Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Nine
NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...
Beethoven, Friedrich, Whitman, Kerouac all melted me during my childhood. But they never spoke to me and said vote this way, or join the army, or start a fire, be the revolution. They never told me explicitly to do anything except, obviously, to motivate me out of my pre-pubescent hellhole.
When I was gob-smacked by “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” while a rambunctious young tadpole, I wanted to do something, and later I learned that this lofty movie propaganda put the juice into me. Some art should be political, but that doesn’t mean the political message should be overt. The artist herself isn’t necessarily aware of the message. Polke, whom some consider Germany’s Andy Warhol, what I tried to explain to Tre that first encounter, was an extremely political artist. He went through a phase, probably his most famous, of painting East German concentration camps, a “celebration” of his nation’s various historical moments, I suppose. But those images of guard towers, screaming at you, did not scream anything in particular. Not to me. Possibly they screamed something striking to East or West Germans. Imaginative they were, they were also too benign. Those stark, shadowy towers were glossed over by cascades of cartoon-like showers of ducks and flowers and pop images, turning the towers into toys and the canvases into the par of a child’s nursery blanket.
Today, when I look at the Japanese dancers, I can see Polke glaring backward, frivolously, at a corrupt element within us. I’m not alone reading that into his work. The demeaning of women. The loss of an ancient culture. The trashing of culture in general.
Does it make me want to do anything about these problems? It inspires me. I hammered my students with righteous indignation. What else can you do except warn them about the loss of their culture, the inevitable changes in culture that cause loss, the exuberant lies that your own culture will tell that can force you into opposition with others and yourself? And what else can you do except warn young women, and caution young men, about the harm mass culture does to society, does to gender?
Everywhere in our country the White Male tells you they are in control, what to think, and especially what to think about who is in control. The feminist writers warn us that we can get intimidated by and even become a part of, knowingly or unwittingly, the very people who corrupt us and deny us our dignity. They drag non-white, non-male recruits into their ranks to start spreading the news. In my day, feminism hadn’t done much to turn off the loudspeaker any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. had to shut off the spigot of idiots like Clarence Thomas. See the women voting for Trump. See the women flooding the ranks of the AltRight.
And yet…and yet.
Beethoven, Friedrich, Whitman, Kerouac all melted me during my childhood. But they never spoke to me and said vote this way, or join the army, or start a fire, be the revolution. They never told me explicitly to do anything except, obviously, to motivate me out of my pre-pubescent hellhole.
When I was gob-smacked by “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” while a rambunctious young tadpole, I wanted to do something, and later I learned that this lofty movie propaganda put the juice into me. Some art should be political, but that doesn’t mean the political message should be overt. The artist herself isn’t necessarily aware of the message. Polke, whom some consider Germany’s Andy Warhol, what I tried to explain to Tre that first encounter, was an extremely political artist. He went through a phase, probably his most famous, of painting East German concentration camps, a “celebration” of his nation’s various historical moments, I suppose. But those images of guard towers, screaming at you, did not scream anything in particular. Not to me. Possibly they screamed something striking to East or West Germans. Imaginative they were, they were also too benign. Those stark, shadowy towers were glossed over by cascades of cartoon-like showers of ducks and flowers and pop images, turning the towers into toys and the canvases into the par of a child’s nursery blanket.
Today, when I look at the Japanese dancers, I can see Polke glaring backward, frivolously, at a corrupt element within us. I’m not alone reading that into his work. The demeaning of women. The loss of an ancient culture. The trashing of culture in general.
Does it make me want to do anything about these problems? It inspires me. I hammered my students with righteous indignation. What else can you do except warn them about the loss of their culture, the inevitable changes in culture that cause loss, the exuberant lies that your own culture will tell that can force you into opposition with others and yourself? And what else can you do except warn young women, and caution young men, about the harm mass culture does to society, does to gender?
Everywhere in our country the White Male tells you they are in control, what to think, and especially what to think about who is in control. The feminist writers warn us that we can get intimidated by and even become a part of, knowingly or unwittingly, the very people who corrupt us and deny us our dignity. They drag non-white, non-male recruits into their ranks to start spreading the news. In my day, feminism hadn’t done much to turn off the loudspeaker any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. had to shut off the spigot of idiots like Clarence Thomas. See the women voting for Trump. See the women flooding the ranks of the AltRight.
And yet…and yet.
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