Artists to the Rescue!
Patrick Courrielche works in the arts in Los Angeles, and last month he was invited to join in a conference call arranged by the National Endowment for the Arts. The invitation asked the 75 participants to deploy their artistic talents to advance the Obama administration's "recovery agenda." And what's that? You know: "health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal." All that stuff.
Courrielche (who is quick to say he's no right-winger) was creeped out by the call and wrote about it on the blog Big Hollywood, where it got lots of attention. "Is building a message distribution network, for matters other than increasing access to the arts and arts education, the role of the National Endowment for the Arts?" he asks. The answer is no, as the endowment's charter makes clear.
Many people are upset about the phone call and the larger, purely partisan campaign it was meant to encourage, and of course they're right to object. Along with similar initiatives by the administration to use the power of government to rally support for its political agenda-a list that could arguably include the Education Department's Obama-worshipping "teacher's guide" for the president's speech to school children this week-it's another example of the overreach that messianic political enthusiasts are often guilty of.
Yet in the past few months we've also seen the Obamatards display astonishing ineptitude in rallying the troops, now that the glitter of campaigning has given way to the drudgery of actually doing something.
Yes, they're misspending money that isn't theirs for purposes that aren't proper, and they should knock it off. Really, though, the spectacle is more comical than sinister. Watching left-wing arts bureaucrats organize performance artists, hip-hoppers, multimedia visionaries, shamans, videographers, aboriginal dance troupes, poetry slam prizewinners, YouTube Riefenstahls, oud players, and street mimes into a political lobby for health care reform is a bit like watching Spanky and Our Gang choreograph the Little Rascals in Swan Lake. Let us savor these moments.
Sticks and Stones . . .
Elsewhere in this issue Mary Katharine Ham describes how some of the Obamacare protesters at congressional town hall meetings have appropriated-with tongues set firmly in cheek-the nasty terms that the media and others have employed to describe them ("right-wing terrorist," "fear-monger," etc.). There seems to be no word in the English language for the practice of adopting a term of abuse as one's own, but especially in politics, it's an old and honored technique.
THE SCRAPBOOK is reminded that, in 1948, the left-wing Labour politician Aneurin Bevan-one of the architects of the British welfare state, by the way, including the National Health Service-explained in a speech that "no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin."
British Conservatives at the time might well have reacted with shocked indignation-as many American conservatives have to Obama adviser Van Jones's assertion that "Republicans are assholes"-but, instead, they founded hundreds of Vermin Clubs throughout the United Kingdom, which served to strengthen and unify their party and, not least, make Bevan look petty and vindictive and supremely foolish.
THE SCRAPBOOK is not suggesting that critics of Obamacare wear "right-wing terrorist" as a badge of pride. But it is pertinent to know which side in this debate employs irony and wit, and which side practices (to resurrect another historic phrase) the politics of personal destruction.
A PR Tsunami
Last December, the Brazilian ad agency DDB Brasil created an ad for the World Wildlife Fund's Brazilian unit. The ad showed a swarm of commercial airliners converging on lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center. The copy on the ad read: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it."
The ad went on to win an award in New York in May, and then, last week, finally made its way on to the Internet (including our website). The reactions were as you would expect: Bloggers wanted to know why the WWF was exploiting 9/11 in its advertising, why the group was casting Planet Earth as a terrorist, etc.
The WWF sprang into action to defend its good name. An army of eco-flacks was deployed to beat back the story. Instead of an abject apology for an inexcusable lapse in taste, though, they went on offense. The ad was neither authorized nor approved by the WWF, they said; the group was unaware even of its existence. THE WEEKLY STANDARD received two phone calls demanding such corrections, which means dozens of such calls must have been placed. The New York Daily News was actually convinced to publish a story explaining that the group was "appalled" by the "tasteless 9/11 terror ad" supposedly produced by unsupervised rogue designers at the ad agency. The WWF even took to Twitter, barraging critics with links to statements denying every element of the story. How could an ad that was created for the WWF but never approved or authorized win an award without the WWF knowing about it?
Well, it couldn't. After 24 hours of damage control, the WWF released a statement conceding that, yes, they had approved the ad. Yes, the ad had run in a Brazilian newspaper. Yes, it was all true-but WWF assured us they "deeply regret that the information we provided, while given in good faith, may not have been completely accurate."
The WWF should add its PR experts to the endangered species list.
Letters They Didn't Publish
SCRAPBOOK friend Ross Terrill, the distinguished Sinologist, has shared with us an excellent letter he sent to the editor of the Boston Globe, which, alas, they did not publish. Happily, we have the space that the Globe editors couldn't spare and so reproduce it here:
Dear Editor, The Globe did a fine job during the 1960s civil rights struggle, but your current view of diversity is pinched. A 8/14/09 story asked "how to preserve diversity in the nation's newsrooms." The only criterion given for diversity was race. The same day we discover under the heading "Deep, Diverse Field" for the City Council election, among 13 challengers "6 are black, 2 are Latino, and 1 is Vietnamese-American." But you fail to broach the most important diversity in a democracy: competition of diverse political standpoints. Front page the same day you raised Massachusetts's probable loss of a congressional seat because of "Warmer climates with less expensive housing" in the south. Nothing about the anti-business policies of a one-party Democrat state with rising taxes driving business, jobs, and people out. Diversity anyone? For the Globe, array of color is great; array of political and economic ideas, well, not so great. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty said truth, to be kept bright, needs encounter with error. Even the Globe's truth and the Democrats' truth needs it. A diversity of color alone tells us nothing about excellence or initiative. I've met the Globe's bias on diversity of political view first-hand. For decades when left-of-center, I was welcomed as a contributor of scores of articles to all sections of the paper. Now right-of-center, I am blackballed. Nothing accepted, nothing even acknowledged. I get the point. Some kinds of diversity are more equal than others. I hope the Globe survives. Being less one-eyed might help. Ross Terrill
Sentences We Didn't Finish
The Bush administration declared war on the whole idea of civil rights, in a way that no administration of either party has since the passage of the nation's civil rights laws in the 1960s. It put a far-right ideologue in a top position at the . . . " ( New York Times editorial, September 2).