This is something I think about often. This great river of American soulfulness, from Anne Hutchinson to Henry Thoreau to Sojourner Truth to Margaret Fuller to Fats Waller to Bob Dylan to William Carlos Williams to William Faulkner to Janis Joplinโฆwhy are our politicians so blind and deaf to the gifts these artists bring to us? Why do they want to reduce life [to] some kind of shadow life, a life in which everything but their own power or pursuit of power is without meaning?
Glenn W. Smith, Brief Note From Nashville on the Soul, www.firedoglake.com
There’s a wall in Washington
And itโs made of cold black granite
They say 60,000 names are etched there in it
In that wall in Washington
Iris DeMent, There’s a Wall in Washington
I don’t often think about the link – or lack thereof – between art and politics, but when I read Mr. Smith’s comment yesterday morning I immediately realized that he was making an extremely cogent point. He raises a fundamental question about American politics that is worthy of our collective consideration: Why, when we have such a deep historical well of intellectual acuity and passion for the arts, are our politics so singularly shallow?
There is clearly something about the American electoral process that enhances already overly aggrandized egos and convinces the bearer thereof that he or she is truly God’s gift to the people. What egomania! If anyone in America – anyone other than an American presidential candidate, that is – announced publicly that they had been chosen by God to undertake a particular endeavor, they would be closely examined by those around them for signs of whether they ought to be committed for observation. American politicians don’t seem to comprehend that they are of the people and that it is the people that give the gift of office to them.
I suppose it isn’t universally true that all politicians are dumber than a post; it just seems that way much of the time. Watching politics these days is not an intellectual exercise. It is, instead, the equivalent of watching Entertainment Tonight – a shallow, gossipy extravaganza which peers into a murky world of so-called glamour populated by folks neither you nor I would ever remotely consider inviting to a sit down meal in our own homes. If someone can stomach the spectacle, it is probably because there is a certain depraved fascination in watching the truly disgusting say truly despicable things about matters of which they lack any real knowledge or understanding. It is the real life equivalent of watching maggots work.
And, yet, these are the people that govern us and adopt our laws. And whose fault is it that they do so? Us, of course, because we elect them.
The real irony of this fact is that many of the people who elect these folks also find abiding pleasure in music, in painting, in dance, and in theater. In these venues and in other art forms, spectators are challenged by artists to use their minds and imagination and reflect upon the wider world from the unique perspective of the involved medium. While the sorts of questions posed by artists are often those without obvious answers or, perhaps, even answers at all, the process of considering the challenges they pose is vitally important to our understanding of how things work and of humanity’s place in a scheme of things grander than that of human commerce, culture or politics. In fact, most who patronize the arts do so for the very reason that it broadens perspectives and challenges the intellect.
More to the issue at hand is that in the performance or presentation of any art form and the audience’s reaction to that presentation or performance lies a deep emotional passion for things profound and sustaining. We listen to music because it helps us transcend the moment; we listen to music because it makes us think past the mundane; we listen to music because it makes us joyful or, at least, lessens a moment of pain; we listen to music because it takes us somewhere we aren’t, somewhere we cannot attain without the assistance of rhythm and melody. This transformative power is not unique to music and is shared by all art forms, but somehow we seem only to allow that transformation to abide the moment of interaction.
Why are we unable to translate the values we glean from interaction with the arts into an on-going practical political reality that will nourish, rather than entertain or appall, us? If we had the answer to this question, we might avert much of the excess that comes from putting the simple-minded in positions of power. Perhaps we put the simple-minded in such positions simply because they are so simple. Life is, after all, a complex equation, and politicians attack it with a comprehensive single-mindedness that seems to prove attractive to those of us unable to cope with the seeming chaos of complexity.
If we had truly learned the lesson contained in Iris DeMent’s There’s a Wall in Washington, could we have avoided the current mess in Iraq and Afghanistan?
If we had truly learned the lesson contained in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, could we consider someone as a serious candidate for President who believes waterboarding is “an enhanced interrogation technique” (all current Republican candidates, except Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, recently endorsed waterboarding )?
Maybe if we take the time to consider the meaning of these lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, we can come to the collective realization that leadership ought to be earned and not conferred just because some simpleton believes he or she was called by God to exercise power over the rest of us:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Or, maybe we won’t take that time and we will acquire additional fodder and additional wasted lives to fuel future ruminations on the subject.
