We've all seen ghastly paintings and prints at garage sales and thrift shops—sad clowns, unflattering portraits, homely florals and trite landscapes—and wondered not only why someone could have considered hanging them in the first place, but also who in the world could have wasted time making such things?
Most bad art is regrettable but forgettable, something we look past rather than at. But some masterpieces of bad art are so remarkably awful, so tasteless, awkward or outlandish that they deserve to be displayed in all their horrific glory. Pieces that bad deserve to hang in a museum of bad art. Happily, there is such a place, just outside of Boston.
The Museum of Bad Art is an actual physical place and is also a wonderful virtual space with its own highly entertaining website. Established in a Boston basement in 1993, MOBA moved to Dedham, Massachusetts, and has expanded and grown into one of the most entertaining sites on the Web. Their collection runs the gamut from shockingly bad portraits to awkward landscapes to disturbing animal pictures. MOBA's website states, "The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent."
Oh, they're special all right. An early acquisition and one of two masterworks in the collection is "Lucy in the Field with Flowers," a vivid and stirring portrait of an elderly woman whose head looks uncomfortably like Norman Mailer's. Lucy prances through a field of flowers, her legs arrayed as if seated but her body clearly in motion. Her breasts sway in opposite directions under her bright blue dress, which appears to be floating off to one side for no apparent reason.
"The Athlete" features a discus thrower described by MOBA's curatorial staff as "A startling work, and one of the largest crayon on canvas pieces that most people can ever hope to see. The bulging leg muscles, the black shoes, the white socks, the pink toga, all help to make this one of the most popular pieces in the MOBA collection." I'm also quite fond of "Peter the Kitty," a painting found in a Salvation Army store, which is, I agree, "Stirring in its portayal of feline angst. Is Peter hungry or contemplating his place in a hungry world? The artist has evoked both hopelessness and glee with his irrational use of negative space."
Of all the pieces in the collection, my favorite has always been a pointillist tour-de-force done in homage to the genius of George Seurat, whose "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was the inspiration for the beautiful Stephen Sondheim musical "Sunday in the Park with George." MOBA's "Sunday on the Pot with George" features an rotund older gentleman wearing naught but Y-front underwear sitting on top of what is either a chair swathed in thick blue folds of fabric, or perhaps a melting blue toilet. George's sagging flesh drips slowly toward his nonexistent feet in cascading red and peach colored blobs of paint, the canvas sizzling and jittering before our eyes. The painting has a lively, psychotic quality. I love it so that I've enjoyed it in book, calendar and notecard form—items from the MOBA online store make excellent holiday gifts!
Much as I love the images, the oh-so-serious "interpretations" of the pieces are equally enjoyable. Here's the caption from a pastel and acrylic piece titled "Inspiration": "The organ master stares, transfixed by twin mysterious visions: the Neanderthal saint in the setting sun and the Gothic monk proceeding out from the cathedral's sanctum, each framed by a halo of organ pipes, reminiscent of #2 pencils."
MOBA truly lives up to its tag line: "Art too bad to be ignored."
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Panic at the Funplex!
In the early 1980s I saw a bunch of classic New Wave musicians (and a few major punk ones) live in concert, and I’ve always been so glad to have had those experiences. Joe Jackson, the Pretenders (whom I saw before half the band died of drug overdoses and Chrissy Hynde went through her born-again phase), Elvis Costello, Devo, Bow Wow Wow and the Ramones gave amazing concerts, full of energy, pop and fizz. I also saw the fun-but-nothing-special bands that were good for a laugh but had limited staying power, like Split Enz, Flock of Seagulls and Sparks, and I heard some who should have made it bigger, like San Francisco's Romeo Void and Bonnie Hayes. I remember that period fondly, cringe a little to think of the dance clothes I wore, and smile to think of bouncing around in tiny clubs or huge auditoria for hours, carefully avoiding the mosh pits and drunken elbow-flingers. (I didn't drink so my reflexes were pretty good.) After the silliness of the disco era, it was great to hear lyrics with a bit of cynical wit, and to hear the angry young men and bouncy young women talk about what mattered (or didn’t), shake people up, and then laugh at themselves when they got too serious. Some early eighties, over-synthethized music is just laughable today, and the poseurs and big-haired, big-shouldered singers in the videos from that time are a hoot to watch, but a lot of the music is still quite fresh and delicious.
One of the biggest, brightest and best bands of the early eighties was the B-52s. They sounded like nobody else, and their campy wit, the harmonic warbles of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, Fred Schneider’s nasal sprechgesang (spoken-song) delivery and the magnificent, neverending energy and bounce of Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland’s instrumentals made them one of the best dance bands of all time, period. They were fearless and embraced the ridiculous. In fact, the name of the group comes from the extra-tall beehive hairdos Kate and Cindy used to wear on stage; they resembled the noses of B-52 bombers. I had the great pleasure and good fortune to see them twice in the early eighties, and those concerts remain among the most delightful in my memory.
In 1985, Ricky Wilson, older brother to Cindy, died from complications from AIDS, and the group went quiet for two years. They had a resurgence in the late eighties and actually gained their biggest mainstream commercial successes after that; “Love Shack” and “Roam” are hits from that era, and while I enjoy those songs a great deal, they were a little more polished than the early B-52s I loved so well and had a bit less of the raw, wild energy that made them so great to begin with.
When I heard they were releasing their first original album in sixteen years this spring, I was both delighted and trepidatious; their early works were so original, unselfconscious, witty and, most of all, danceable, I hoped that they would stay true to their roots, and not go all serious and sensitive on me, like Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper did for a time after their big bold New Wave beginnings. All four of the remaining B-52s are in their fifties, and I hoped they hadn’t grown up too completely and hadn’t learned to be afraid of the ridiculous.
Hooray! They haven’t. Their new album, “Funplex,” is strong, tightly produced but still fresh, and the B-52s still sound like, well, the B-52s. Their title song, “Funplex,” mocks America’s love affair with the shopping mall and our emotional attachment to spending money and seeking out instant pleasure with a credit card, but between Fred’s shouting out “Misery at the Funplex!” and Kate and Cindy’s lines about breaking hearts at the Taco Tiki Hut are addictive riffs and kitchy, catchy hooks.
My daughter Lily and I particularly enjoy “Funplex,” “Keep This Party Going” and “Juliet of the Spirits,” but the whole album is quite listenable and, of course, danceable. That’s why we’ll be seeing them in July when they come to Seattle with Cyndi Lauper, Joan Armatrading and others on the True Colors concert tour, which will benefit the Human Rights Campaign, an organization which advocates on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender/transsexual rights. We figure we’ll be dancing all day so we need to work out our dancing muscles regularly before then. Our current regimen includes dancing to “Funplex” and their 1983 “Whammy” album during after-dinner firefights with our atomic blasters (foam rayguns that shoot air-propelled foam projectiles). If someone had told me in 1983 that I’d be listening to fresh B-52s tunes while screaming, dancing and dodging my teen daughter’s foam missle attacks 25 years later, I would have been so happy. Sometimes dreams do come true.
One of the biggest, brightest and best bands of the early eighties was the B-52s. They sounded like nobody else, and their campy wit, the harmonic warbles of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, Fred Schneider’s nasal sprechgesang (spoken-song) delivery and the magnificent, neverending energy and bounce of Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland’s instrumentals made them one of the best dance bands of all time, period. They were fearless and embraced the ridiculous. In fact, the name of the group comes from the extra-tall beehive hairdos Kate and Cindy used to wear on stage; they resembled the noses of B-52 bombers. I had the great pleasure and good fortune to see them twice in the early eighties, and those concerts remain among the most delightful in my memory.
In 1985, Ricky Wilson, older brother to Cindy, died from complications from AIDS, and the group went quiet for two years. They had a resurgence in the late eighties and actually gained their biggest mainstream commercial successes after that; “Love Shack” and “Roam” are hits from that era, and while I enjoy those songs a great deal, they were a little more polished than the early B-52s I loved so well and had a bit less of the raw, wild energy that made them so great to begin with.
When I heard they were releasing their first original album in sixteen years this spring, I was both delighted and trepidatious; their early works were so original, unselfconscious, witty and, most of all, danceable, I hoped that they would stay true to their roots, and not go all serious and sensitive on me, like Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper did for a time after their big bold New Wave beginnings. All four of the remaining B-52s are in their fifties, and I hoped they hadn’t grown up too completely and hadn’t learned to be afraid of the ridiculous.
Hooray! They haven’t. Their new album, “Funplex,” is strong, tightly produced but still fresh, and the B-52s still sound like, well, the B-52s. Their title song, “Funplex,” mocks America’s love affair with the shopping mall and our emotional attachment to spending money and seeking out instant pleasure with a credit card, but between Fred’s shouting out “Misery at the Funplex!” and Kate and Cindy’s lines about breaking hearts at the Taco Tiki Hut are addictive riffs and kitchy, catchy hooks.
My daughter Lily and I particularly enjoy “Funplex,” “Keep This Party Going” and “Juliet of the Spirits,” but the whole album is quite listenable and, of course, danceable. That’s why we’ll be seeing them in July when they come to Seattle with Cyndi Lauper, Joan Armatrading and others on the True Colors concert tour, which will benefit the Human Rights Campaign, an organization which advocates on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender/transsexual rights. We figure we’ll be dancing all day so we need to work out our dancing muscles regularly before then. Our current regimen includes dancing to “Funplex” and their 1983 “Whammy” album during after-dinner firefights with our atomic blasters (foam rayguns that shoot air-propelled foam projectiles). If someone had told me in 1983 that I’d be listening to fresh B-52s tunes while screaming, dancing and dodging my teen daughter’s foam missle attacks 25 years later, I would have been so happy. Sometimes dreams do come true.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Now Showing at a Gallery Near Me: My Art
Through May 4, eleven of my canvases are currently part of a group show at Form/Space Atelier, an art gallery in Seattle’s Belltown district. The gallery is chock full of tasty art, with 187 pieces lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling and covering the windows. You'll find everything from ethereal sculptures created painstakingly out of toothpicks to vibrant photography, exciting paintings of all sorts, iron-encased cow skulls, giant pastels, tiny jeweled canvases, even a FrankenBarbie monster. Subject matter runs from the solemn to the whimsical, from the sublime to the ridiculous. The gallery is open each week from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.
What a pleasure it is to be involved in this exhibition. I've spoken to several of the other artists in the show, and I feel fortunate to be hanging my work alongside theirs. If only I could afford to snap up their work before others do! Many thanks to curator Paul Pauper, who runs the gallery, for his support, fine eye and good humor.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Dyed in the Wool
I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat since I was just a tyke. I remember jumping on my friend Tracy’s bed and shouting “Humphrey! Humphrey!” with her repeatedly on a hot August night during the 1968 Democratic convention when Hubert Humphrey became the nominee after front-runner Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. Our parents were crowded around a 12-inch black-and-white TV in the living room with a bunch of other adults watching the convention. I was only five, but my friends and I were already aware that Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated that year, that there were riots breaking out in major cities, and that the world felt like a dangerous place where people, presidents, cities and whole countries were on the edge of death or madness much of the time.
We lived in a safe little suburb but were only 45 minutes from places like Berkeley and San Francisco, where Governor Ronald Reagan was gassing students for speaking freely on college campuses. Black Panthers based in Oakland were shouting about black power issues on the TV news, Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and issues of race, class, gender equality and other hot-button issues were discussed all the time on TV, radio, in magazines, even at Tupperware parties. Most of my friends were also the children of educators, so we were raised in little progressive intellectual greenhouses. We’d be dragged to parties where our parents would drink sangria and smoke a lot of cigarettes. (There were cigarette burns on almost everybody’s coffee tables when I was a child, made when a filter-tipped True or Pall-Mall or Salem cigarette burned down too far or got knocked aside and left a charred black oval that would later be covered by a bowl of mixed nuts.)
Our parents would discuss gender politics and racism too loudly, somebody’d get too earnest and two dads would go out on the patio to talk alone for a while as they hashed out the finer points of foreign policy. Then somebody would put on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and we’d all dance. We kids would all stay up too late, eat too many Bugles or Fritos or Beer Nuts, sneak peeks at some dad’s stash of Playboy magazines in the master bedroom, and then eventually we’d pass out on beds and sofas and be dragged home by our parents in the wee hours after the parties died down.
By 1968 the country had been at war in Vietnam my whole short life, and the students my young mother taught in her high school English classes were graduating, some going straight to Southeast Asia. Worry about the war was on everyone’s mind, on posters, cars bumpers and sung about on the radio regularly. In retrospect many people may think the time only seems as if it was especially politicized because of all that’s been made of it in movies and books since then. But even to me, a child on the verge of kindergarten, life really was politicized; even as little children were aware of big political issues. All my little friends and I hated President Nixon just as much as our parents did. We were inculcated with political beliefs that had been passed down from parents who threatened disinheritance (perhaps seriously) if we considered straying from the Democratic party line.
So the Democratic Party is in my blood. I get disgusted with elements of the party’s politics at times, of course, because of the way it gets bogged down, bloated and politicians get bought by special interests. But I believe in the core values of my party as I see them, not just because I grew up being told they were right, but because, time and time again, I’ve watched the core values of the Republican Party damage the fabric of our nation and the people in it. The core values of my party have echoed the values that I was taught to cherish when I was at my grandmother’s knee. Things like respecting and fostering diversity. Showing mercy to those in need. Valuing diplomacy over unnecessary force. Fighting for others’ rights to express themselves in ways that I don’t necessarily personally agree with. Remembering that we’re part of a world community and wanting everyone to do better, not just ourselves and our friends. Being willing to sacrifice a little personal comfort for the benefit of the greater good. Of course, these are not solely Democratic values, but I believe the Democratic Party has done a better job of emphasizing and exalting these values, while the Republican Party has done a great deal to undercut them.
I have some dear Republican friends with whom I get along well because we stick to issues that we agree on, for the most part. When I make new Republican friends they are often surprised to learn that Democrats can have strong family values and attach huge importance to self-reliance, discipline, honesty, integrity and honor, too, just as their families do. Somehow millions of Republicans have been led to believe that those are conservative traits that accrue only to Republicans, and that Democrats are necessarily permissive, careless, amoral at best and immoral at worst, and disrespectful of private property and personal boundaries. Partly, this is because easily offended ultraconservatives who don’t approve of people who engage in activities they don’t personally enjoy will often note one example of iffy behavior by a Democrat and tar all progressives with the same brush. There’s no way to have thoughtful, fact-based, rational dialog with people who jump from one logical fallacy to another and refuse to look at facts.
But not all Republicans or independent voters are like that, and we Democrats have to be honest and respectful, too. It’s easy for us to paint all Republicans with labels like selfish, militaristic, judgmental or unforgiving. We Democrats believe that because Republicans vote for a party with, yes, a selfish, militaristic, judgmental and unforgiving party platform, they must believe in all the tenets of that platform. But they may just be afraid of being taxed beyond their ability to stay in their homes or to save enough to pay off their credit card bills. They may believe that waging big wars is the only way to save their grandkids from being blown up by religious zealots. I disagree with them, but they’re sincere and many of them do want the best for the greatest number. I think they’re seriously misguided, but they don’t have to be monsters just because they’re not Democrats.
In my twenties I spent a great deal of time with young, almost exclusively male, members of the Libertarian party. Most of them had Stanford graduate degrees, which they believed proved that they were intellectually superior in every way and that their political beliefs must therefore be perfectly and unassailably logical. (They did not understand that getting perfect SAT math scores does not guarantee that one is wise, logical or insightful.) I had hundreds of debates with them on the limits of a totally free-market-based government to ensure a clean environment, build safe roads and neighborhoods, redress grievances or oversee product purity, among a million other things. They couldn’t bend me to their beliefs, and I couldn’t be swayed to theirs. But I learned about a different way of thinking and saw how even very smart people can fall prey to logical fallacies based on emotional factors (even if they swear to Ayn Rand that that they’re above all that). It was great mental training to argue the permutations of their belief system, and I learned how to get them to listen to me more carefully by proving to them that I would listen to and understand their ideas, even if I did not agree with them. And that’s a start. I believe in respectful discourse; one must listen closely to the opposition and be polite enough to get them to let down their hair and speak honestly to glean enough information to counter their arguments effectively. Sun Tzu was right: know thy enemy.
What I find saddest is political infighting among people who are of the same party and who share about 95% of their beliefs, but who backbite, attack and take each other down based on the remaining 5%. I am so frustrated with my party now when people like James Carville publicly attack someone like Bill Richardson and call him Judas for having the timerity to stand up for the candidate he believes is best for the country (in this case Barack Obama) rather than pledging himself blindly to someone whom he feels cannot win the election or serve the country quite as well (in this case Hillary Clinton). Carville believes Richardson’s guilt at feeling politically beholden to Hillary’s husband should trump Richardson’s doing what he believes to be the right thing for the nation. Disgusting. The mud-slinging, name-calling and low-blows being delivered during this campaign have sickened us all. The saddest part is that it divides the party, alienates those who are independent or undecided, and weakens us in the eyes of those who will vote in the November election.
We shoot ourselves in the foot when we engage in public intraparty backbiting. And then we end up with people who say, “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but I’m so angry at [the candidate other than my own] that if that nasty [other Democratic candidate] is nominated, I’m not going to vote at all. Or I’ll just go and vote for McCain!” I’ve heard Hillary supporters say if people aren’t smart enough to line up behind their woman, they’ll be too disgusted by the nearsighted sexists all around them to vote for Barack. Yeah, letting the party that represents everything they say they’re fighting against win—that’ll show ’em! And I’ve heard even more people say that they think Hillary is so much in the thrall of behind-the-scenes power brokers and special interests and has moved so far to the middle and done so much damage to her party’s image, she’s essentially a Republican now, so voting for a straightforward Republican would be better than voting for a stealth Republican like her.
Wait a minute!
I totally understand disgust and anger with the current situation. I wonder at times whether Hillary and Bill are engaging in some sort of horrible political murder-suicide pact, seemingly trying to destroy the Democratic party and the country (and their own historical reputations, ultimately) by dividing the country and damaging the one hope the country has to save ourselves from slipping further into the cesspool W has dragged us into. Several journos even suggest that Hillary, knowing she can’t win the nomination, is trying to taint Barack so completely that McCain will win—and then people will be so horrified after four years under him that they’ll be thrilled to give her another shot in 2012. I think this is a wacko conspiracy theory, but so many wacko behind-the-scenes political maneuverings have been uncovered in the past decade that I’m loath to dismiss anything as impossible now.
But listen—
A Democrat who refuses to vote is, to my mind, essentially voting for McCain. Remember the Latin maxim: “Qui tacet consentire videtur.” He who is silent is assumed to give his consent. If you refuse to provide a vote for the alternative out of a devotion to lofty principles over pragmatism, you aid the other side. Unless Democrats lift our voices against Republican candidates, we give them our tacit consent, and that’s the message we send to the whole world, not just to the 5% of the world’s population that happens to live in the U.S. If we can’t be bothered to exercise the right to vote that people died to secure for us, and which people around the world are willing to die for even today, we’re lazy and careless and deserve what we get.
I find much distasteful about Hillary’s recent behavior, and her chance of securing the nomination is now minuscule. However, because Democrats are now so polarized we risk having a significant number of her supporters simply bow out of further political participation out of petulance. I hope that they will consider this: there are a huge number of reasons why either Obama or Clinton would be infinitely better for the nation (and the world beyond our borders) than McCain. Here’s the number one reason:
McCain would appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court who would continue the wholesale attacks on civil liberties and the general war on good sense that we’ve seen under Bush. That would be a tragedy.
McCain has made it increasingly clear during this campaign that, overused and misleading “maverick” label aside (he’s one of the biggest insiders there is and he toes the conservative line—he’s no maverick), he is nothing if not a conservative Republican. He would appoint people who would continue to undercut our civil rights in dozens of ways, as the court has done under Bush. Corporate America would get a free pass to continue environmentally disastrous behavior, like opening more pristine areas to drilling, removing protection from threatened species and dragging behind in setting guidelines for slowing global warming. Conservative judges will continue to narrowly interpret the constitution to support big businesses and intrusive government that puts ruthless administrative expediency before your rights. (Recount legitimate votes? Naw, toss them out and anoint the man with half-a-million fewer votes! Miranda rights? Who needs them! Habeus corpus laws? They don’t apply when the administration doesn’t want them to. And on and on.) Reproductive rights could keep being diminished until even more people end up having back-alley abortions, since legal ones and RU-486 could become so hard to secure. (In hundreds of counties across the U.S., access to legal, first-trimester abortion is already hard or impossible to obtain, even for adult women with ready money, under the current administration.)
McCain says he would leave the troops in Iraq. He thinks watching millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure and glutting the market with homes that nobody takes care of that are sold as-is at auction makes more sense than urging the companies that got rich on their irresponsible mortgage lending decisions to find ways to help irresponsible mortgagees restructure debt and help keep the housing market afloat. (A misguided desire not to show mercy to people who’ve made mistakes may seem more “fair,” but helping them find ways to keep their homes means saving the industry from free-fall and helping the housing market keep more of its value, which benefits us all.) McCain would continue our belligerent foreign policy, making sure our name continues to be mud around the world, making us more prone to terrorist attacks and harming us economically as well by showing indifference to other cultures and using force instead of diplomacy. Hillary voted for funding for the current war, but she knows now what a disaster it was; McCain still supports it.
I believe that Hillary Clinton would be less progressive, less diplomatic and less proactive on the subjects I just listed than Barack Obama, so I support his candidacy over hers. But she and Obama agree on most of the important things. Their health care plans are very similar, they agree in their opposition to continuing the war in Iraq, to stopping the mess in Guantanamo, to ending the violations of habeus corpus and stopping the disregard of the Geneva Conventions. Many of their economic plans are similar, too. Their ways of expressing themselves differ vastly, of course, enough so that I think it would make a great difference in their ability to get the country to go along with them and to get the rest of the world behind us. So yes, it matters to me a lot that Obama be our nominee and win. But with all her faults, Hillary would be a much better choice for our country than McCain, the hypocrite, who’s all big talk about not being in lobbyists’ pockets while being in their debt, who voted to continue waterboarding (so much for all his fancy words about it being torture a few months back), and is famous for his nasty temper and bullying manner.
There are myriad reasons why I feel we would all be better off under a Democrat than a Republican, but the number one reason to vote for Democrats is because of the decades of horrible influence that Republican presidents would have on the future of the country because of their power to nominate Supreme Court justices. We have several justices on the brink of retirement right now; the next president could have as many as three new seats to fill, since Justice Breyer, an introvert who hates living in Washington, is aching to retire and leave D.C.; Justice Ginsberg (my heroine!) is almost 75, has had colon cancer and is rather frail; and Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 this month.
Right now we often have a 5-4 conservative majority of the court, but swing votes sometimes save us from the worst decisions, and the strong voices of reason on the moderate left still on the court at least make important arguments that become part of the record that is reviewed when these issues come back before the court later. Their dissenting decisions are influential, if not now, then later. If the conservative majority becomes lopsided, they not only get their way on every decision, and choose to decide more dangerous cases because they know they’ll get away with whatever they want; they can also quash dissenting opinion and the open airing of other points of view. They fill seats with people who may serve 20 or 30 years and damage the fabric of our lives and our Constitution for a generation.
Please, fellow and sister Democrats, don’t even THINK of staying home when a Republican has a chance to put another civil rights-hating conservative on the bench.
We lived in a safe little suburb but were only 45 minutes from places like Berkeley and San Francisco, where Governor Ronald Reagan was gassing students for speaking freely on college campuses. Black Panthers based in Oakland were shouting about black power issues on the TV news, Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and issues of race, class, gender equality and other hot-button issues were discussed all the time on TV, radio, in magazines, even at Tupperware parties. Most of my friends were also the children of educators, so we were raised in little progressive intellectual greenhouses. We’d be dragged to parties where our parents would drink sangria and smoke a lot of cigarettes. (There were cigarette burns on almost everybody’s coffee tables when I was a child, made when a filter-tipped True or Pall-Mall or Salem cigarette burned down too far or got knocked aside and left a charred black oval that would later be covered by a bowl of mixed nuts.)
Our parents would discuss gender politics and racism too loudly, somebody’d get too earnest and two dads would go out on the patio to talk alone for a while as they hashed out the finer points of foreign policy. Then somebody would put on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and we’d all dance. We kids would all stay up too late, eat too many Bugles or Fritos or Beer Nuts, sneak peeks at some dad’s stash of Playboy magazines in the master bedroom, and then eventually we’d pass out on beds and sofas and be dragged home by our parents in the wee hours after the parties died down.
By 1968 the country had been at war in Vietnam my whole short life, and the students my young mother taught in her high school English classes were graduating, some going straight to Southeast Asia. Worry about the war was on everyone’s mind, on posters, cars bumpers and sung about on the radio regularly. In retrospect many people may think the time only seems as if it was especially politicized because of all that’s been made of it in movies and books since then. But even to me, a child on the verge of kindergarten, life really was politicized; even as little children were aware of big political issues. All my little friends and I hated President Nixon just as much as our parents did. We were inculcated with political beliefs that had been passed down from parents who threatened disinheritance (perhaps seriously) if we considered straying from the Democratic party line.
So the Democratic Party is in my blood. I get disgusted with elements of the party’s politics at times, of course, because of the way it gets bogged down, bloated and politicians get bought by special interests. But I believe in the core values of my party as I see them, not just because I grew up being told they were right, but because, time and time again, I’ve watched the core values of the Republican Party damage the fabric of our nation and the people in it. The core values of my party have echoed the values that I was taught to cherish when I was at my grandmother’s knee. Things like respecting and fostering diversity. Showing mercy to those in need. Valuing diplomacy over unnecessary force. Fighting for others’ rights to express themselves in ways that I don’t necessarily personally agree with. Remembering that we’re part of a world community and wanting everyone to do better, not just ourselves and our friends. Being willing to sacrifice a little personal comfort for the benefit of the greater good. Of course, these are not solely Democratic values, but I believe the Democratic Party has done a better job of emphasizing and exalting these values, while the Republican Party has done a great deal to undercut them.
I have some dear Republican friends with whom I get along well because we stick to issues that we agree on, for the most part. When I make new Republican friends they are often surprised to learn that Democrats can have strong family values and attach huge importance to self-reliance, discipline, honesty, integrity and honor, too, just as their families do. Somehow millions of Republicans have been led to believe that those are conservative traits that accrue only to Republicans, and that Democrats are necessarily permissive, careless, amoral at best and immoral at worst, and disrespectful of private property and personal boundaries. Partly, this is because easily offended ultraconservatives who don’t approve of people who engage in activities they don’t personally enjoy will often note one example of iffy behavior by a Democrat and tar all progressives with the same brush. There’s no way to have thoughtful, fact-based, rational dialog with people who jump from one logical fallacy to another and refuse to look at facts.
But not all Republicans or independent voters are like that, and we Democrats have to be honest and respectful, too. It’s easy for us to paint all Republicans with labels like selfish, militaristic, judgmental or unforgiving. We Democrats believe that because Republicans vote for a party with, yes, a selfish, militaristic, judgmental and unforgiving party platform, they must believe in all the tenets of that platform. But they may just be afraid of being taxed beyond their ability to stay in their homes or to save enough to pay off their credit card bills. They may believe that waging big wars is the only way to save their grandkids from being blown up by religious zealots. I disagree with them, but they’re sincere and many of them do want the best for the greatest number. I think they’re seriously misguided, but they don’t have to be monsters just because they’re not Democrats.
In my twenties I spent a great deal of time with young, almost exclusively male, members of the Libertarian party. Most of them had Stanford graduate degrees, which they believed proved that they were intellectually superior in every way and that their political beliefs must therefore be perfectly and unassailably logical. (They did not understand that getting perfect SAT math scores does not guarantee that one is wise, logical or insightful.) I had hundreds of debates with them on the limits of a totally free-market-based government to ensure a clean environment, build safe roads and neighborhoods, redress grievances or oversee product purity, among a million other things. They couldn’t bend me to their beliefs, and I couldn’t be swayed to theirs. But I learned about a different way of thinking and saw how even very smart people can fall prey to logical fallacies based on emotional factors (even if they swear to Ayn Rand that that they’re above all that). It was great mental training to argue the permutations of their belief system, and I learned how to get them to listen to me more carefully by proving to them that I would listen to and understand their ideas, even if I did not agree with them. And that’s a start. I believe in respectful discourse; one must listen closely to the opposition and be polite enough to get them to let down their hair and speak honestly to glean enough information to counter their arguments effectively. Sun Tzu was right: know thy enemy.
What I find saddest is political infighting among people who are of the same party and who share about 95% of their beliefs, but who backbite, attack and take each other down based on the remaining 5%. I am so frustrated with my party now when people like James Carville publicly attack someone like Bill Richardson and call him Judas for having the timerity to stand up for the candidate he believes is best for the country (in this case Barack Obama) rather than pledging himself blindly to someone whom he feels cannot win the election or serve the country quite as well (in this case Hillary Clinton). Carville believes Richardson’s guilt at feeling politically beholden to Hillary’s husband should trump Richardson’s doing what he believes to be the right thing for the nation. Disgusting. The mud-slinging, name-calling and low-blows being delivered during this campaign have sickened us all. The saddest part is that it divides the party, alienates those who are independent or undecided, and weakens us in the eyes of those who will vote in the November election.
We shoot ourselves in the foot when we engage in public intraparty backbiting. And then we end up with people who say, “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but I’m so angry at [the candidate other than my own] that if that nasty [other Democratic candidate] is nominated, I’m not going to vote at all. Or I’ll just go and vote for McCain!” I’ve heard Hillary supporters say if people aren’t smart enough to line up behind their woman, they’ll be too disgusted by the nearsighted sexists all around them to vote for Barack. Yeah, letting the party that represents everything they say they’re fighting against win—that’ll show ’em! And I’ve heard even more people say that they think Hillary is so much in the thrall of behind-the-scenes power brokers and special interests and has moved so far to the middle and done so much damage to her party’s image, she’s essentially a Republican now, so voting for a straightforward Republican would be better than voting for a stealth Republican like her.
Wait a minute!
I totally understand disgust and anger with the current situation. I wonder at times whether Hillary and Bill are engaging in some sort of horrible political murder-suicide pact, seemingly trying to destroy the Democratic party and the country (and their own historical reputations, ultimately) by dividing the country and damaging the one hope the country has to save ourselves from slipping further into the cesspool W has dragged us into. Several journos even suggest that Hillary, knowing she can’t win the nomination, is trying to taint Barack so completely that McCain will win—and then people will be so horrified after four years under him that they’ll be thrilled to give her another shot in 2012. I think this is a wacko conspiracy theory, but so many wacko behind-the-scenes political maneuverings have been uncovered in the past decade that I’m loath to dismiss anything as impossible now.
But listen—
A Democrat who refuses to vote is, to my mind, essentially voting for McCain. Remember the Latin maxim: “Qui tacet consentire videtur.” He who is silent is assumed to give his consent. If you refuse to provide a vote for the alternative out of a devotion to lofty principles over pragmatism, you aid the other side. Unless Democrats lift our voices against Republican candidates, we give them our tacit consent, and that’s the message we send to the whole world, not just to the 5% of the world’s population that happens to live in the U.S. If we can’t be bothered to exercise the right to vote that people died to secure for us, and which people around the world are willing to die for even today, we’re lazy and careless and deserve what we get.
I find much distasteful about Hillary’s recent behavior, and her chance of securing the nomination is now minuscule. However, because Democrats are now so polarized we risk having a significant number of her supporters simply bow out of further political participation out of petulance. I hope that they will consider this: there are a huge number of reasons why either Obama or Clinton would be infinitely better for the nation (and the world beyond our borders) than McCain. Here’s the number one reason:
McCain would appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court who would continue the wholesale attacks on civil liberties and the general war on good sense that we’ve seen under Bush. That would be a tragedy.
McCain has made it increasingly clear during this campaign that, overused and misleading “maverick” label aside (he’s one of the biggest insiders there is and he toes the conservative line—he’s no maverick), he is nothing if not a conservative Republican. He would appoint people who would continue to undercut our civil rights in dozens of ways, as the court has done under Bush. Corporate America would get a free pass to continue environmentally disastrous behavior, like opening more pristine areas to drilling, removing protection from threatened species and dragging behind in setting guidelines for slowing global warming. Conservative judges will continue to narrowly interpret the constitution to support big businesses and intrusive government that puts ruthless administrative expediency before your rights. (Recount legitimate votes? Naw, toss them out and anoint the man with half-a-million fewer votes! Miranda rights? Who needs them! Habeus corpus laws? They don’t apply when the administration doesn’t want them to. And on and on.) Reproductive rights could keep being diminished until even more people end up having back-alley abortions, since legal ones and RU-486 could become so hard to secure. (In hundreds of counties across the U.S., access to legal, first-trimester abortion is already hard or impossible to obtain, even for adult women with ready money, under the current administration.)
McCain says he would leave the troops in Iraq. He thinks watching millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure and glutting the market with homes that nobody takes care of that are sold as-is at auction makes more sense than urging the companies that got rich on their irresponsible mortgage lending decisions to find ways to help irresponsible mortgagees restructure debt and help keep the housing market afloat. (A misguided desire not to show mercy to people who’ve made mistakes may seem more “fair,” but helping them find ways to keep their homes means saving the industry from free-fall and helping the housing market keep more of its value, which benefits us all.) McCain would continue our belligerent foreign policy, making sure our name continues to be mud around the world, making us more prone to terrorist attacks and harming us economically as well by showing indifference to other cultures and using force instead of diplomacy. Hillary voted for funding for the current war, but she knows now what a disaster it was; McCain still supports it.
I believe that Hillary Clinton would be less progressive, less diplomatic and less proactive on the subjects I just listed than Barack Obama, so I support his candidacy over hers. But she and Obama agree on most of the important things. Their health care plans are very similar, they agree in their opposition to continuing the war in Iraq, to stopping the mess in Guantanamo, to ending the violations of habeus corpus and stopping the disregard of the Geneva Conventions. Many of their economic plans are similar, too. Their ways of expressing themselves differ vastly, of course, enough so that I think it would make a great difference in their ability to get the country to go along with them and to get the rest of the world behind us. So yes, it matters to me a lot that Obama be our nominee and win. But with all her faults, Hillary would be a much better choice for our country than McCain, the hypocrite, who’s all big talk about not being in lobbyists’ pockets while being in their debt, who voted to continue waterboarding (so much for all his fancy words about it being torture a few months back), and is famous for his nasty temper and bullying manner.
There are myriad reasons why I feel we would all be better off under a Democrat than a Republican, but the number one reason to vote for Democrats is because of the decades of horrible influence that Republican presidents would have on the future of the country because of their power to nominate Supreme Court justices. We have several justices on the brink of retirement right now; the next president could have as many as three new seats to fill, since Justice Breyer, an introvert who hates living in Washington, is aching to retire and leave D.C.; Justice Ginsberg (my heroine!) is almost 75, has had colon cancer and is rather frail; and Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 this month.
Right now we often have a 5-4 conservative majority of the court, but swing votes sometimes save us from the worst decisions, and the strong voices of reason on the moderate left still on the court at least make important arguments that become part of the record that is reviewed when these issues come back before the court later. Their dissenting decisions are influential, if not now, then later. If the conservative majority becomes lopsided, they not only get their way on every decision, and choose to decide more dangerous cases because they know they’ll get away with whatever they want; they can also quash dissenting opinion and the open airing of other points of view. They fill seats with people who may serve 20 or 30 years and damage the fabric of our lives and our Constitution for a generation.
Please, fellow and sister Democrats, don’t even THINK of staying home when a Republican has a chance to put another civil rights-hating conservative on the bench.
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