Posted 8:36 PM by Gene

I was going to read this, and possibly comment, but guilt by association -- Richard Nixon's guilt -- impeded me. Still Leonard Garment's op-ed on the snuffed-out poets' hate-in at the White House came through with a really good line: That the cancelled righteous protest wasn't about Iraq, or even free speech, but it was "about bad behavior, the sort I have grown increasingly weary of over the last 35 years." We all have, Mr. Garment. But after 35 years it's too late for reason. The whole cultural redoubt is home to cry-baby loony leftists, and when the right responds, when it deems fitfully to respond, it's with the equivalent of cowboy poetry, or mawkish hymns like "AH'm praaaayoud to beee a caaaaaAAAAAAYN -- AmayriCAAAAAAYN!" Politics has so precluded excellence for so long it's hard to imagine where a new generation of Poes or Dickinsons or Frosts could begin. Not in academe, and not under the watchful Big Brother eye of Rupert and Sumner, either.

It used to be possible to create great art despite politics. Aaron Copland was an unregenerate leftist, and he took Leonard Bernstein under his wing (in more ways than one, I'm afraid), and both produced glories. But that was when art commanded more respect, and artists had more self-respect. It's just not possible now. Sloganeering always defeats the muse.

And speaking of sloganeering, anyone who can write "Jews who learned their comportment from storm troopers/ act out the nightmares that woke their grandmothers" is a candidate for an editorial job at a new Der Sturmer.