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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
Gore's weightlessness is sinking him; applause for Giuliani's stand against the arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment; and praise (praise?) for Paltrow.
Oct 6, 1999 | As the once wooden and now manic, overbouncy Al Gore sinks week by week in the polls vs. his still shadowy rival for the presidential nomination, Bill Bradley, I wonder whether the big bosses of the national Democratic Party are starting to regret their strident defense of President Clinton during last year's impeachment crisis.
If he had had any conscience or class, of course, Clinton would have resigned at the first hint of scandal. But if Democratic leaders had followed principle rather than partisanship, they would have gelled behind the scenes to force Clinton out, allowing Gore to assume the presidency and to gain stature and experience in office -- after which he would have breezed through the 2000 election against the relatively untested Gov. George W. Bush, the likely Republican nominee.
Former New Jersey Sen. Bradley is gaining on Gore because the latter, with his newly sandblasted owl eyes and his weirdly bulging, gym-hewn mammaries, seems slicker and slicker, a weightless creature of the Washington anthill despite his recent emergency eviction of campaign headquarters to his home state of Tennessee. Bradley's drowsy, shambling style looks increasingly attractive to registered Democrats (like me) who are fed up with the narcissistic Clintons, but time will tell whether Bradley can re-create America's aw-shucks Gary Cooper past or whether he will founder under the massive daily media bombardment that is politics today.
Other news of the past two weeks includes the official announcement of his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by Arizona Sen. John McCain -- who has given me the willies since his TV appearances in the months leading up to the impeachment vote. I continue to be dismayed by the coddling that McCain is getting by liberal Democratic journalists -- a suspiciously easy ride that suggests he is being strategically used by the opposing party to help derail Bush's onrushing electoral train.
The disciplined but darkly guarded McCain would make a good captain of the Praetorian Guard, but I just don't see him in the Oval Office except in a "Doctor Strangelove" or "Fail-Safe" scenario. With his baleful eyes and unnervingly phoned-in smiles (always a beat too late), McCain utterly lacks the expansiveness, relaxed charisma and formidable managerial aptitude of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose record as supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II led to his elevation to the presidency.
As for the speech given by actor Warren Beatty at a Los Angeles awards ceremony last week, the televised excerpts were banal in content and nauseatingly coy in style. The man is a walking pair of parentheses, and his putative presidential candidacy is a very bad joke. All those filthy-rich Hollywood stars and moguls, with their smug, dated liberal rhetoric, should stop preaching to Washington about expanding the bureaucracy and endow their own private foundations instead for charity as well as arts grants.
The frontier between politics and art was commandeered for the past two weeks by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his attack on the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a once dignified institution that has in my view disgraced itself by this detour into the tacky. Of the behavior of some museum curators and library directors, Salon reader Carl A. Moore writes to ask "why liberals charged with the public trust go out of their way to incense the public."
The rote attacks on Giuliani have been deafening. While the mayor certainly exceeded his authority in demanding that the entire show be stopped (rather than simply denouncing individual works that did not merit public funding), I am frankly enjoying his assault on the arts establishment, which is in dire need of a shake-up. I have nothing but contempt for Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, who was hired two years ago and whose suitability for that position, on the basis of the present debacle, seems questionable.
"What a whiny slug!" I declared as Lehman nervously defended himself on TV. He struck me as an affected provincial oblivious to the fact that the zenith in campy collections of 1950s Tupperware and Formica kitchen tables was about, oh, 15 years ago. The liberal casuists who sprang to unqualified defense of Lehman and his show (which includes not just Chris Ofili's dung- and porn-adorned Madonna but a rotting cow's head and a formaldehyde-suspended bisected pig) seem to have lost sight of the larger question: What should be the role and status of art in the United States?
Since the Puritan hegemony of three centuries ago, it has been a struggle for art to win acceptance here. Each of these incidents of religious desecration or of ostentatious decadent display (I speak as a sympathetic theorist of decadence in "Sexual Personae") simply poisons the cultural atmosphere and ensures popular hostility to art and artists.
The price for this pointless provocation will be paid by schoolchildren whose arts programs are gutted for lack of funding. Sure enough, Republican presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole has just responded to the Brooklyn exhibit (which she calls "highly offensive") by calling for the complete abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had nothing to do with this show.
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