[lit-ideas] Dancing for Howard Dean
- From: "M.A. Camp" <macampesq@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 22:40:00 -0500
Beyond parody at the Times
The New Criterion ^
<http://newcriterion.com/archives/24/10/beyond-parody/><http://www.freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://newcriterion.com/archives/24/10/beyond-parody/>
* *| 10/2005 | Roger Kimball
Martin Heidegger once said that the fundamental metaphysical question is
"Why is there something rather than nothing?" While waiting for an answer to
that query, we would like to offer for the consideration of our readers a
less fundamental, but perhaps no less pressing, metaphysical question: "How
is it that cultural coverage in The New York Times, which yesterday seemed
as awful as it was possible to be, is today even worse?" This ever-fresh
question deserves serious thought. How do they do it: each week a little
more tawdry and demotic, more politically correct, less intellectually
nimble and journalistically serious.
Some of you may immediately object, pointing out that this prodigy of
deterioration is by no means confined to the Times's coverage of culture. We
concede the point. After all, we are talking about a newspaper that actually
employs Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, not as
comic relief but as some of its star pundits. These are
moveon.org<http://moveon.org/>folks, infatuated by a combination of
narcissism, ideology, and moral
hysteria. And let's not forget that cynosure of fatuousness, Arthur "Pinch"
Sulzberger, the perpetually adolescent publisher of the Times, who sets the
tone. In matters big and small, young (we speak characterologically)
Sulzberger can be counted on to do the wrong thing. Remember the Howell
Raines/Jayson Blair affair? Pinch blustered his support for the plagiarist
and his boss until it looked as if it might actually cost him something, and
then he cut them loose and went into full therapy mode, with hand-wringing
memos about How Things Must Be Done at the Times. Remember the recent flap
over demands that the Pulitzer Prize for Walter "Friend of Joe Stalin"
Duranty be rescinded? The Times couldn't give it back, Pinch said, because
it didn't actually have the award. Yes, and here's where you quote Dorothy
Parker about Marie of Roumania.
The truth is, deterioration at the Times is a rich subject, full of
cautionary tales about how a great liberal institution can go rancid by
making a caricature of its principles and adulterating its work. When a
great newspaper's front page is indistinguishable from its editorial page,
and its editorial page is indistinguishable from a transcript of a
Democratic Party rally, journalistic decay is a certainty. But if what's
happened to the Times's news reporting and opinion pages is an outrage—think
only of the repulsive way in which the paper attempted to generate anti-Bush
capital from the Katrina disaster—its coverage of culture is somehow more
depressing than infuriating. Here, too, one finds the triumph of ideology
over principle and an unseemly race to the lowest common denominator. Yet in
matters of culture and the arts, the Times adds another dimension of
depredation—we mean the element, half preposterous, half nauseating—of
unthinking modishness.
An entire dissertation might be written about what has happened to The New
York Times Book Review. In many respects, it is Exhibit "A" in the
metaphysical sweepstakes under discussion. It was already as bad as it could
get when a new editor came along and—treating readers to, inter alia,
full-length reviews of tell-all books by famous porn stars, a garish
redesign, and a steady diet of politically correct sermons about the world
of ideas—somehow made it worse. Our favorite recent example was the
preposterous essay by Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale,
which attempted to rehabilitate Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American
Mind for the Left. The basic argument was that Bloom's book was not the
simple-minded prescriptive book it has often been taken to be (taken to be
by the Left, that is, though Mr. Sleeper left out that bit). Ergo (note the
logic), it cannot be something that would give aid and comfort to
conservatives who, as everyone knows, are simple-minded, prescriptive
ideologues. It would have been funny if it hadn't been in earnest. But of
course it was in earnest. Everything about the Times is oh-so-earnest—which
is not at all the same thing as serious. (Indeed, the divagations of the
Times form a revealing object lesson in the extent to which the earnest,
fueled by the emotion of virtue, is often the enemy of the genuinely
serious.)
Much more could be said about the Times Book Review. But what caught our
attention most recently was the lead article, by Ginia Bellafante, in the
Sunday arts pages for September 18. Entitled "Bill T. Jones Is About to Make
People Angry. Again.," this 2,200-word valentine to the fifty-three-year-old
black, HIV-positive choreographer-activist (get the picture?) was partly an
exercise in hagiography, partly an ideological position paper. The occasion
for the article was "Blind Date," a new dance by Mr. Jones which was due to
premier in New York at the end of September.
Ms. Bellafante begins with a little praeludium about her subject's "fabled
musculature," on view for her amidst the "soaring windows" in his studio
above Times Square and for readers of the Times courtesy of an artsy color
photograph. Now, the truth is that Bill T. Jones is one of those artists
better known for his political positions than his art. He is a sort of anti-
or inverse George Balanchine—that is, he is more interested in movements
than in movement. But he is exactly the sort of figure to appeal to the
Times. He is the right race, loudly advertizes the right sexual
inclinations, and suffers from the world's most politically correct malady.
He also, of course, espouses the right sort of politics—not just on soap
boxes and in manifestoes but also, or so we are told, in the very guts of
his choreography.
The spectacle of the Times writing about such a figure is awe-inspiring. Kid
gloves are insufficiently obsequious for the task. But Ms. Bellafante proves
herself mistress of the required rhetoric. "Blind Date," she informs us, had
its origin in a speech that Mr. Jones heard in Germany last year in which
the speaker warned that words like "honor" and "valor" had been "cheapened,
emptied and recast as purely anachronistic." Well, yes, as Thucydides
pointed out, periods of cultural upheaval are also periods of linguistic
disintegration. But that is not quite what Ms. Bellafante meant. "The last
presidential election," she writes, brought Mr. Jones's "relatively vague
ideas about civil malaise into sharp focus." Ah, yes: "the last presidential
election." That would be the one in which George W. Bush beat John Kerry,
right? Now, what do you suppose our Paper of Record will make of this? Whose
side do you suppose they will take? Take your time. And while you ponder,
consider how Ms. Bellafante weaves her garland. Mr. Jones, she writes,
responded not with a screed calling for the dismantling of the Bush White
House or the secession of the Northeast. Instead, invoking Bach, he set
about to create a work of choreography endorsing the values of the
Enlightenment, a piece that would cast a critical eye on what he described
as a national atmosphere of "toxic certainty." And he has done so with a
series of segments that question the expediency of war, reflect on limited
opportunities for the urban poor and remark on the centrality of sexual
moralism to the Republican agenda.
"Blind Date" does not try to obfuscate its point of view. It makes no
pretenses to pure abstraction. This will, no doubt, agitate some observers,
just as Mr. Jones's work has done before. But what is truly striking about
the piece is that the politics Mr. Jones has in the past fought so fiercely
to express sit squarely in the mainstream of American liberalism. "Blind
Date" is in many ways the sort of composition that might have sprung from
the forces of the Democratic National Committee were they inclined to think
in pas de deux and counterpoint. Had Mr. Jones wanted a more literal title,
he might have considered "Dancing for Howard Dean."
"Dancing for Howard Dean"? Yes, that is about right. But does that place
Bill T. Jones "squarely in the mainstream of American liberalism"? It may
well place him squarely in the mainstream of the Michael Moore, Howard Dean,
Democracy Now crowd. That, thank heavens, is a far cry from the "the
mainstream of American liberalism." Surely there are editors left at the
Times who know this?
The remarkable thing about Ms. Bellafante's effort is not its politics—they
are the usual off-the-rack left-wing pieties to which readers of the Times
have long been inured—but rather its insinuations. Enlisting the devout J.
S. Bach into the brigades of the Enlightenment is an amusing divertimento, a
testament to audacity, possibly, or—could it be?—to simple ignorance. But
what we really admired was the way Ms. Bellafante purveys the clichéd
animosities of the Michael-Moore-Left as if they were startling new insights
into the national soul. Mr. Jones offers us dances that "question the
expediency of war, reflect on limited opportunities for the urban poor and
remark on the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda."
Hello? Is this a dance we are talking about? Or is it some species of
political sermonizing? Can Mr. Jones tell the difference? Apparently not:
"Mr. Jones refuses to classify some of his pieces as more political than
others," Ms. Bellafante tells us, obviously as impressed by this as by her
subject's musculature. "In his poststructuralist worldview, all art is
political." Who would doubt it? And who would deny the label
"poststructuralist" to his reasoning: "'Swan Lake,' he enjoys pointing out,
was conceived to delight the aristocracy." Oh, we see: The aristocracy, i.e.,
the bad guys. Whatever was conceived to please them is ipso facto political.
Another Marie of Roumania moment.
Ms. Bellafante or her editors want us to believe that "Blind Date" will make
people angry. We very much doubt it. It is much more likely to make them
yawn. The audience for his brand of politics-in-leotards already agrees with
him about George W. Bush, the urban poor, sexual license, the war in Iraq,
not to mention the environment, "women's rights," racism, and a thousand
other such topics. Mr. Jones's performance will simply pander to their
prejudices—always an agreeable thing, of course—but without the redeeming
feature of anything aesthetically memorable. It's a mug's game, laughable in
one sense but also a sad, weary-making, and depressing portent.
--
Cheers,
M.A. Camp, Esq.
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