The presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons’s balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stoned scribbles, Richard Prince’s feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.
WWRD?
As I pointed out a while back, the blogosphere is full of people who had never heard Sarah Palin’s name 24 hours before McCain chose her, but who six hours later knew everything they needed to know in order to make decisive and unshakable judgments about the quality of the choice and about McCain’s motives in making it.
Let’s contrast these people to Ross Douthat. Early on, he made his inclination clear: “At the moment, I’m probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you’re reading my commentary.” But, astonishingly enough, Ross’s inclination did not instantly determine his judgment — he decided to wait on that until he got more information. Information, imagine that. And now that he has acquired that information, he’s ready to formulate a judgment:
Now that we’ve seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there’s no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it’s just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.
Now, get this: Ross’s verdict on Palin’s performance and readiness stands at odds with what he wanted to believe. How many times have you seen that in this election season: someone who tried to suspend his emotional response in order to make a fair and accurate decision based on data, and in the end came to a conclusion different than the one he wanted to come to? Not many times, I’d bet.
Clearly the man has no future in political commentary. But good on you, Ross, all the same.
(P.S. I think he made the right call.)
According to surveys by Ellison Research of Phoenix, 36 percent of Americans polled indicate that they have no idea ‘what an evangelical Christian is’ in the first place. Only 35 percent of all Americans believe they know ‘someone very well who is an evangelical,’ while a stunning 51 percent are convinced they don’t know any evangelicals at all. On the left side of the aisle, some critics have grown hostile.
One of the surprises of a new Ellison study is ‘how much abuse is aimed at evangelicals,’ noted company president Ron Sellers. ‘Evangelicals were called illiterate, greedy, psychos, racist, stupid, narrow-minded, bigots, idiots, fanatics, nut cases, screaming loons, delusional, simpletons, pompous, morons, cruel, nitwits, and freaks, and that’s just a partial list. …
‘Some people don’t have any idea what evangelicals actually are or what they believe — they just know they can’t stand evangelicals.’
Nobody has ever really believed in Freedom of Religion. Where religion is concerned, the hardest virtue is tolerance, and to find out what a person’s religion is one has only to discover what he becomes violent about.
Godot 2008: Change Worth Waiting For
O, what a falling off was there
The transformation of the previously idyllic American Scene into a series of back-alley brawls is a function of the upcoming Presidential election, of course: all of a sudden everyone is a partisan and is demanding that everyone else be a partisan too. As someone whose primary interests are in Christian life and thought, literature and the arts, and technology, I was taken aback by this: I foolishly forgot that for many, many people politics is the most important thing in the world. I forgot that they really do believe that the choices they are faced with are so momentous that the whole world stands on a knife edge. They are certain that the differences between Adolf Hitler and Mohandas Gandhi could scarcely be greater than the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama.
Whatever.
Maybe things will become more peaceful and more civil once the election is over, assuming that the election doesn’t conclude the way the 2000 one did. But I think the recent explosion of (what seems like) the whole blogosphere into wrath and recrimination indicates just how fragile are the truces we manage to make with one another, and also — to return to an old theme of mine — just how problematic is the post-plus-comments architecture of the blog in its current form.
My experience with blogging suggests the follow ratio of comment types:
- 10% positive, supportive, complimentary
- 10% seriously and critically engaged with what you’ve said
- 20% bitchy, snarky, contemptuous
- 60% irrelevant (people grinding their own axes and riding their hobbyhorses)
Those are not very good ratios. But I think that if you’re going to enable comments on your blog you thereby incur an obligation to converse with your commenters. (Plus, it seems to me that bloggers who ignore their commenters tend to create a situation in which the commenters get more and more extreme in the hopes of provoking a response from the host.) So how do you respond in a situation in which so few of your commenters are giving you something substantive to respond to? That’s the problem I can’t figure out, and that’s the main reason I haven’t enabled comments on this tumblelog.
That’s also why I won’t be around the Scene — where the comments are quite enabled — very much until the election is over. It’s no fun dealing with all the snark and hobbyhorse-riding, and at this stage in my life, I ain’t gonna voluntarily do stuff that’s no fun unless there’s some service to God and humanity involved.
So, see y’all in the funny papers.
It’s hard for me to pin the Scarlet Letter E for Egghead to my chest and beg apology for knowing things, or reading literature, or liking the heirloom tomatoes I grow in my backyard, or any of the things that compose my professional and personal being. It’s hard for me to see myself as some growling, powerful elite who daily intrudes upon the private lives of a humble family of church-goers in the heartland and forces them to watch pornography while I turn their children into Marxoislamicist transsexuals.
It’s not as if getting your face pushed into fences ever quite comes to an end, either. I was at a party a few years back where one guy, upon hearing I was a professor, immediately wanted to make sure I knew how to throw a football and put me through my paces. Yeah, I found that basically gentle and amusing, but it’s not as if I then got a chance to find out what he thought of Foucault, if you know what I mean.
So emotionally, I just can’t quite get my head around the idea that somewhere along the way, I magically became the swan and now it’s other people who suffer uglyducklinghood.
in which I dare to suggest an experiment
If you are a partisan in the current political struggle, try this: for one week, talk and write about your disagreements with your opponents without using any of the following words and their variants:
lie
hypocrisy
vile
loathsome
dishonest
mean-spirited
arrogant
cynical
contemptuous
culture war
spin
taunt
mock
hateful
red state
blue state
elites
