RUTHFULLY YOURS

First of all – and I know this is ticky-tacky but the left’s ubiquotous pseudo-sophisticated name checking gets obnoxious – Julius Caesar was not a particularly great writer. Even if that wasn’t true, Marcus Aurelius was in every way a better scribe and at least equally as powerful. And as a purely historical matter, though it’s distasteful to admit, Lenin and Mao also need to be included as writer-leaders who controlled huge swaths of territory. All of them obviously lived after Caesar.

This is why we have separate sandboxes for academics. People who study things like history – where precision is still at least gestured toward – play in one sandbox. Then we put theater and music experts like Landesman in a different sandbox, where there are no sharp facts for them to swallow or cut themselves with. There they can spin metaphorical tapestries of fancy and pass them off as profundity, and we pat their heads and assure them that they’re bright and shiny.

The pursuit of the arts, of course, is irreplaceable in and indispensable to a well-cultivated society. But its practitioners should avoid political activism, lest they end up sounding like moronic protofascist bootlickers. And just to be clear, it’s the “moronic” part that’s particularly grating:

Three days after Landesman was confirmed as the head of the NEA, his communications director, Yosi Sergant, told NEA grantees in a conference call: “I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment — you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.” Two days later, a host of arts organizations endorsed Obama’s health-care plan… of the 21 groups signing the statement, 16 had recently received grants from the NEA or were affiliated with organizations that had… Landesman debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

 

Not for nothing, but the last time I got an email about the Cashill hypothesis it was from a far left academic. He found it highly unlikely that Obama metamorphosed from his crappy pre-Dreams self into the transcendent political author of our time. I’m not totally sold on that theory yet, though I agree that bad writers don’t become a good writers without years of practice that Obama never had. But as a simple matter of public argument, invoking the President’s literary brilliance might be two-sided.

The weird thing about the NEA dustup is how unnecessary it was. Was the White House worried that artists weren’t consistently producing agitprop for the Messiah In Chief? Because they were and are:

What is unofficial Obama art? That’s what I wondered when I heard there will be a display of such art in Chicago at the Chicago Tourism Center. Basically, it’s art by any artist who was inspired by Obama’s run for president to create a video, a painting, a poster or whatever to commemorate the occasion. This is not just any art, but good art. People whose work is represented in the exhibit sent it in for consideration. The result is more than 100 artworks. Some of the pieces may seem familiar like the Go Tell Mama series of posters or Sol Sender’s Obama ’08 logo–the one that ended up on yard signs and bumper stickers.

Website and exhibit:

There’s even an ongoing blog called The Art Of Obama. It’s not meant ironically.

None of which has stopped Presidential appointees – more and more Presidential appointees – from handing out taxpayer money so artists can get their propaganda subsidized. Because why should they have to produce agitprop for free?