistic society, religion and politics co-exist in an uneasy relationship mainly because of the IRS and churches’ 501(c) 3 tax-free status. And don’t forget the First Amendment. There’s no space for Savonarola, the mad monk who launched the Inquisition, or an auto de fé in America in 2009, although some wingnuts would probably like to revive both the monk and the deadly practice.

When Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,” He was talking about separation of church and state. The central teaching of all major religions—whether it be of Jesus, Moses or Mohammed—is love and help each other and not intolerance, hate and ostracism.

And so it goes with the issue of abortion which, along with same-sex marriage, are the two main building blocks of the new theology of Christian conservatives, two words forming an inherent contradiction that are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, for example, has warned that it will discontinue its social services programs unless the District’s proposed same-sex marriage law is changed to accommodate its teachings on homosexuality or it is exempted from the law.

And in welcoming Anglicans to the Catholic Church who’re disaffected over gay marriage and ordaining women, Pope Benedict XVI was not acting as a pastoral proselytizer as much as he was embracing homophobes and anti-feminists. The latest manifestations of the occasional cosmic collision between church and state are over the eponymous Stupak amendment to the House version of the health care reform bill and the efforts of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to prevent what amounts to nothing more than truth in advertising.

Sponsored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), the amendment would prohibit elective abortion coverage in the public option portion of the bill and bar federal subsidies for plans that include abortion purchased through the new insurance exchanges. Those who oppose the amendment argue that the language goes beyond existing law. The amendment was adopted after a furious round of lobbying by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who, in one of those toothsome twists, support health care under the rubric of social justice but who oppose abortion (or the right to choose) in the name of right to life.

The second celestial collision of faith and politics hits closer to home. Legislation pending before the Baltimore City Council and the Montgomery County Council would require truth in advertising at pregnancy counseling centers run by anti-abortion groups. In Baltimore, the clinics would be required to post signs so women don’t mistake the counseling centers for clinics that perform abortions. And in Montgomery County, they would be required to give disclaimers to women so they don’t mistake the purpose of the counseling center. These are nothing more than, say, the health warnings on cigarette packages or wine bottles. The Catholic Church opposes the proposed law but supports continuing the blatant deception. In fact, the archbishop of Baltimore, Edwin F. O’Brien, has said he will consider suing the city if the law is adopted.

The Stupak amendment has grave legal implications for Maryland and 16 other states that provide abortion money under Medicaid if there is a serious threat to the life of a pregnant mother. That prerogative derives from the Hyde amendment that allows states to provide such funds out of their own treasury although the use of federal funds for abortions is prohibited. Some argue that the Stupak amendment might go beyond that to deny states the right to provide abortion funds. Maryland’s attorney general has been asked for an opinion on the matter.

Those who oppose the Stupak amendment argue that it would deny access to abortions for low and moderate-income individuals that the health care reform bill is designed to help. The present Maryland law was adopted in 1991 and approved by the voters on referendum in 1992 by a vote of 52-38 percent. It states that abortions are legal if, in a doctor’s judgment, a fetus is not viable, i.e., able to sustain life outside the womb.

The terrible tug now facing Democrats in Congress is whether to suck it up and allow health care reform to pass with the Stupak amendment, if it comes to that, or stick to hard-headed principle and possibly allow the legislation to die, the snare Republicans have set. There are many people who oppose abortion but who support a woman’s right to choose. Republicans love to portray Democrats as the party of abortion on demand. They are not. There are ample safeguards and definitions in Roe v. Wade as well as in Maryland law to prevent indiscriminate abortions.

Both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are pro-choice, although Obama’s position is more nuanced to include family planning and fatherly responsibility, in a Bill Cosby kind of way, for children born without benefit of clergy. Obama and his family, after all, resemble nothing if not the Huxtables.

The issue of abortion is front-and-center and will remain an above-the-fold topic until the health care reform issue is resolved one way or another and probably emerge occasionally long after that. Remember a little more than a year ago when several Roman Catholic bishops pounced on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who’s ardently pro-choice, for apparently misrepresenting Catholic doctrine (quoting St. Augustine, based on the writings of Aristotle.) Pelosi also daringly tossed in, for good measure, the matter of “free will.”

And it surfaced, ever so briefly, when one bishop suggested that Biden, a Catholic and father of four, should avoid taking communion because of his pro-choice position. And in 2004, Democrat John Kerry was scolded by bishops and told not to participate in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Republican Rudi Giuliani received similar cold-shoulder treatment from the bishops but proceeded to take communion anyway.

Most recently, Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-RI) has been engaged in a public feud with Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, RI, over abortion and the health care reform issue. The bishop has publicly questioned Kennedy’s faith and said he should not receive communion. Kennedy had criticized church leaders for opposing health care changes unless they included tighter restrictions on abortion. An angry Tobin has demanded an apology.

Abortion is probably the single-most combustible issue where many Catholics and Protestant evangelicals intersect, by emotion if not doctrine. It has become a regular occurrence around election time when many Catholic clergymen read from their Sunday pulpits admonitions that members of the faith cannot, in good conscience, vote for candidates who are pro-choice or who support abortion (there is a difference) or risk excommunication, kind of like subordinating country to church teaching.

Evangelical Protestants, who represent many denominations and are not centralized, regularly vent on television about the evils of abortion, i.e., family values, and stem cell research, but in a curious twist, unlike the Catholic Church, continue, in many cases, to support capital punishment. To them, and even many Catholics who dispute church doctrine, all life is not equal. Religionists like to talk about a “culture of life.” But there’s nothing more sustaining to the culture of life here on earth than adequate, affordable health care.