Readymade (No Thought Required)

You gotta love this Slate piece by Jack Shafer on the unanimously reverential treatment our nation’s daily newspapers accorded master marketer Robert Rauschenberg upon his passing this week at age 82. Shafer opened with this damning summation:

The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today's newspapers prove that you're more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section.

Oh, that’s brutal. Wish we’d written it!

Shafer goes on to point out ...

You'd expect that an artist who deliberately courted controversy might rouse a little debate on the event of his death. But none of his provocations move the daily art-crits in that direction—not his White Painting, not his "black painting," not his Automobile Tire Print, not his screenprints, not his Mud Muse, and not his "cardboards." Even the time that he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, erased its every line, and displayed it as Erased de Kooning Drawing wins worshipful treatment from the gang. "[A]n act both of destruction and devotion," reports the New York Times. Evidence of "creative overdrive," proclaims the Los Angeles Times. An example of "the younger generation, turning history into a blank slate," finds the Washington Post.

We never had much truck with Rauschenberg’s art---we prefer pitchers like the one above, which is why we’re running it without credit or permission---but we were always intrigued by the fact that the artist was a pure product of what our friend Banjo calls the Petrochemical Underarm of Southeast Texas. From a 2005 profile in the Beaumont Enterprise, one of the art world’s most authoritative organs:

"We didn't have any museums when Milton was here. That's what we called him then," said Dovie (Horton) Logsdon, a classmate from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur. "But we all had to make the best of what we had. Everyone here was either farming or working with the railroad. We had to create our own culture."

Art was foreign to Rauschenberg when he was growing up in the working-class town.

"The first art I saw that was hung on the wall as art was in California during the Navy," said Rauschenberg.

What he saw at the Los Angeles County Museum was Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" and Lawrence's "Pinkie."

"They looked like the backs of playing cards I had seen. I remember being surprised that a human being actually made them. I thought, well, that's what I do. I doodle and draw and copy the funnies," Rauschenberg said.

From such privations does great art spring. Anyway, our longtime favorite Rauschenberg anecdote, which we’ve read so often we assume it to be of the print-the-legend variety, involves the future world-beater and soon-to-be-former-Milton hitchhiking back to Port Arthur following Navy service in World War II. Donna Rae Wiser picks up the tale in the Enterprise:

To his surprise, his family had moved away, leaving no address.

"Someone told me they thought they might have moved to Lafayette," he said.

He hitched another 120 miles to a coffee shop there. There sat his father, Ernest, who explained simply, over a cup of coffee: He'd been promoted to Lafayette.

No Country for Old Men (Or Women)

A faded flier on a lightpost in southwest Houston. Note the very detailed description of the suspect, right down to the unkempt facial hair. The object here of course is not to promote or debunk stereotypes, but to catch a bad man who's beating up old people.

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t an Elitist? (You Kinda Sound like One Is the Reason We’re Asking)

We are unashamed and willing to stand naked before the world this evening and acknowledge the following: We can’t sit still for NASCAR. Or Toby Keith. Sean Hannity strikes us as the walking definition of “dumbass.” We occasionally eat tofu*---why, we’re not sure, but we think it has something to do with “health”---and we generally avoid trans fats, although we would defend to the death your right to eat trans fats---well, maybe not to the death---and certainly would never encourage a class-action suit against the makers of that key food grouping of the early 21st century.

Does that make us an elitist? It certainly might, especially in light of the following: We read the Sunday Times (sometimes on Sunday). We rarely drink alcohol, but when we do we prefer expensive dark beers brewed in Portland or Belgium or some other foreign place. We have been hunting a grand total of three (3) times in our life (although we own a serviceable array of firearms and enjoy repairing to the Piney Woods for their lawful discharge--all in preparation for the day our daughter starts “dating”) and we go fishing maybe an average of twice a year (although we’d certainly like to go more often, and occasionally voice that desire aloud, usually on days like the ones we’ve been having lately). We did not go to an Ivy League college---we somehow managed to wring a degree from the state-funded diploma mill in our hometown---but we have at least a passing acquaintance with the works of Wittgenstein and Hegel (not in the German, of course). We have never read a John Grisham novel. Of these facts we are neither proud nor embarrassed. We have passed through that portal into the place where we pretty much couldn’t care less (or is it could care less?) what anyone else thinks of us, pro or con, with some few notable exceptions.

So, yes, we fear we might be an elitist---we prefer to think of our self as a member of the natural aristocracy, of course---a designation that automatically disqualifies us from pursuing a late-life career in electoral politics (among many other disqualifiers). If you (like us), have a life so attenuated that you devote one or more waking hours to the viewing of MSNBC, then you are aware that the “elitist” descriptive now has been tied snugly around the neck of the callow Obama, as it was around the protruding Adam’s apples of John Kerrey and Al Gore (although for Obama with considerably less debilitating effect than the likely deadly Judas Kiss of the Rev. J. Wright). No less an observer than Pat Buchanan---and we’re not being facetious here, as our coozan Pat is probably the most astute spectator of the political sport in the entire USA (and a likely Hillary voter in a McCain-Clinton match-up, we’d wager)---has suggested the elitist image that now has Obama walking with a crutch will soon have him rolling in a wheelchair.

Perhaps Pat saw the film clip of Meredith Vieira---Meredith Vieira of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire fame!---asking Obama whether he had “fire in the belly” or “arugula** in the belly?” (Was that a line she borrowed from Maureen Dowd?) We forget how Obama replied, but it was not the appropriate answer. He tried to answer the question by avoiding it, as an elitist would. The non-elitist reply would’ve been: “That’s the stupidest goddamn question I’ve ever heard.” Then Obama could’ve pulled out one of his secret cigarettes and fired it up---smoking being a decidedly non-elitist pastime these days---and blown second-hand smoke right up the nostrils of the pert patrician nose of Meredith Vieira. The election would’ve been over! McCain probably would’ve withdrawn and even Clinton would have had to finally let go.

That exchange typified how the leveling of the “elitist” charge has become just another trump card, perhaps the ultimate one, in the great American con game of status: a member of the communications elite needling a member of the political elite with the suggestion that he’s a latent elitist. It reminded us of the time we saw conservative author and talk-show chick Laura Ingraham butter up Imus (in those longed-for pre-Morning Joe days) by telling him, “Yeah, you look a NASCAR fan---I could see you at the track, wearing a cap ….” Something like that. Imus, who dropped out of high school to join the Marines, is in fact a NASCAR fan (when we said we “can’t sit still for NASCAR” we meant “NASCAR really sucks”). Ingraham, arbiter of regular-guyness, went to Dartmouth and clerked for a Supreme Court justice.

Obama, of course, is not of the once-dominant East Coast aristocracy of cold-blooded WASPy financiers and politicians that produced our current president but rather of the less class-bound aristocracy that sprang from the post-War Baby Boom meritocracy, elevated not be lineage but rather by high SATs and Ivy League degrees and, for those who pursued a career in Democratic politics, an unfortunate proclivity for do-as-I-sayism and the pressing urge to assume the moral high ground in almost any political argument. And Obama isn’t really an elitist in that latter-day sense, although Yale law graduate H. Clinton comes off as a midnight-to-6 waitress when compared to him. We saw that clip of the Illinois senator fooling around on the basketball court with the North Carolina team and we noticed he can actually play. Pick-up basketball is no elitist pastime. (Obama said that the Heels’ Tyler Hansbrough went easy on him while guarding the senator; we assume that meant Hansbrough was only guarding Obama’s white half.***)

The accusation of elitism long been a problem for left-of-center politicians, as Jeff Greenfield reminded last week in a Slate essay on George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, the author’s first-person account of life among coal miners and their families in 1930s England (a book that every young person should read---NOW!---along with Down and Out in Paris and London). Orwell, a small-s socialist and the 20th century’s most perceptive critic of totalitarianism and imperialism, sought to explain socialism’s unpopularity among the British working class thusly, according to Greenfield:

"As with the Christian religion," [Orwell] writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." (Think "organic food lover," "militant nonsmoker," and "environmentalist with a private jet" for a more contemporary list.)
Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, "every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses."

Real working-class folks, he says, might be drawn toward a socialist future centered around family life, the pub, football, and local politics. But those who speak in its name, he says, have a snobbish condescension toward such quotidian pleasures—even condemning coffee and tea. "Reformers" urged the poor to eat healthier food—less sugar, more brown bread. And their audience balked. "Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like organs and wholemeal bread, or [raw carrots]?" Orwell asks. "Yes it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would rather starve than live on brown bread and more carrots … a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn't."

But things are much changed since Orwell’s time. The author, who elsewhere in his writings was equally contemptuous of vegetarians and “sandal-wearers,” died from TB at 46 (after years of smoking like fiend and getting shot in the throat in the Spanish Civil War---he was a guy who was willing to put himself out there). If born a half-century later, we bet Orwell would be pursuing a low-cholesterol diet and walking the treadmill at the health club at 6 a.m., although he’d likely just do it and shut up about it. As for Obama---it just shows once again what a great country this is when a half-black man from Hawaii can rise to become an arugula-eating elitist.

*We actually had some this evening, leftovers from our vegetarian daughter’s to-go plate.
**For non-elitist readers, this is fancy-pants lettuce.
***Unsophisticated vaudeville humor for the 21st century.

A Pre-Emptive Invasion, Based on a False Premise, With No Apparent Exit Strategy

And Greeted With Nearly Unanimous Credulity By a Compliant and Unquestioning Media

Where Have We Heard That Before?

We’ve held our tongue on the state’s raid and dismemberment of the Yearning for Zion Ranch, lest we be accused of endorsing child abuse in a public forum, but we can no longer stand by and jingle the change in our pockets after watching Channel 11’s Friday night coverage of the arrival in Brazoria County of some of the dispossessed-by-the-state-of-Texas FLDS children. For some reason the Belo-owned CBS affiliate thought it was newsworthy to show footage of the children as they were herded off the school buses and hustled into the foster care facility. The filming appeared to have been done from a helicopter hovering directly above the procession at a height of 40 or so feet (we could be off on this, but it was too damn close). Then one of the male anchors, we can’t remember if it was Greg Hurst or the other clown, offered up this unattributed “fact”: “Yeah, y’know, some of these kids had never ridden in a moving vehicle before!”* Now that the Therapeutic State has taken care of that alleged omission in their upbringing, we’re sure it won’t be long before some of these kids will be watching Teletubbies and pestering their foster parents (or whoever they end up with) to buy flat-screen TVs from Wal-Mart.

We’ve been surprised by the lack of sustained outrage, or even skepticism, on the part of politicians, journalists, pastors and other mainstream tastemakers (even, um, bloggers) over what seems to have been an egregious misapplication of police power by the state (of Texas), not to mention a gross violation of the Constitution. One person who been ringing the alarm is James Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who in in op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle asked why the state is “so intent” on punishing the FLDS mothers and children (who, barring proof of actual documented child abuse, have a right to be left alone) and suggests the raid and its aftermath “may be a tragedy in the making.” In case you missed it, we’ll quote Harrington at length:

It is becoming increasing apparent that either officials were duped into obtaining a false warrant or obtained a warrant for which they knew there was no reasonable factual basis.

It is also clear the evidence Texas Child Protective Services has so far is slim, to say the least, and even that questionable evidence may have been manufactured.

If there was child abuse, it should be punished — that means the perpetrator and not the mothers and the children. It is the culpable man or men who should be arrested.

Nothing at this time suggests wrongdoing to justify mass separation of all the children from their mothers. Otherwise, all that happens is victimizing innocent children. So far, nothing has come to light that shows any grievous misconduct at the Eldorado ranch. In fact, it now turns out that the one alleged perpetrator has been in Colorado all the time.Yet, CPS convinced the judge that mass genetic testing was necessary and wants to move forward, removing children from their moms.

... One certainly can get the impression the officials may be motivated more by bias against the FLDS people because of their practice of plural marriage and their self-isolation in an enclave. It would not be the first time in American history that majority society has struck out against Mormons or other self-isolating religious groups.

Simply because their beliefs and lifestyle are very different, and maybe even incomprehensible to majority society, is no reason to leverage the law against them. Religious freedom is a cardinal tenet of the First Amendment. It may be hard to swallow for many "mainstream" folks, but it is essential to any pluralist democracy. And so is due process.

Amen. We suspect somebody’s going to be very embarrassed (and liable, too) when this shameful episode finally plays out (but not Greg Hurst!).

*Something we wish we could say---that we'd never ridden in a motorized vehicle.

Long-Term Memory Loss

We read with interest the letter to the editor from Bob Lanier that was published in Tuesday’s Houston Chronicle, wherein the former mayor chastised City Councilman Peter Brown for telling the newspaper that if elected mayor in 2009 "he will go to the state Legislature to avoid allowing Houstonians to vote on [a stricter development code].” Such a move “circumvents the right of our citizens to decide the course of Houston public policy,” wrote Lanier. “… It would be a mistake to limit the public’s role in any policy that seeks to shift private property rights to City Hall.”

We agree whole-heartedly, but as a long-time resident we found Lanier’s defense of the democratic process somewhat, shall we say, ironic. Let us return now to those halcyon days of the late 1980s, when the city was trying to shake off the Oil Bust hangover and Lanier, a bigfoot developer, was among the movers who forged a compromise between road-building suburban interests and mass transit advocates under which Metro would pursue construction of a light-rail system while devoting a portion of its revenue to streets and thoroughfares. The plan was put to a referendum and was approved (by how much we forget---no time for this “fact-checking” business this evening) and Lanier became Metro chairman, presumably to carry out the voter-approved plan. But not too long after taking the reins of the transit agency Lanier began raising doubts about the viability of the rail plan, based on numbers assembled by an outside expert he had hired who deemed the proposal highly cost-ineffective. When it finally became apparent that Lanier was out to kill rail and not carry out the wishes of voters, the then-mayor, Kathy Whitmire, had the old boy 86'ed from the Metro board. In what turned out to be a supreme act of vengeance, Lanier ran against Whitmire, initially basing his campaign on the idea that voters should be allowed to have another say on the rail plan, based on the “new information” that had emerged since it had been approved. But once he had ousted Whitmire and assumed her job, nothing more was to be heard about the need for a new referendum, or about the old referendum for that matter, and when pressed Lanier said that his election as mayor had been a referendum on rail and there was no need to waste money and time on more of this voting business (even though rail, pro or con, never was much of an issue with voters and was quickly subsumed by Lanier's put-more-cops-on-the-streets platform).

And that’s our history lesson for today. There will be no homework, but you must answer this sample TAKS question before dismissal:

When the author of this passage uses the phrase “shake off the Oil Bust
hangover” in paragraph 2, line 3, he:

A. Is using a simile.
B. Is using a metaphor
C. Is hung over himself.
D. Is up past his bedtime.

Don’t forget to use your strategies!

Latent Obamaism Detected in America's Newsrooms---Again!

The Chronicle's reader representative (again, the Slampo's Place Stylebook dictates that we lower-case this job title) has raised the question of whether the newspaper's policy on identifying crime suspects by race (and ethnicity, we presume) is outmoded, given the alternate sources of information now readily available---sources whose producers (including the cops and readers who append comments to online stories) aren't as squeamish as the daily newspaper's brain trust about including the world's recognized No. 1 identification marker in its descriptions of Our Town's wanted men and women. This amounts to another astute admission by Re-Rep II that the daily newspaper is no longer the be-all and end-all of all things newsy. The policy in question, he reports, is as follows:

Race should not be used in a police description that is too skimpy to identify a suspect, such as "a black man in his 20s." But a complete description (several
elements, such as height, weight and personal characteristics) should always
include race.

(Which makes sense, except in any given week the paper seems to be all over the place in its application.)

We're not sure whether this marks a recent or long-past change of policy at the Chronicle. We do recall that the paper's previous ombuds-fellow---Re-Rep I---explained that the paper generally avoided fingering crime suspects by race because that amounted to "racial scorekeeping," a sentiment that we believe he once attributed to the paper's exceutive editor, although we can no longer find evidence of that in the Chronicle archives (maybe we imagined it). This stank to us of something that we lacked the vocabulary to name at the time but which we will henceforth call Obamaism*---the keen ability to discern the true motive/cause behind the failings of your social inferiors, coupled with the overwhelming compulsion to lecture them on how they might cure themselves of their frailties. We believe that what was meant by the dismissive "racial scorekeeping" was this: We are trained professionals with college degrees and many years of experience in our field and it is our duty to protect our feeble-minded readers from themselves. You may cling to your racial scorekeeping, most likely because you are bitter, about something, but there will be no racial scorekeeping** on our watch (except, of course, when it comes to filling newsroom jobs).

The current Re-Rep---who we know to be a smart guy with probably the best news sense/judgment of any higher-up at that newspaper***---explained that the "theory" behind the current policy is that

the limited description of "a black man in his 20s" is so vague as to be meaningless. At the same time, it tends to promote the stereotype that young black men are likely to be involved in criminal activity.

We're down with the "so vague to be meaningless" explanation, if the result is that no published description at all is offered beyond "a man," although a "black man in his 20s" does narrow the possible pool of all suspects down a notch or two (it eliminates us, for instance and most importantly). But we have to wonder about the notion that such a description "tends to promote a stereotype." Is it the task of a supposedly objective, even-handed newspaper to do whatever is the opposite of promoting stereotypes (debunking stereotypes?) any more than it is to promote stereotypes?

We think this explanation, like that of editor's deployment of the racial scorekeeping pejorative, reflects an overinflated notion of the power and influence of the media to direct the thinking of their customers. Humans were stereotyping other humans, both inside and outside their tribes, centuries before there were any media, mass or otherwise, and have continued to do right up until 11:39 this evening, despite the local newspaper's circumspection with racial IDs. Stereotyping---or profiling, if you will---used to be a survival mechanism, now it's material for 1001 bad Comedy Central comedians, as well as a survival mechanism. Everyone does it (including you). It's part of the complex calculus of existence. (Our recent favorite episode of flagrant public stereotyping came courtesy of light heavyweight champ/chump Bernard Hopkins, who prior to his bout with Caucasian [a limey to boot!] Joe Calzaghe repeatedly proclaimed that he would "never lose to a white boy," then proceeded to have his ass royally kicked by the whitey.) Intelligent people of all hues recognize their prejudices and learn to work around them, usually by simply taking people as they come and without censorious moral instruction from the media.

Still, we think the Chronicle should hold off on any change in policy and simply await the glorious post-racial, post-ethnic and possibly post-gender future to be ushered in by President Obama.

*An exlcusive coinage of Slampo's Place Ltd., copyright 2008, unauhtorized use prohibited.

**"Racial Scorekeeping"---a great title/subject for a new blog: "Jews continued to hold a commanding lead today in the number of theoretical physicists, while Eastern Europeans made further inroads into NBA line-ups and African Americans stayed away from bowling alleys in droves ... "

***If favorable comment from this quarter might cause this individual any problems with his superiors, please substitute "roaring asshole" for "smart guy with best new sense, etc."

¡Benedicto Es Tu Papá!