Fact
or Friction*#!... 02/02/03
Some
Velvet Morning Page 3...
Did it fall on the total farce of the 2000 election? And by farce here, I'm not talking about the Florida debacle, I mean the election from the get-go, the zero-choice between Demican and Republicrat.
Did it fall with America's best Republican president ever- Bill Clinton?
Reagan?
Bush the Elder?
Nixon?
Eisenhower?
Johnson?
Kennedy?
America has fallen right not by the might of the army, but by the long arm of multinational corporations, the purveyors of fascism with a smile.
ART + POLITICS = POWER
Taylor's Hitler scribbles madly on graph paper one night in a snit over his inability to create abstract art. As you may remember my little historians, Herr Hitler railed against and destroyed abstract art as the product of the sick and twisted minds of Jews and Homosexuals. Hitler's art, his means of expression became rhetorical, as well as political and cultural, and, let's not forget- racial. He's responsible for setting back a nice big global melting pot a good one hundred years.
Is there a proper admixture of art and politics in our rightist America today? Television, advertising, film- are these the right's politics as art? If yes, it is only as an individuating force, and not a unifying force like Hitler's artistic politics which brought together in a fevered pitch the German and European Aryans against European Jews. No, American media, as controlled by multinationals, which once successfully divided groups of Americans along racial and class lines, is now invidious- dividing individuals from individuals, creating a swirling society of hostility which Christopher Lasch referred to as the war of all against all. Will the invidious politics as art be replaced by a unifying political art or political artist in our lifetime? It won't come from this administration. They would not know art if it bit them on the hindside and gave them roses. Ashcroft's fear of the feminine and literal belief in Heaven and Hell is clearly indicative of this administration's lack of imagination.
The SF Protest of 1/18/03 did bring some art to politics - after all, SF is the capitol of street theatre, so this is to be expected - but only in a reactionary way. What America needs is a political artist who is a visionary, one that can rebuild not just the economy, but the culture. I lift my glass of Lodi Chard to the promise that this artist is all Vaclav Havel, and zero Hitler. Hell, I'll take Karen Finley over der Fuhrer any ol' day.
$12 taxi ride home from the bus station back in Sactown. I give the Ukrainian driver a twenty and tell him to keep the change. He doesn't smile or say thanks. He just looks at me like a just shat in his hand. Ah.. back in Grumpymento. Feel the vibe. Feel the love.
FIN
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"Some Velvet Morning" by Lee
Hazelwood, Nancy Sinatra