Culture Watch
Pat Buchanan's terror campaign in the Republican primaries has weakened and disoriented George Bush, and I can't say I'm sorry. It has also forced debate about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) back into the headlines--on the most skewed and reactionary of terms. Never mind that Buchanan's homophobic NEA attack ads were themselves the sleaziest things seen on broadcast TV in this decade. The issue is back out in the arena.
Bush reacted by firing NEA chief John Frohnmayer. His party chairman, Richard Bond, suggested publicly that the government should "get out of this business" of deciding "what is art."
By the time you read this, Buchanan may well have been laid quietly to rest--and the NEA issue with him--for this year. But given Buchanan's success, it is almost certain to return for as long as we have a public arts agency.
Art subsidies do involve some decisions about what is art. But they also involve judgments about what art is necessary or worthy, and, perhaps most important, about who decides. It's a complicated and problematic issue, and one that requires more than 30 second's (or even one page's) worth of thinking. But here goes...
Our individual and collective inability (or at least reluctance) to discuss the issue of racism openly and frankly—and to struggle actively with it with colleagues, family members, parishioners, and friends—keeps the cycle of oppression repeated and reinforced. Joseph Barndt's Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America will be greeted with gratitude and relief by anyone who has tried to wrestle with the issue of racism in a personal relationship or a professional setting.
Barndt—a pastor in New York City and co-director of Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church and society—has been working on issues of racial justice for decades. In Dismantling Racism, he has boiled down years of experience, insight, and wisdom into a clear, readable, no-nonsense, and honest volume.
Barndt's overall analysis is superb. He addresses the social, political, and economic realities in this country with such simplicity and clarity that reading this book is like looking through a camera lens at a vista that at first appears blurry but is suddenly, dramatically, brought into focus.
In the first chapter, Barndt discusses what he calls the "continuing evil of racism"—how the roots of racism are "embedded and intertwined in the life and history of the United States." A dynamic tension is created between the despair and disappointment of the past and a sense of hope for the future.
As the debate on political correctness rages, we will examine the literature that fuels this discussion.
One of my buddies from college is a poet. He also writes advertising copy.
As the folks at Mazda are always reminding us, the 1980s-going-on-'90s are really the 1950s.
There's something reassuring about the fact that the flag, the old Stars and Stripes, can still kick up so much popular controversy.
The usual rap on TV cop shows is that they trivialize real life-and-death matters into a glossy package of sanitized violence designed to sell soap and soda pop.
For this future cultural analyst, the legendary '60s were an after-school special.
Political philosophers tell us that one of the great driving forces of human history is the tension between individualism (or liberty) and community (or equality).
Someday in the far-distant future, some 23rd-century Mel Brooks may make a satirical film called The History of the World: Part MCXXXXVII.
The ad line for the new Oliver Stone-Eric Bogosian film, Talk Radio, gets my first nomination for The 1989 William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold" Award.
As this is written on November 22, 1988, the pop-cultural atmosphere is a-swamp with remembrance of things Kennedy.
The 1987-88 pop culture season was definitely a red-letter year. And the letter was Hawthorne's scarlet "A." That's for adultery, in case your high school lit is rusty.
Ronald Reagan, it is said, has run America's first cinematic presidency, often taking his ideological cues and policy prescriptions from his familiar world of the silver screen.
Perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected to happen during the Reagan era was a renewal of interest in the idea of legalizing drugs.