Oh, the things you find when trying to find out if the First Lady will play the usual role in the NEA. Here’s a HuffPo piece by Jon Robin Baitz, telling us what he’d do if he was the head of the organization:

I would attempt to pass legislation on a special tax dedicated to the NEA for all artists who make over half a million dollars a year from their work.

That’s job one: Tax! Not disband the thing and turn the money over to the states to let local government use it as they prefer, but Tax! Tax! Shovel the coal into the chuffing, billowing maw of Jabba the Fed!

Sorry. We’re getting off on the wrong foot. The Federal-funding argument was lost a long time ago. As with so many things, opposition to Federal funding is equated to opposition to the thing itself. The existence and healthy survival of these things before Federal intervention is meaningless; what seems to count above all is the satisfaction some get from knowing there is a National Something or other, complete with assistant special directors for coordinating things, because God knows we couldn’t produce art if someone in Washington wasn’t coordinating it all.

But before we go on, consider the National Endowment. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet the National Endowment for the Arts was conceived as some sort of middlebrow self-improvement program - sending Pablo Casals LPs to schools, helping small towns put on “Our Town,” subsidizing museums so they could put on challenging works like gigantic Calder mobiles, and paying off the survivors when the damned thing snapped a cable and carved a tour group in stir-fry slices. I’m sure it still funds good things. But let us risk a headache and try to think of a few art forms we managed to create without its assistance:

Jazz

Blues

Rock and Roll

Every movie made in America

Skyscrapers

Painting that looks like something

Sculpture that looks like someone

As it happens I like modern art, so this isn’t some philistine sneer at funny pitchers what don’t look like Whistler’s Mama. I’m not even opposed in principle to state funding of the art, for two reasons: 1) the monarchs and the church did a fine job of it for millennia, and 2) if some small town wants to help defray the cost of a play in the school gym, fine.  But I have to draw a line, because if I say it’s good to support orchestras in large cities with Federal money, then anyone gets to support their favorite kind of art, even if it happens to be guillotining paper-mache replicas of the Founding Fathers on Presidents Day. You get your art, I get mine.

“Yes,  but yours stinks” is not a useful reply. Accurate, but irrelevant.

But I digress, way to soon. To return to his point:

I would attempt to pass legislation on a special tax dedicated to the NEA for all artists who make over half a million dollars a year from their work.

. Not actually pass it, but attempt it, perhaps in the form of pantomime or someone standing outside Congress declaiming mocking remarks in the heroic meter, or via a recreation of  “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” complete with some wise old jurist at the end who notes “doesn’t seem to be anything in the Constitution about taxing people according to their profession,” and then there’s a crestfallen sigh. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it anyway!” Hurrahs, hats through in the air, etc.

I would create a new version of the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s and ’40s, which would also be funded by this surtax from the artists who have succeeded.

That’s right: send people to write unreadable tour guides to the states, based on a tax on those many, many artists who make over $500,000. While you can expect Alec Baldwin to support it, you can also expect some enterprising blogger to question whether or not he qualifies anymore.

This particular act would require Congress to define art, by the way. I’d love to hear people insist that Thomas Kinkead isn’t art suddenly insist that it is, when they think they can get their mitts on his cash. Architecture is art; do we tax the fellow who makes a living designing boring suburban office structures?  No? So quality, according to subjective state-defined standards, is the criterion for determining who’s an artist? Oh, bring THAT one on.

I would attempt to create a superfund from private donations from all studios or Apple, for instance, in order to replenish the coffers. That money would go to school arts programs, which have been slashed for years.

Pssst: Apple is a computer company. I think he just chose them because A) they’re successful and hence have lots of money sitting around doing nothing, and B) you see people making art with their machines. This is like taxing Ford to pay for literacy programs, because people use cars to drive kids to school.

It’s strange that it’s either Apple OR the studios. Stranger still that it’s a SUPERFUND, which he may believe has special powers and a flowing cape and can only be defeated by a rider to the bill  that mentions the word “Krypton.”

As for school arts programs, I’m all for them, but A) there’s no guarantee extra money would do much, and B) there’s certainly no guarantee that X amount of dollars would ever be regarded as sufficient. Look: I had zero school arts programs as a kid. I mean, we drew, we did collages, paper mache, potato art, all that low-tech cheap stuff, but that was it. Yet somehow - in the grim barren achingly provincial reaches of North Dakota - I managed to acquire a love of painting, architecture, and classical music by the time I got out of high school. I didn’t grow up in an artistic family. But I had a history teacher who introduced us to Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization.” There was also this big building downtown called “The Library,” which has since been supplanted and universalized by the Internet. It’s possible, in other words, for kids to learn about art without having to raise the price of iPods. But I will concede that kids should learn art in school; I just believe it’s possible without extracting the money from a manufacturer of CPUs and operating systems.

I would create a national architecture czar in an effort to beautify our cities, the way André Malraux beautified Paris when he was the French minister of culture.

While I support city “beautification,” and can see the rationale behind Malraux’s plan to save facades while sacrificing the structures behind them - something imported to America in the 80s and 90s, and derisively called “facadomy” by critics - a “national architecture czar” would have no power, only a bully drafting table. And we can disagree about what urban beautification is, too - I like lots of signs and neon and visual bustle; for others it’s Street Art. I think the powerlines stretched over the street to power the light rail are hideous throwbacks. Others disagree. But we’ll get back to architecture in a bit.

I would move away from the focus that the NEA has had on minor ethnocentric and folk projects  . . .

Good! Not because we don’t need to study and celebrate these things, but if he thinks they’ve been focusing on the subjects, well, it’s time perhaps to turn our attention to something that binds the nation together. What does he propose?

. . .  and move into a broad, far-reaching series of projects that question the role of religion and commerce in the life of the nation

Ah.  Of course. It’s the perfect distillation: take the money from people who have used commerce to succeed in the arts, so we can  question the role of commerce in the life of the nation. Ideally, common people will become Aware and have Consciousness Raised from its gutter-state to the Olympian heights where one can see a magnificent future, a time when the role of commerce has been questioned with the force and incisive detail you only get from people who can’t get anyone to pay them for what they do.

Sorry; unfair. Don’t mean to equate monetary success with artistic success, of course. But what if the result of this far-reaching project - sorry, a broad, far-reaching project - was less commerce? Wouldn’t that mean fewer people able to fund the Great Questioning?

Unless we found additional sources to tax, of course. That’s often a possibility.

However the whole “question commerce” thing works out, I’m interested how we go about questioning the role of religion in the life of the nation in handy art form.   If you honestly think we’ll get a sober, fascinating account of the history of religion in America - a totally obscure and ignored subject, I’ll admit - you might have to brace yourself for an “installation” that has a hundred plastic baby dolls hanging upside down, with the title - UNWANTED - as the only indication it’s a protest against contraceptive laws of the 1930s. (There might also be a video installation with interviews of old ladies who couldn’t get a diaphragm in Missouri in 1951,  in case you’re not walking around retroactively mad at the past STUPID PAST.)

It would be amusing for someone to use the money for a play that describes, oh, something good done by people of faith, based specifically in the tenets of their faith. I know, I know - c’est absurd! But bear with me. Say, a play about Episcopalians who go to Zaire to open a clinic. Hold out that promise for a cautionary tale of post-imperialist zeal and cultural arrogance, then refuse to provide it at the end! The missionaries are the good guys!

If it would help, people could comfort themselves by saying that the utter lack of irony was itself proof that the entire event was saturated with it.

I would encourage the Office of Faith Based Initiatives to begin a dialogue about tolerance, acceptance, democracy and theology . . .

All at once? Or can we take them alphabetically, and break for lunch after democracy?

. . .  in order to encourage a greater understanding of the powerful link between politics, religion and culture

Again: no one’s ever thought about these things, and we need government money to make them do it. Mind you, the fellow is talking about the National Endowment for the Arts. And he’s already moved into telling another government entity what to do.

Sorry, he would encourage them. I have no idea what this means. A phone call and a letter? A phone call, a letter, lunch? A follow-up email after a week or two?

Re: Re: Re: Dialogue on tolerance, acceptance, democracy and theology in order to encourage a greater understanding of the powerful link between politics, religion and culture

Just wanted to touch base to see how that greater understanding of the powerful link was coming along

Jon

>> Sorry I didn’t get back to you; we’re busy this week coordinating food shelves awareness week - lots of people to feed.

I would insist that a percentage of income from networks (both cable and traditional) go to fund both NPR and PBS.

Why not? All those idiots sitting around watching tripe like “The Wire” should be compelled to pay for programming they do not want and do not watch. But why stop there? People watch movies on premium cable, so we should be able to tax any form of movie distribution. Netflix gets off scot-free, which must chap him fiercely. You there! Boy! Figure out a way to tax free movie downloads! I don’t know how, just do it! I insist! Some sort of . . . meter thing. Like they do with gas.

On the other hand, maybe he’s on to something. Maybe it’s time to tax the HuffPo and use the money to fund small, unnoticed arts blogs; since the HuffPo has ads, this might also spur encouragement about the beginning of a debate about the role of commerce and art. Tax corporations that sponsor “Prairie Home Companion,” and use it to fund smaller radio shows that lack enormous marketing wings. Just a thought. But I insist!

I would bring symphonies to small towns.

Parade them through town with elephants, too. Actually, many small towns have orchestras - the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra has been going for years, for example. All it needs is A) someone to make a movie about stupid funny-talking people in Fargo formin’ an orchestra dere, ya, an’ playin that Bay-toven, or B) a heartstring-yanking movie about a hip but disillusioned East Coast musician who goes to Fargo to take over the orchestra, and finds his purpose in life restored, partly thanks to a saucy local gal who’s not only cultured but down-to-earth, yet different from most of the people in town. (This would have been the Susan Sarandon part 15 years ago, but now she’s the saucy local gal’s Earthy Mom.)

While it is a good thing to see an orchestra, people in small towns have gramophones that can reproduce music in remarkable quantities. But this is a small point.

I would wear a suit and tie all day, every day, and entertain cultural figures in my Georgetown brownstone and raise money through small private fundraisers there, in addition to initiating an Obama-like Internet fundraising machine for the arts, made up of small donors.

Complete with questionable credit-card policies? Fine; it’s private. And it’s also so cute! A suit and a tie, entertaining Cultural Figures - who gets to play Truman?  Who gets to play Lennie Bernstein? Oh, it’ll be just like New York in the sixties! Can we get some Black Panthers for authenticity? Don’t tell them about the defunding the ethnic-folkways part.

I would instruct the Smithsonian to develop a wing of political art . . .

Jesus wept. For one thing, all art is political. Right? I was instructed as such in college by a rather acerbic peer, who noted that even the pure tones of Mozart were tributes to the aristocratic order, and as far as Bach goes, well, I got your dialogue between religion and culture right here,  in D minor. What he means is the dreary, tendentious, angry, self-righteous, hectoring claptrap that makes the usual suspects compare a crude photocopy of Bush with bloody fangs drawn in to Goya’s accounts of wartime atrocities. Or maybe not; I stopped reading too soon.

. . . whose first exhibition would be about propaganda, torture and the Constitution.

Yes, let’s explore the relationship between propaganda and the Constitution. There isn’t one. Briskly we move from this room to the next, where we have 846 variations on the Abu Ghraib guy with a hood on his head.

This is my favorite part:

I would ask prominent artists and writers to curate shows across the country on this theme. It would be about the effects of war on the soul of a nation. It would be very complex and draw conclusions without simple bromides of either ideology.

It’s like reading a nine-year-old’s account of his secret hideout: And it would have a submarine base in a secret cave and it would be very big and have a nuclear power machine. Why would it be very complex? Because it would be.

Super NEA-Man from the planet Brownstone goes on:

I would ask Robert Hughes, Wes Anderson, Bill T. Jones, Frank Gehry, Meryl Streep, Suzan-Lori Parks, Eric Fischl and John Adams for their advice as often as possible, mainly because I admire them.

And want to have lunch with them and have them come to my house when I wearing my special suit! What would you ask Frank Gehry about, anyway? Frank - if I can call you that - I’m considering a new wing of the Smithsonian to join the other structures on the Mall, and wonder what you’d put up.

“Well, I think a large, irregular-shaped aluminum structure that confounds the eye from almost every angle might be the ticket. Or perhaps a building that vaguely recalls the human scale of classic urban structures, but contorts them in a way that makes the viewer feel he has been dosed with animal tranquilizer.”

Many others too, but it is too long a list. I would leave the NEA a far more powerful and vital institution than it was when I arrived.

And special art flames would come out of a hole in my wrist and defeat bad artists, who are all minions from the evil Emperor Roc-Wel.

I would make sure that I was a frequent guest at the White House, and I would always bring presents of art for the first children, so that when they grow up, they would include art into whatever magnificent endeavor for the public good that their marvelous parents helped shepherd them into.

Unless, God forbid, they grow up to be lawyers and go to work for a successful firm. Fie on that! Oh, wait. He ends:

If anyone in the administration wishes to discuss this, I am not too hard to find.

He’s the guy in the suit in a brownstone with plates of appetizers and hors d’oeuvres arranged just so, sitting on the edge of the sofa, waiting for the door to ring. Which it will. It has to. Oh, it just has to.

This was sent to me by Amitai Etzioni, for reasons I cannot imagine. A big broadcast of a paradigm-altering manifesto, perhaps. For some reason the opening line caught my eye:

President Obama has a unique talent: He is able to inspire people all over the world to deliberate and dialogue about burning issues.

As well as consider the impact on the environment caused by reckless issue-burning, as well as the clear-cutting of old growth issue-thickets. But is it true? As far as I can tell we’re not having a debate at all. He won; spending is good; Debt will save us from the terrible secret of space, which is Debt. We have concluded our debate about Federal funding of stem-cell research, and now the magic Government dollars, imbued with a power no private sector dollars contain, will help us cure all those diseases that are very important despite the lack of support from prominent actors.

At the top of the agenda for such a global give and take is what makes for a good life.

The moment the “good life” is put in global terms, I know I’m going to have to give up something. It’s just a question of what, to whom, and in which quantities.

At first, it may seem preposterous for a nation deep in an economic crisis and mired in wars to pay mind to what at first blush seems like a philosophical subject.

But the good life is not just a “philosophical” subject; it’s something that has practical manifestations every day. It’s only a philosophical question for those who don’t have it themselves, or believe the people who think they have it . . . shouldn’t.  But I’m interrupting. Let him state his case again:

At first, it may seem preposterous for a nation deep in an economic crisis and mired in wars to pay mind to what at first blush seems like a philosophical subject.  Actually, there is a profound connection between our multiple crises — add that of the climate to the mix — and the characterization of what makes a life good.

Do you have the suspicion that the characterization is going to be made for you? “Climate,” after all, is the hard left’s version of what they thought the Patriot Act was for the Right - an rationale to expand the powers of the state. The difference is that we don’t have satellites intercepting conversations between cold fronts conspiring to strike the Crusaders where they sleep, but never mind. “Climate” is a physical manifestation of a sick zeitgiest. Climate is a hot June and a cold March. Climate is a dry December and a hot July. Climate is Silly Putty: it stretches, takes any form, and when you press it on the Sunday comics, it shows you the pictures in reverse. Which only proves your point!

As long as those whose basic needs have been well-sated, whose creature comforts have been secured, keep defining the purpose of life as making more and more dough in order to purchase more and more consumer goods, we will not rein in wild capitalism, protect the environment (climate included), advance social justice, or, arguably, stop killing one another.

At this point I almost stopped reading, because anyone who can pack that much boilerplate claptrap into one sentence is destined to end up explaining why things have to be taken away from people. Basic needs: the words of someone who knows how big your house should be. Creature comforts: he knows how many pairs of pants you should own. “Defining the purpose of life as making more dough to purchase more consumer goods” - the earnest snit of a petty puritan who believes you put in long hours so you can afford a Cuisinart kiwi-peeler.

To boil it: if you think life is about making money to buy things, we will kill each other. On a grand philosophical bong-water level I understand, but that’s the sort of sophomoric profundity that usually discovers the strange fact that the men in charge of planning and directing wars are usually younger than the soldiers they command. Really. Look it up, man.

As for “social justice,” it’s “climate” plus laws that treat people according to skin color and the quantity of their possessions. Which is perfectly fine by some, but please: spare the lectures about the Constitution-shredding. “Created equal” means nothing if the end result isn’t equal 10, 19, 27, 43 years hence. “Social justice” is achieved only when the outcome of any given system looks egalitarian to the Jacobins; otherwise, the existence of unequal outcomes is de facto proof of injustice. It begins with the laudable idea of enforcing colorblind laws, and ends up insisting that the higher rates of premium cable subscriptions in insufficiently diverse suburbs proves the existence of systemic inequality.

Only after we come to see that additional goods add precious little to our happiness;

Nonsense and hypocrisy. Computers aren’t basic needs. E-mail isn’t a basic need. Who says so? Me. So this person’s life cannot possibly be happier by the addition of a device that lets him peruse the words and deeds of the world. As for me, base shallow grasping materialist that I am, let me spell it out:

My computers bring me happiness, for they are instruments of knowledge and art. My cameras bring me joy, yea, for they allow me to capture the fleeting shadows of the day or the laughter of my child or the happy romps of my old dog in the new snow, and fix them forever in a form whose quality exceeds the fond dreams of D. W. Griffith. My car gives me pleasure, for it gives me freedom and ease of movement, allows me to meet friends, gather food for the family, and drive to work with the  glories of Beethoven crashing from the speakers. Or AC/DC, depending on the mood. For that matter the morning drive is made pleasurable by possessions like the coffee maker, which serves up a hot delicious beverage the moment I wake from a comfortable bed - and the waking, I should add, was gently occasioned by a machine that cost a bit more than one of those $19.99 alarms that sounds like someone tripped the perimeter alarm at Los Alamos.

Since I seem to be seeing possessions in terms of the flow of the day, let me go on: my computer, which is hardly a basic need, gives me freedom at work unchained to a veal-pen desk; my cellphone lets me write messages to a network of beloved strangers or listen to music from around the world - and take a picture of something, if I choose. Photography is art, right? Art is good, right? Yes, I know - if it serves the general weal in a spiritual burning-issue sense. If I use the camera to snap a picture of the Catholic-run men’s shelter down the street, do I get a pass if I buy a new camera this year?

Or would that be overshadowed by the bilious negativity that rolls in dark waves from my large TV? It’s not a basic need, I admit - can I still have one? Yes, if it’s not LARGE. People who grudgingly admit the usefulness of a TV for pedagogical purposes reserve the right to frown on your TV if it’s larger than it need be, for several reasons: 1) you probably went into debt to get it; 2) it uses energy that makes the planet die; 3) you watch the wrong kind of programs; 4) the size of the screen is regarded as a direct reflection of the stupidity of the viewer.

Unless we’re talking about careful, pained, exquisitely sensitive motion pictures about the horrors of life in the suburbs in the Fifties.

But I have to admit something: I love my big TV. I want a bigger one, too. If I won the lottery I would build a house that had a large screen in the basement, in a room that looked like the great old Moderne palaces of yore - a Trans-Lux, for example. Would that be okay? Movies are art, right? And art is life?

Sorry, I interrupted. He was saying:

that pursuing (additional goods) is Sisyphean — the more we gain, the more we seek; and that deep contentment and human flourishing rise out of spiritual projects and bonding with and caring for others, shall we be able to come to terms with much that bedevils us.

If human flourishing rose exclusively out of spiritual projects, the Dalai Lama would have been the first man on the moon. I don’t mean to discount the role of “spiritual projects” in human development, but conflict pushes progress.

Sorry; full stop. Pause. We’re mixing terms. I suspect that “human flourishing” to this fellow is not “progress,” at least as I understand it. I see progress in the scientific as well as cultural and political sense: better medicine, cooler media, faster information-distribution systems, more freedom, more prosperity, the spread of individual and property rights across the globe. I think he means “human flourishing” to mean everyone agrees to wear the same itchy hemp robe and chant the Happy Planet Song while we tote buckets of night soil to the communal plot.

These are hardly new thoughts.

Brother, you said a mouthful.

What is current — and provides the reason the new President is well advised to keep this topic in mind and in the public eye — is that the incessant quest for ever more material goods is at the heart of the economic crisis.

He has a point. We loaned too much money to too many people who wanted too many things and couldn’t pay for them. Pity we didn’t tighten standards and cut off millions from access to mortgages and credit cards. Because that would have sailed through Congress like WD-40 through a duck’s intestinal tract.

President Obama correctly mocked President Bush for calling on people to go shopping after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America. However, today Americans and the citizens of many other nations are again urged to go shopping to dig us out of the current economic crisis. (This is what a stimulus package is all about.)

Hence the controversial provision to give everyone a $500 Target gift card.

Moreover, there is no doubt that given the way the economic system is set up, if people do not buy stuff, there will be more unemployment and more people will lose their homes and empty their retirement funds.

To translate: if there is no economic activity, the economy will suffer.  Like the hoofbeats of a messenger from another kingdom, the insights come one after the other:

However, the good way out of the crisis does not lead to a return to the old ways of the better-off purchasing ever larger homes, stocking them with ever more appliances, and driving SUVs and Humvees.

Again: stop. Ever more appliances. Which appliances do you want me to give up? Be specific. Hot water heater? Clothes drier? Waffle iron?

It does not call for people to save nothing and to go into debt in order to buy still more goods  — many of which those who are better-off do not really need —

Spoken like someone with a keen insight into what people should not have. The new Puritans are finely tuned to what you need and are so blinded by their hatred of consumerism they actually think “those who are better-off” go into debt to buy “still more goods” that are utterly superfluous to their lives. I know people who are well-off, and their debt is almost always involved with their business. But to our author, people with lots of money put Ambergris Separators on the credit card and make the minimum payment.

nor for people to labor long hours, take work home, delay retirement, send their teenagers to labor at fast food chains, and cut short social and cultural life to make some more money.

Ah. Well. We are dealing with a youngun here, I think. Many people labor long hours and take work home because they have demanding, complex jobs they have freely chosen. Assembly-line jobs have a quitting whistle; your average OB-GYN is on the clock 24-7.  Even if they are unhappy about their jobs, and don’t quit them for something that pays less, the fact that they have cut short cultural life - whatever that possibly means - to make some more money is no one else’s business.

Of course he can say what he wishes, of course; surely whatever suggestions he has for making our lives and society better, they’ll be voluntary.

The precept of a good life calls for setting ceilings for purchases and for work, for setting fairly modest limits on that which we seek to own and purchase, and on the amount of time we are willing take away from our children, spouses, friends, communities and ourselves, in order to work.

And there you have it. We have to set limits on what you can buy, how much you can work, what you can own, and how much time you are spending on work as opposed to the obligatory devotion to COMMUNITY.

These are the people who regard themselves as the finest champions of the individual. Well, inasmuch as the collective is made up of individuals, yes.

But how to achieve this world in which people stop working to buy appliances and spend more time on friends?

There are a whole slew of public policies that can express, foster, recognize and promote the good life. A steeply progressive income tax will do wonders.

Oh, it’ll do wonders, all right. Remember: the secret to expressing, fostering, recognizing and promoting the good life is taking away half the money of people who are too stupid to work long hours and bring work home. If they complain, it’s because they don’t know what the good life really is. It’s not sitting down at the end of the night to watch a fine movie on a sofa with a single-malt. It’s having friends over to a small sustainable apartment with a small fridge that doesn’t have an icemaker, breaking the crappy plastic ice trays by hand to get a few usuable cubes, serving everyone cheap scotch from a plastic jug then heading down to the Community Cinema for a movie - only to find that the projector is still broken because the owner can’t afford to fix it, so you go to the local coffee shop, which is staffed not by teens forced to labor but by middle-aged guys who lost their jobs because they worked in fields we have deemed socially regressive.

Consumption tax (or VAT) on all items that are not defined as basic goods, will help send a message.

And the message is: don’t buy anything.

Limiting government insured or subsidized mortgages to houses of a reasonable size (McMansions are out),

Because if there’s one thing the housing market needs now, it’s changing the game on the mortgage deduction, undercutting the value of larger properties. Why wait for the market to figure out the right price for these structures, when we can simply pass laws based on how much space you should really have? It’s not like a stranger wouldn’t look at your life and come up with a perfectly reasonable evaluation of your square-foot requirements.

I’ll go for that as soon as I can have a law that dictates how much memory, processing power and hard-drive space you can have. Don’t ask me why. I think you’re using the space for pirated movies. No one needs that much computing power. Computers use fossil fuels. I’d also argue that your internet connection is too fast, especially when some people have faster connections than others.  Ideas are expressed best in text form. Three hundred baud ought to do.

a tax on gas guzzlers and on cars by weight, and insuring only one bank account up to 100,000 dollars (rather than the current, unlimited number) are but a few illustrations of setting limits.

That last one fascinates me. It’s not enough to take away from people who have property; he wants to change the rules to make sure they lose legitimately accumulated property if their bank fails. The idea that someone out there has two accounts with $100,000 each - guaranteed - gnaws at him.

Last but not least, there is a deep connection between a life worth living and social justice.

And thus are the lives of private citizens - utter strangers, millions of them - delegitimized. “Social Justice” trumps any individual right, and the confiscation is sainted with the collectivist’s benediction: through sacrifice your life is now worth living. That life you had before, when you worked and saved and provided for your family? A thin sham, unconnected to the greater good. When your house is the size we want, your bank account duly humiliated, your appliances small and few, and you have time for culture - then you will have a life worth living.

To achieve a major reallocation of wealth, those who have more than enough must find sources of contentment other than laying their hands on still more goods.

Don’t accuse him of being a tyrant; you’re free to find your own alternate sources of contentment after they’ve taken away your laptop because you have an old Dell tower in the basement somewhere. Remember: property is theft and possessions are slavery. Imagine the contentment you will feel when you are forgiven of the former and relieved of the latter.

Really: imagine it. This is not optional.

This is what many religions offer.

So the tax code should be used to push people to faith-based compensations? But don’t accuse him of wanting a theocracy; that term is reserved for people who . . . Well, the scary ones who use religion for dark reasons that choke your freedoms, and don’t understand how God weeps everytime SubZero comes out with a side-by-side model that lets you buy in bulk and freeze for later.

Those who have lost this source of goodness, or have found it twisted, are called upon on to search for other springs of meaning. And nobody is better placed or more equipped than President Obama to return us to this old, but never more current, subject: What makes a good life.

You can understand the fellow’s frustration. What’s the point of freedom if people waste it on themselves?

One niggling contrary note. A recent piece in the Weekly Standard described the social-welfare benefits in a Swedish city.

Rosengård lies in the world’s most generous welfare state. Those who cannot provide for themselves and their families have a right to social welfare, which according to Swedish law must cover the cost for food, clothes, shoes, leisure activities, health and hygiene, health care and medicines, a daily newspaper, a phone, living expenses, electricity, commuting to work, home insurance, membership in a workers’ union and unemployment insurance. The frustrated and angry youngsters in Rosengård get health care at a minimal cost, free dental care, free school, and free college and university education, with the right to student benefits and loans.

Sounds pretty socially-just, no? Well, give it a few hundred years to work. For now, the experiment seems . . . inconclusive:

In December, the neighborhood was shaken by violent riots after a so-called basement mosque was not extended a new lease agreement. In response, local youths occupied the mosque, set cars on fire, and fired rockets at the police. In the Swedish media the riots were largely described as an expression of frustration and anger, due to social inequalities.

The article is fascinating, as it details the ways Malmo’s residents have enthusiastically expressed their objections to the presence of Jews, either in the form of Jews gathering for a political reason, or Jews showing up in the country to kick a ball around. It’s really quite disheartening  - you raise taxes, you provide all manner of benefits, you do what you can in the name of eliminating social injustice, and you still get people incapable of mustering the requisite manifestations of post-cultural civilization. But it helps you identify the Wreckers, at least: SUV drivers who go into debt for appliances, and Jews. In the old days, we’d just burn them, but we’ve evolved. No one would dare build a crematorium today.

The carbon impact would be ruinous.

 

I know it’s old news, but it’s fascinating. Remember this guy?

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban.” Caught in Afghanistan after the invasion while fighting on the side of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance; pled guilty to supplying aid to the enemy, and for possessing explosives during the commission of a felony.

Here’s the indictment. Of course, they can indict a ham sandwich, and say the ham sandwich was made by Hitler; they have to prove it. But if you want to return to those merry days of yore and remind yourself of the fellow’s particulars, read on:

 

     8. In or about late May or June 2001, LINDH agreed to attend an al-Qaeda training camp for additional and extensive military training, knowing that America and its citizens were the enemies of Din Laden and al-Qaeda and that a principal purpose of al-Qaeda was to fight and kill Americans.

 

     9. In or about late May or June 2001, LINDH traveled to a Bin Laden guest house in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he stayed for several days.

      . . .

13. In or about June or July 2001, LINDH met personally with Bin Laden, who thanked him and other trainees for taking part in jihad.

      . . .

 

20. After learning about the terrorist attacks against the United States on or about September 11, 2001, LINDH remained with his fighting group. LINDH did so despite having been told that Bin Laden had ordered the attacks, that additional terrorist attacks were planned, and that additional al Qaeda personnel were being sent from the training camps to the front lines to protect Bin Laden and defend against an anticipated military response from the United States.

 . . .

 

     21. From in or about October through early December 2001, LINDH remarried with his fighting group after learning that United States military forces and United States nationals had become directly engaged in support of the Northern Alliance in its military conflict with Taliban and al Qaeda forces.

 

Today I was looking at a WaPo transcript of a live chat with his attorney, C. Anthony West. (He’s identified as defense attorney and co-counsel.) As you might expect, he defends his client. That’s his job, even after the trial is over; can’t expect him to say “the boy got off easy, considering what an ass he was. Personally, I would have put him in the jug until the seventh seal broke, then made him do the rest of his time in Hell.” That’s not what attorneys do. You can judge a lawyer by the cases he takes, of course, and Mr. West has taken on some noble cases, fighting against child pornography. Just makes you wonder why he took this one. Aside from the fact that his firm had been retained and the publicity was bitchin,’ that is. But that’s speculation. It could have been he saw this as an opportunity to make sure our Shining Ideals were upheld even in our Darkest Hours. 

I’ll say this: if I ever defect to the other side and find myself captured with a bunch of guys who want to kill as many Americans and unbelievers as possible, this is the man I want staying my case in an online chat. 

Here’s how the attorney viewed the plea bargain:

“The government’s willingness to dismiss all of the terrorism charges–including the most serious, conspiracy to kill Americans–was for us an acknowledgement of what we have been saying all along: Whatever John is, he is not a terrorist, and he did not go to Afghanistan to kill Americans.” 

Just Afghans. To which someone from Harrisburg,  PA asked:

 Many believe there was a line crossed with John Lindh continued fighting after the United States entered the war. What is your client’s position to having been in a position of being on an opposing army?

Tony West: I understand that perception. John went to Afghanistan long before September 11 ever occurred, and he went for the specific purpose of opposing the Northern Alliance. One of the first things he told Army interrogators when they questioned him on December 3 of last year was that after 9/11 happened, he wanted to leave the front lines but couldn’t for fear of his life. John never wanted to be in a position where he was opposing the United States (and never thought he would be), and in fact he never opposed any American military. He does understand, however, how people can perceive that he was on the “other side.”

Damned broad-minded of him. This I did not know: the details behind the plea bargain. 

“For example, one of the items the government was insisting on was a provision that might have the effect of preventing John from foreign travel for the rest of his life. One of the most remarkable things about John has been his ability to remain committed to his faith throughout this whole things (which I believe has contributed to his lack of bitterness toward anybody). He explained that he couldn’t knowingly sign any agreement that would prevent him from making his Hajj, or trip to Mecca, which the Qu’uran requires every Muslim to do at least once in his or her life. To do so, said John, would be against Islam. So, we explained that to the prosecutors, who agreed to drop the requirement.”

Good lawyer. He notes that Lindh won’t be able to sell a book and profit from it, but some day his tale will be told. As his lawyer said: “it’s a story that needs to be told and his is a unique perspective.” 

I mention this for one reason: Tony West is the President’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Division. If you want to know how far we are past 9/11, there’s your answer: John Walker Lindh’s defense attorney is going to work for Justice. I’m not saying he wouldn’t do a perfectly competent job.

It just seems like one of those things that might have stuck out, once upon a time. 

Overheard at an early staffing meeting: “So, should we get a genial, helpful guy the press will see as a peer at best and a worthy adversary at worst, or someone peevish, condescending, and utterly unskilled at the hurly-burly give-and-take? Let’s try the latter one first, and see how that works out.”

It isn’t:

Among the many things we get from England, cautionary examples may be their most useful export:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Of course he has. What’s the line from Scrooge - better they should die, and decrease the surplus population? I’m surprised that’s not an applause line these days. If Scrooge had forbid Crachet from putting on more coal because it would contribute to global warming, he’d be the hero, and Crachet would have got the three spirits.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.

It hasn’t taken long, but it’s taken hold: children, to some, are not bundles of joys, but bundles of sticks whose inevitable combustion harms the planet. It doesn’t matter whether reducing the population might deprive the world of another Mozart or a scientist who can cure cancer; the latter would just mean people living longer and going more harm, and it’s an act of pure cultural arrogance and classism to suggest we need another Mozart anyway. (Plus, non-political culture we cannot afford in these desperate times. It’s not that it makes people think the wrong things; it just takes up time that could be spent thinking about the right things.) 

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table.”

I think there might be other ghosts jostling to be heard. Smaller ones.

The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland - an area the size of Trafalgar Square.

I have to admit my ignorance here; I don’t know if the old-growth oak is super-extra concentrated potential carbon. Seems likely, since old-growth means the trees would be bigger - but the choice of examples also suggests that something venerable is be destroyed, wantonly, for the sake of something as commonplace as a baby. 

There are 51.7 million acres in Great Britain, incidentally. 

“Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: ‘You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial,” he said.

It is heartening to think that encouraging the government to tell parents to abort #3 for the sake the environment is still too controversial. 

Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

You thought I was exaggerating by saying that curing disease only prolongs the problem, eh? I’d like to know which diseases he prefers to underfund so the state can shower the land with more condoms. I can’t imagine price is what keeps people from using a French letter, after all. It’s the lack of education, perhaps where does this go? Or the fact that scientists have not yet invented spring-loaded knickers that shoot out condoms the moment you tug on the elastic. 

He said: “We still have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe and we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth, often among women who are not convinced they want to become mothers.”

So the role of the state should be to convince ambivalent mothers to abort, then. Possibly by showing them cartoons of polar bears marooned on ice floes and letting them draw the obvious conclusion.  But why are two kids okay? Perhaps because the fellow speaking has two of his own, and couldn’t bear to think of choosing which one he’d have culled for Gaia’s sake. Well,  I say the limit should be one, and that this fellow is to be roundly pilloried for the metaphorical Forest of Trafalgar Square his excess kin will immolate.   He might argue that two are necessary to keep the population going and the economy intact,  but of course population and the economy are the twin engines of our destruction, and people seem mulishly unwilling to part with either. If you’re really concerned - if you are a good person - then your heart cannot help but sink when you hear the phrase “There’ll always be an England.” That’s the problem. 

Not to say there won’t always be an England - the physical place, which no doubt is called something else by native fauna in a language made of barks and spoor-scattering - will always be there, if we act now. There’s only one kind of sea-level rise that’s acceptable, and that’s because everyone jumped en masse into the water to drown themselves. 

Imagine an England where the Hundred Acre Wood is unspoiled by Christopher Robin!

Then burns down entirely one day because there’s no one around to put out the fire. 

People do come in handy now and then. It’s good to have spares. 

 

–

(Note:  When I wrote the post this afternoon, I called it the Thousand Acre Wood. This was entirely intentional, since it would have been a Thousand Acre Wood if humans hadn’t cut down 900 acres. But since *some* people didn’t get the obvious implication, I’ve changed it to Hundred Acre Wood.)

(Also, that’s nonsense. My mistake. Now fixed.)

From an online survey:

The “NO” option remains grayed out when you mouse over it.

A perfect example of the reflexive cringe some people feel when they see a rather straight-forward unmoderated example of Western Culture – from Britain, of course:

“Dorothy Glenn decorates her home in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, with hundreds of festive lights every year, including a giant tree and a 4ft Santa Claus.

“But this year she was astonished when an employee of South Tyneside Homes called at her house and informed her that the decorations she was displaying might be offending her neighbours.”

The neighbors weren’t offended, which must make Constable Killjoy all the more annoyed; they’re not helping matters at all. We’re not going to get to the perfect world unless the right people are as irritated as their civil shepherds, and pitch in. No one felt excluded? Not one of you felt like an outsider? How stupid are you, really? There it is! Someone else’s culture – the old dominant culture presented without apologies or footnotes, and all you can do is say “how pretty.” The damned ingratitude of it all.

If it were left up to the official who made the complaint, the ideal holiday decoration would consist of white lights – well, no, that privileges one color over the others. If you had all colors in equal numbers it would suggest that there was an equality in society where no such thing exists, so perhaps colors could be assigned by the first letter of people’s names, arbitrarily chosen, and then presented in the appropriate proportion. The lights could be displayed with a snowflake, and individual expressions could be achieved by varying the size and design of the snowflake. This avoids the religious connotations of a star or a tree, the offensive presentation of human form inherent in the snowman – no Muslims have complained about that, but we’re working on reminding them – and the other iconography that suggests a particular historical genesis, sorry, origin for this season.

Bully for Mr. Khan:

“Independent councillor Ahmed Khan, who represents Mrs Glenn’s ward, condemned the employee’s actions.

“He said: ‘Every year this woman puts her Christmas lights up and I know how popular they are. It’s great when people make an effort to decorate their houses.

“‘It’s this kind of nonsense that sets race relations back 20 years. That woman did nothing more than decorate her house to celebrate Christmas.’”

It would, if it were Muslims who were complaining. But since it’s the government, it should set government relations back 20 years. But it won’t.  The housing association apologized, and “started an investigation,” as if there’s some strange shadowy secret group in their midst that can only be uncovered by a legion of pipe-smoking men in deerstalker caps. I expect to hear nothing more on the story, least of all the identity of the pinch-souled miscreant who upbraided the lady for an inflatable snowman and an excess of reindeer. In a way, it’s a heartening story, because the lady got to keep her snowman, and the neighbors who turned out for the supportive photograph were reassuringly diverse; it would have been different if they’d all been yobbos from the local staring at the lens with defiance. That would have sent a chill up some spines, perhaps. Get some lagered-up lads in front of a snowman, and the next thing you know they’ve formed a chapter of the BNP.

The most telling aspect of the story, though, is that the display appears to be entirely secular, but it’s still presumed offensive. The very act of asserting the symbols of your particular culture and history – however denatured they’ve become – strikes the Eurocrat as exclusionary, unless it has the requisite apologetic footnotes.  The historical cultures have no place in the great grey continental smear of egalitarian glory, no matter how much they mean to the citizens. The future may be the undiscovered country, but the past is the inconvenient one. 

Courtesy of American Digest, this observation from Oz Conservative on the failures of modern culture:

 

Where were the Bachs and Beethovens of my own time? The Europe of the past was poorer and less populated. It was supposed to be more backward. And yet it produced a wealth of great composers - a whole tradition of high art - which fell away during the 1900s.

 

Why hasn’t liberal modernity produced high culture? One reason, perhaps, is that if we only recognise man and his desires, with no higher order toward which man aspires, then there is nothing for a high culture to successfully orient itself to.

 

Not necessarily. One of the greatest 20^th century art forms was the skyscraper, which is pure Mammon from the caissons to the tip of the spotlit spire. Renaissance art may be religious in subject matter, but it was often commissioned as a status symbol, complete with the patron in the corner pointing to the Scourging of St. Screamus with a grave expression. This didn’t make the painting irreligious – belief saturated everything – but I’m not sure how many of these painters were devout guys who cut off the legs of their easels so they could paint on their knees. But I know what he means. It’s not the humanism that ruined art, it was humanism that divorced itself from the possibility of transcendence. Which would be bad enough if it hadn’t decided to splash around in the gutters as well.

 

Ah, but why was it influential? It recontextualized the commonplace and made us see it as Art, a process that continues to this day every time you see a book with a title like “The Art of Bread” or “The Art of Toad Sexing” or whatever else has to be elevated to the status of marble sculpture to make the user feel they’re living a rarified life. It played a joke on the Stuffy Academics, which is something the adolescent temperament never tires of doing. This is not encouraged any more, since the Academics are on the side of Truth and Modernity, however defined today. Although I once knew an architecture student who took perverse and boundless glee in shocking his teacher by putting a pointy roof on the house each student had to design. A pointed roof. In other words, a useful roof, a functional roof that didn’t collect rain water. Everyone else had a flat roof, of course. Machine for Living and all that. This was just around the time Post-Modernism made it okay to quote history, as long as everyone saw you wink, or could understand that your overscaled grotesque excretions were meant ironically.

 

An instructor might not know what to make of a house with a point roof, but if you called it “House In The Time of Reagan” he’d understand.

 

Finally, Duchamp redefined the act of creation. You were no longer required to take materials and form them into pleasing shapes. (He lacked the skills to make something as graceful as an industrial urinal, probably.) Art now consisted of the act of calling something Art, of finding art where others had just seen pissoir equipment. Again, a reaction to Stuffy, Tradition-Bound Authority. It wasn’t enough that the visual arts had undergone the Great Unravelling; what was necessary was removing Art from the hands of the Artists entirely. Or rather taking it from the old guard and putting it in the hands of you and all your friends, who are just a marvelously clever bunch of lads and having a grand old time.

 

Painting didn’t lose its relevance because of secularism – the 19^th century was a tremendously vital era, and the great art was almost entirely secular. But they revitalized painting by tugging on the loose, frayed strand of representationalism, and that unraveled everything. You can only invent a new school if you’re more unrepresentational than the previous guy, which is why you start with gauzy Turner landscapes and end up with Motherwell, or any other guy who puts an enormous black mark on a canvas the size a garage door, calls it ELEGY or AMERICA #6 and watches the commissions roll in.

 

Music: same thing, more or less. German Romanticism unraveled around the end of Mahler’s tenure; French music, well, Raveled; the Italians soldiered on in the old tradition, but it sounded thin and showy. The Brits did their best as well, but eventually their orchestra music got odd and grumpy around the edges before expiring in a burst of showy golden glory in Walton’s Coronation March.   In short: I think serious composers lost faith in the ability of the symphonic and tonal traditions to ever equal Beethoven or Mozart or the rest, so what’s the bloody point? Or they lost faith in their own ability to rise to the challenge. Jazz was the new thing anyway; the Americans were showing that. Maybe the world had enough oboe concertos composed to accompany the morning bowel-movements of Count Schnaggellpussen of Upper-lower Saxony; it didn’t have enough Louis Armstrong. In any case, orchestra composition isn’t dead – it’s doing very well in movie scores, thank you. (The rise of the movie as an art form is another Good Thing about the 20^th century, but that’s another post.)

 

 

but that’s beside the point, really. Liberal culture, if you want to use the author’s broad term, or modern culture, if you want a term less charged, hasn’t produced any high art because it doesn’t want to, doesn’t know how to, and doesn’t believe in it. What started out as an individual revolt against exhausted traditions – something whose origins you could probably trace to 19^th century political trends, if you wanted to spend the time – became enshrined as a Permanent Revolution against the crusty old bothersome past, the same big hunk of history that summed up the innumerable failures of the West, at least as the grave penseurs defined them. If we are the enlightened ones, then it stands to reason that the culture of the Dark Ages must reflect the sexism, imperialism, fascism, classism, and other myriad isms that stained the globe. But they’ll still go see a traveling exhibit of old Masters, and they’ll still pile in the halls to hear Beethoven, because those are still the gold standards for Taste, and Taste has long been their favorite, and most self-flattering, virtue.

 

High art has been replaced by mass art, which can be low or high or middle; whatever it is, it’s characterized by wide availability, momentary ubiquity, instant access, and its perishable nature. (The worst side effect of the rise of mass art was the death of the pop song, as it was defined before rock.)  But the old traditions are still around – painting still has its realists, emerging now from the catacombs where they hid with Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers for decades; sculpture might yet be liberated from the hands of people who drag rusty steel walls into empty plazas and regard themselves as the heirs to Bernini; music, well composed and properly orchestrated, still has its old power intact, if dormant. Nearly everyone on the planet can hum the “Star Wars” theme, after all.

 

 

(Some note that William’s theme bears a strong resemblance to theme from a Ronald Reagan movie, “King’s Row.” Perhaps. That piece was written by Erich Korngold – a European expat who was called a genius as a young man by none other than Mahler himself.) 

 

 

Then again, maybe we’re just dining on the last of the seed corn. It doesn’t take a belief in the divine to appreciate Bach. Does it take such a belief to be Bach? Or does a rational, secular society have no answer to Bach but the empty crystal kaleidoscopes of Phillip Glass? 

 

Or if their answer is P Diddy, what comes after that?

 . . . but of what? Headline on the WCCO site:

“Report: North Korea Serious About Border Shutdown” 

A helpful sidebar gives the related stories:

North Korea Nixes Samples From Nuke Facilities (11/12/2008)

North Korea To Halt Border Crossings With South (11/12/2008) 

North Korea Threatens To Turn South Into ‘Debris’ (10/28/2008)

There’s a pattern here, but it would take a lifetime of work at State or the CIA, sifting through the strange, oblique clues that waft from Norkland, to figure it out.  

Our motto for the next few years: nothing should come as a surprise, even the fact that we’re surprised by whatever comes.  Maybe especially the fact that we’re surprised. 

Found this in the paper today. It’s from a 1947 Star editorial page piece on a local labor leader who attended a Communist rally. (He said he was just soliciting money for the strike fund.)  Comrades! Strive to attend the Annual Lenin Rally and Fish Fry!

 

 

This was a bit jarring, since Nellie Stone Johnson is a local hero in these parts. I knew she was an old-line leftist – I interviewed her in 1988, I think, and she was smart, sharp, and friendly. Patterson was a full-blown Communist – I’d say “Commie” but that’s one of those terms that makes some people put you in the precious-bodily-fluids category. I don’t know if she was a Communist, but appearing at a Lenin Memorial is heavy-duty. If it’s not fellow-traveling, it’s certain showing up at the station to see them off. 

So? Well, those were the bad guys. Lenin’s heirs were not exactly exporting freedom and light and powdered magic unicorn eyelashes to the people of Eastern Europe. Nellie Stone Johnson’s subsequent reputation arose from her civil rights work, and she was much beloved & lauded when she died in 2002.  But it’s interesting how the culture now regards domestic Communists as either persecuted idealists or just really extra-strength liberals in a hurry who had no idea, absolutely none whatsoever, that things over there weren’t happy worker hoedowns over exceeded tractor-tire-production quotas.

 

If someone had appeared at a Hitler Memorial Meeting, would they get a school named after them? Lindbergh got a few airport terminals and schools named after him, of course, but there’s still discussion and agonizing over his politics. Sure, he believed in eugenics - but only voluntary eugenics! Uh huh. Still, “Nazi Symp” is one of the first things that comes to mind for a lot of people when his name comes up. “Commie Symp” has lots all its sting. 

Odd how that happened, isn’t it?