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I don’t have HBO, so I won’t be seeing the movie Game Change anytime soon. it sounds mildly interesting to me from what I have read, if only because of this one line:

“‘Now it takes a movie star charisma to get elected president. Obama and Palin, that’s what they are, stars,’ one strategist concludes at the film’s end.”

Well, I don’t dispute that. In the age of television and especially of the internet, charisma itself is a “game changer” Visual media loves a charismatic individual.

Perhaps that’s why they couldn’t resist making a movie about something that happened only three-and-a-half years ago, and was not exactly undocumented. Personally, if I wanted to relive The Sarah Palin Experience 2008, I’d just go watch some of the many news shows about her. It’s not like her debate performance or her acceptance speech are lost forever. The Couric and Gibson interviews are readily accessible.

I know, supposedly this movie gives us the “behind the scenes” look at Palin and the McCain campaign, but I frankly have my doubts as to whether it is accurate. The only evidence it has for its accuracy is that Palin says it is inaccurate. That counts for something, but on the other hand its truth is vouched for by McCain’s Chief Strategist Steve Schmidt. Forgive me if I don’t trust the words of a political strategist.

No one except the actual participants knows what really went on, and, being all currently living people in the field of politics, are likely to tell the story that is most flattering to their own interests. The only way to really do it right would have been to make some sort of Rashomon-like film. And even that wouldn’t get you any closer to the truth.

This doesn’t mean that it’s utterly impossible to know what happened on the campaign trail, but it’s going to be years before a really clear picture emerges. That’s often the way with history. Right now, there are too many currently politically active people portrayed in the movie to really have much confidence in it.

So, why did they make this movie? Why didn’t they make a movie of an election we don’t have footage of, like, for instance, the 1824 election? That would be a good one; full of drama and intrigue. And it had Andrew Jackson, who is quite a fascinating personality. That would be very interesting to watch.

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Charlotte Allen has a rather baffling piece in the Los Angeles Times. She begins like this:

A few years ago Ann Coulter published a book titled “How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must).” With all due respect, Coulter, one of my favorite conservative eye-pokers, was wrong. There is no “how” in talking to a liberal. You can’t talk to a liberal, period.

She then goes on to cite numerous cases in which she attempted to. This one is my favorite:

[A]s I was defending my doctoral dissertation on a medieval topic, I mentioned that wealthy women of that time often functioned as patrons of the arts, commissioning beautifully decorated religious books. “Women like pretty things,” I said. OMG! I looked around at the three learned but liberal female professors on the committee, their smiles suddenly frozen into rictuses, groans issuing from their lips. How was I going to tell my husband, who had already made the reservations for a celebratory dinner, that I’d failed the defense? (Fortunately, I didn’t, but it was a scary moment.)

I mean, that’s just nit-picking, in my opinion. If they had failed her over it, that would be another matter, but as it stands I don’t see why she should whine about a minor incident like the expression of someone’s face. Or at least don’t go using “these people looked at me funny once” to support a generalization about the adherents of an entire ideology.

(As an aside, I have had very interesting conversations about gender differences with liberal friends of mine–liberal female friends, at that! So, I can match Ms. Allen’s anecdotal evidence with some of my own.)

It’s not really a very ambitious article. It seems like its primary point amounts to “liberals suck”, and it never moves beyond that.

But wait! The L.A. Times, being a fair publication, also has a liberal, Diana Wagman, submit her views on the issue of “liberals vs. conservatives”.  The point of it, essentially, is that she is a liberal and she and her conservative neighbor got along fine until they found about one another’s politics, at which a point they yelled at one another a lot. And now she feels bad because they hate each other.

The two articles conform almost humorously to stereotypes–the conservative says that liberals suck, and the liberal remarks how sad it is that there’s so much hate in the world.

So, I guess another anecdote of mine is in order. Two of my friends in college were conservative, and I don’t think either of them knew I was a liberal. Whenever they’d say something like “those liberals are a bunch of idiots”, I’d say something like “Oh, yeah? What have they done now?” Then they would tell me, and I would smile and nod. I generally was able to ask them their opinions of things without them ever asking me for mine. And that suited us all just fine.

Should I have spoken up? Am I a traitor to the cause for not doing so? Maybe. But I didn’t think it was likely I would change their minds, and so I made a calculation that it was better to have friends I could rely on in matters not political than not have them at all.

On this blog, of course, I take a different tack: I tell people my views, and if they express different ones, then I am happy to debate with them. Mostly, this is because it will leave a written record, and it’s possible–unlikely, but possible–that someday I may write something interesting in the course of debating that might be useful either to the person I’m debating or else to some third-party who happens by and reads it. But this was very unlikely to happen in conversation.

Most people are not  good at spoken debate. I know I’m not. The closest thing we have to professional debaters are lawyers, and there’s a reason it takes so much training to be one of them. It’s a very difficult skill. Moreover, it’s even worse in political matters, because the two parties actively try to teach their techniques that are designed to benefit the Party, not further discussion or aid in arriving at something like the truth.

That’s what “talking points”, slogans and similar things that political parties put out are for; to keep people from having honest debates. Despite my reluctance to do so, I have been involved in a few spoken debates with Republicans. And I have witnessed many more between friends and family members. They can be quite amusing to watch because the participants on both sides very quickly fall into saying remembered phrases and slogans that they have learned from somewhere. It’s not really a debate; it’s like two synchronized recordings. This is true even for debates between actual politicians–the only difference is that they are usually better at hiding what they are doing.

Most people support their party fairly instinctively, and only learn the reasons and arguments they are putting out as a way of having something to say on their behalf. Personally, I try to always state my reasons for why I support them, and not their reasons for why I ought to support them. It’s very surprising how tough that can be.

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I thought that the Clint Eastwood “It’s Halftime in America” ad was good, but a little over the top. Whatever else it was, or was perceived to be, it was a car commercial, and frankly it has never seemed to me particularly wise to associate the fortunes of a car company with the country as a whole. Though it is something of a tradition.

I admit that the “halftime” metaphor certainly does suggest a parallel with the fortunes of President Obama–even though really it is only late in the second quarter for his Presidency–but given the grand, “American” imagery of the ad, it almost seemed like it was implying that it’s halftime for the country itself. Which struck me as vaguely unsettling; for why does a car company feel itself qualified to put a 472-year lifetime on the country?

Anyway, Clint Eastwood himself is a libertarian, but, perhaps more relevant in this case, he is an actor. Actors are, after all, paid to say things they don’t necessarily believe. Karl Rove, meanwhile, says he was “offended” by the ad, saying:

“I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

First of all, since when is this “Chicago-style”? I understand that Chicago politics are supposed to be very corrupt, but show me somewhere where the politics aren’t corrupt. Moreover, the really good televised political propaganda tends to occur more at the national level, so I’m not sure what his point is. But never mind.

Secondly, I suspect that this will more than make up to the Republicans for any “corporate advertising” that so-called “political minions” may get.

Lastly, while I don’t think it was intended as an Obama campaign ad, if it was, it was a terrible time to do it. The voting public will have forgotten all about anything that happened in February by election day.

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I once asked on this blog “what would Conservative art look like?” Well, here perhaps is an example. Jon McNaughton produced a painting in 2010 entitled “The Forgotten Man”, which has been in the news lately. Here is a video where he talks about his piece:

You can see a full version of the painting, and read his explanation of it, at McNaughton’s website.

I’ve never understood how people can paint anything more sophisticated than a blotch. It’s almost as amazing and mystifying to me as the ability to play music. So I have to give the guy credit for his skill in that area.

Now then…

Although its overall message is not subtle, there are nonetheless some subtleties to it. Of particular interest to me was the expression of George W. Bush in the scene. He is depicted on the side of the “liberal” presidents–who I think are pretty clearly cast as the “bad” presidents in the eyes of the painter. But G.W.B. is glancing–almost guiltily, I think–over at the presidents whom the painter depicts as “good”. This is in keeping with the attitude many a Republican has lately–post-2007–developed towards him: a good man, tragically tempted away to the side of evil liberalism, and thus, totally not representative of the Republican party. They are, they insist, not responsible for his actions.

Kennedy, of course, is much nearer to “the forgotten man”, and although he is not as concerned as Washington, Madison, Jefferson and–who else?–Reagan, he is nonetheless raising a finger as if to say to Obama “that’s a bit much, isn’t it?”. This is rather unsurprising, in view of the Republicans’ general attitude towards JFK these days.

(I may be wrong, but I believe the further to the right a president is in this scene, the more liberal of a President he is supposed to have been. An interesting irony.)

Really, what McNaughton has done here is provide us with a pretty good graphic depiction of the conservative take on each and every president. One of the things that also stands out to me is that McNaughton seems terribly suspicious of the Federal Reserve, as his website makes sure to mention the actions of various presidents with regard to that institution.

And finally, there is the matter of “the forgotten man” himself. McNaughton has been criticized for making this figure–who is meant, according to McNaughton, to represent all the people–to be a fairly young, white male.

To an extent, this was just a can’t-win situation for McNaughton. From an artist’s perspective, it was essential that there be only one figure here, and ultimately, no matter what characteristics he gave that figure, someone or other would be offended. However, given his party’s reputation, this seems a poor choice. He would have been better served, in my opinion, to make it the personification of Columbia–though the problem is that this would mean changing the title.

As a depiction of the actual reality of the country today, it is quite bad, I think. As a work of art, and of propaganda, it is not terrible, but not great either. But as a look into the Conservative view of history, it is rather interesting. A neat depiction of a false worldview.

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“Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-born maid!
Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.”
                                   –W.S. Gilbert. The Pirates of Penzance. Act I.

Ah, but what of those pirates who steal not only money, but Poetry itself? Old Gilbert went to extreme lengths to thwart those who tried to pirate his and Arthur Sullivan’s light operas. And with good reason; after all, they worked hard to produce their delightful works; it is hardly fair that someone should come and make use of their ideas without paying them.

After all, if they couldn’t make money off their first few operas, maybe Gilbert would have gone back to being a lawyer, and perhaps Sullivan would have gone back to writing hymns, and thus the world would have been without Iolanthe, The Mikado, Ruddigore etc.

Is this not also a danger when people pirate art nowadays?  Freddie DeBoer makes some interesting points about the SOPA and PIPA bills, pointing out that, after all, it might end up damaging the culture:

“At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?”

Well, he’s quite right. It reminds me of the debate game designer Chris Avellone started about a month ago when he said he hoped that “digital distribution stabs the used game market in the heart“.  Which prompted Twitter user “YouAreNotAllBoring” to ask him: “Why do you want to limit the poors[sic] access to culture?” But, since the people who make the games do not see the money from people buying them used, there is a reason for designers to hate the used game market.

The used game market isn’t the same thing as piracy, but it raises some similar questions. To DeBoer’s first question I think we would all agree the answer is “yes”, but strangely, the answer to his second question, I believe is also “yes”.  A heavily qualified “yes”, admittedly, but still a “yes”.

As I see it, many artists will basically continue to produce art as long as it is physically possible for them to do so, whether they suffer material hardship or reap rewards. They are just driven to produce artwork for love of  it. The phrase “starving artist” exists for a reason. However, I don’t wish to imply that this is desirable, or that it is the optimal outcome for the market. Clearly, it isn’t. Obviously, if no artist is compensated for his or her work, it will decrease the supply of artworks. Though it will not drive it to all the way zero, I suspect.

This is simply a question of economic equilibrium, however. Once the concept of economic justice is introduced the question gets much more complicated. In my estimation, this concept makes it into a zero-sum game. If our artists win more compensation, our poor people are deprived of culture, and vice-versa.

Take public libraries, for instance: they provide the poor with a way to gain access to valuable works of culture and knowledge. Yet, if I read a book at the library that someone donated, am I not getting something for free? I am benefiting from that author’s work despite not paying for it. Unfairness remains.

But piracy is, of course, something even more disturbing. After all, it’s stealing, and if even if you argue that it is stealing of the “Robin Hood” variety, there is something even more disturbing about stealing works of expression than stealing money. Art, media, are culture are supposed to be an expression of deep feelings, a work of creativity that comes from–for lack of a better word–the soul. To steal that seems pretty low.

I don’t agree with DeBoer’s sentiment that the opposition to the SOPA and PIPA was out of proportion. The fact that a site could be shut down for “facilitating” piracy is what got me. “Facilitating” is an interesting word. It can be interpreted a lot of ways. And maybe it’s my libertarian instincts kicking in, but I just don’t feel comfortable about an entity having the ability to censor things on such a pretext.

(Also, as I said, we liberals must recall that Rupert Murdoch was for these laws. Rupert Murdoch is not really an artist. It is true that he employs many an artist, but they are artists only in a very specific medium which I will not name here.)

As you can see, what’s the issue of who deserves what is introduced, the problem becomes very difficult, because it seems like the people who make this content deserve to be compensated for it, but at the same time, I think most people feel that everyone deserves to see it. Even the creators themselves would like for as many people as possible to see it purely as a matter of pride, though they balance that against whether they can make money off of it.

One possible solution that has been discussed before on this blog is government-sponsored art. But this leads to an even more immediate threat of censorship and propaganda than government regulations to prevent piracy.

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Nameless Cynic made a very good point in his comment on this post. He questioned whether Rush Limbaugh believes the stuff he says. It may be that saying controversial things is the best way for Limbaugh to generate interest, he will say them even if he doesn’t believe them. It is, as Paul Simon might say, “the principal source of his revenue”.

This is a worthwhile observation, and I have to say it seems quite possible. If you could get paid millions of dollars to say stuff you didn’t believe, would you do it? I suspect lots of people could find some way to justify it. (The phrase “sheep are meant to be sheared” springs to mind.)

If Limbaugh is a charlatan, where does that leave us? Is there anything to be gained by analyzing his statements, or is he simply not worth even thinking about?

Well, that depends. The reason Limbaugh’s pronouncements are controversial is that lots of people believe them and lots of other people don’t. Thus, it is important to recall that even if Limbaugh knows everything he says is a contemptible lie, many other people apparently do not. His claims sound right to them.

It’s important to draw a line between the radio persona Rush Limbaugh and the actual man Rush Limbaugh. If the latter really doesn’t believe what he says, the former is evidently an avatar for the beliefs of many other people. He speaks not his own mind, but the minds of his listeners. He allows people to hear their own subconscious, but with a better speaking voice.

If this hypothesis is correct, then it might still matter what Limbaugh says, because he is still articulating the thoughts of conservatives throughout the country. Or, one might even say, he is telling them what to think. It can be hard to tell which is which.

Edward Bernays, who is often credited with making huge strides in the field of propaganda, once wrote:

“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

(Bernays is sometimes compared, rightly, to Machiavelli. When reading either, it is impossible to tell whether or not they knew how creepy their ideas sounded. Both are almost outrageous enough to be in the Modest Proposal genre, but not quite.)

So, maybe Limbaugh is one of the “small number of people”–or else an agent of theirs–and they are simply telling the “ditto-heads” what to do. The fact that they have been persuaded to call themselves “ditto-heads” is itself a bit of evidence in favor of this idea.

And so we come back to how this post got started: Limbaugh’s comments on the 1950s. He may or may not believe the 1950s were better. If he does, he has enough money to create for himself a virtual 1950s lifestyle, and indeed, this he may be well on his way to accomplishing. But if he does not, and is only a charlatan, then why did he bring it up?

It must have been because he calculated that lots of other people believe it. His listeners are largely white men, and as Thingy pointed out in her comment, these are the people who have by far the most to gain from a return to the 1950s social climate. (However, it is hard to imagine that Limbaugh personally could do any better for himself in the ’50s than he has done in the present. And taxes were higher in the 1950s…)

I don’t think Limbaugh could come and out and say just anything and make his loyal fans believe it. Maybe some of them, but not anything like most of them. I mean, if he told them to go out and kick puppies, I think they’d balk at it.

Personally, my feeling is that people are more resistant to propaganda than they are given credit for. They can usually tell when they are being manipulated to think something, unless the propagandist is very good at his job. Limbaugh is pretty good at his job. And the reason for this is that he tells them what they want to hear.

In Paul Graham’s essay “The Submarine”, about Public Relations firms, he noted:

“A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths… Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.”

If you read the links about Bernays above, you may have observed that the word “propaganda” and the phrase “public relations” to him meant basically the same thing. “Propaganda” came to be a pejorative term, and so “Public Relations” or “PR” was substituted. This is known as a… PR move.

Back to Limbaugh: he is indeed “favoring his clients”, only they are called “listeners”. If this idea is correct, then Limbaugh’s claims might still be important to understanding politics, because they tell us what the conservatives want to hear.

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Via Fryda Wolff, apparently there is some controversy regarding a poster contest the Obama campaign is running. Basically, the contest is that people volunteer to submit a poster promoting the President’s jobs bill/jobs plan/re-election. The winner gets publicity. The controversy is that people say it’s wrong of the campaign to ask that people volunteer their time to promote a jobs bill. Judging by the comments on the Rolling Stone article, people, especially graphic designers, are quite upset by this.

I don’t understand the outrage. No one complains when people volunteer to, for instance, go around from door-to-door promoting a political campaign. And this is actually a much more efficient use of resources in that, unlike a word-of-mouth pro-candidate or brochure delivery, a poster is something that you design once and can thereafter be replicated cheaply. Also, it introduces an element of competition and reward that is absent from more typical campaign volunteer work. What, I ask, is the problem?

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Here’s an interesting story: a Pew Research center study reported that Obama has received the most negative coverage of all the 2012 candidates recently.

One thing I like about the CBS News story linked above is its claim that this report “cuts against the widespread conservative claim that the ‘liberal media’ aides [sic] Mr. Obama…” No, it doesn’t. I don’t believe there is anything whatever that could cut against that claim in the minds of Conservatives, because anything that does must necessarily be a product of same “liberal media”, according to the Conservative way of thinking. It’s an utterly un-falsifiable concept.

Nor is there a major pro-Conservative bias in the press, however. I think the study found what it did because, as President, Obama has to actually do things that have measurable effects, as opposed to simply talking and being talked about like his prospective opponents.

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On The McLaughlin Group last night (we all have our guilty pleasures) the panelists were screaming about discussing government funding for the arts. Pat Buchanan, of course, examined the issue in the context of his “culture war”; that is to say, he argued that because government funds works like those of Andres Serrano, which he and many others find offensive, the best compromise is to not have any government funding of the arts at all.

Well, I think most people would agree the arts are very important to society, even if one doesn’t like or even consider the work of Serrano and similar “art”. But then again, as the Conservatives would say, what good is it if it has to be subsidized by the government? Surely, it should be a spontaneous result of the culture, not brought about through government subsidization.

Perhaps. Although it’s worth bearing in mind that the Medici family and the Church paid for the famous art of the Renaissance. And while I’m sure Conservatives will say the Church is different from the government, that argument is based on the experience of Americans, who may not quite realize the extent to which the Church was the government in Renaissance Italy.

Not to say that there is no merit to the argument that government ought not to fund the arts. After all, if the aim of real Art ought to be Truth, and if it is funded by a government, it is quite likely they will fund only that art which advances their agenda, and may be quite contrary to higher purposes. Propaganda, in other words. (Indeed, I sometimes think many Conservatives would not be opposed to this use of government-sponsored art.)

Then again, it seems funding must come from somewhere, and since true art may not always be profitable, where else can it come from but from an institution that does not have to turn a profit?