This project for the inculcation of proper human feelings through behavioral technique is either sinister or idiotic. It is sinister when it works, as in Communist China, where they have learned how to break one’s character through extremes of coercion, deprivation and torture. These means are not yet available to American educators and family therapists. Which explains their low success rate. Some things, alas, cannot be taught.
Woody Allen, the movie character, once said: I’ve had 17 years of psychotherapy—one more and I’m going to Lourdes. Time’s up, Woody. You’ve tried technique. Now get on that plane.
The Washington Post, April 2, 1993
FROM PEOPLE POWER TO POLENTA
When Katherine Ann Power—’60s radical, bank robber, fugitive—turned herself in last week after 23 years on the run, she added another entry to her already crowded résumé: unwitting historian. Her brief explanatory statement released upon her surrender to Boston police is a document historians of the future, puzzling over what happened to the ’60s, will find useful.
They will ignore the usual mitigating phrases about actions she now characterizes as “naïve and unthinking.” One does not ordinarily think of a bank robbery in which a policeman, father of nine, is shot in the back, as an act of naïveté. “My intention was never to damage any human life,” she says. It apparently never occurred to her that when robbing a bank in the company of three ex-cons, a shotgun and a submachine gun, somebody might get hurt.
Nor is there anything unusual about her spirit-of-the-age defense, wherein she insists that her deeds should be seen in the context of a time when many others—she cites, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon papers—were breaking the law. There is a certain moral gap between unauthorized leaking and armed robbery that this defense does not bridge.
No matter. These run-of-the-mill self-justifications are window dressing. What everyone wants to know is not why Katherine Power robbed a bank in 1970—we know: She wanted to save the world—but why she finally gave it up in 1993. It is her account of the return that yields the one truly memorable line in this text, the one historians will ponder to their benefit: “I know that I must answer this accusation from the past, in order to live with full authenticity in the present.”
So Katherine Power came in from the cold in search of “full authenticity.” Not out of remorse or resignation. Not seeking forgiveness or repentance. “She did not return out of guilt,” explained her husband. She just tired of telling lies, of living as Alice Metzinger, wife, cook, restaurateur, but with a shrouded past and troubled future. “She wanted her life back,” said her husband. “She wanted her truth back. She wants to be whole.”
That Officer Schroeder will not get his life back troubled her (“his death was shocking to me”), but that is not why she surrendered—or she would have done so 23 years ago. In fact, as elaborated in a front-page New York Times story about her psychotherapy for depression, her surrender—for the sake of “full authenticity”—was a form of therapy, indeed the final therapeutic step toward regaining her sense of self.
Allan Bloom once described a man who had just gotten out of prison, where he had undergone “therapy.” “He said he had found his identity and learned to like himself,” writes Bloom. “A generation earlier, he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner.”
In an age where the word sin has become quaint—reserved for such offenses against hygiene as smoking and drinking (which alone merit “sin taxes”)—surrendering to the authorities for armed robbery and manslaughter is not an act of repentance but of personal growth. Explains Jane Alpert, another ’60s radical who served time (for her part in a series of bombings that injured 21 people): “Ultimately, I spent many years in therapy, learning to understand, to tolerate and forgive both others and myself.”
Learning to forgive oneself. Very important nowadays for revolutionaries with a criminal bent. What a pathetic trajectory from the ’60s to the ’90s: from revolutionary slogans to New Age psychobabble, from Frantz Fanon to Robert Fulghum, from the thrill of the underground to the banalities of the couch.
But the banality does not stop there. This revolution has not just gone into therapy. It is heavily into food. When Bobby Seale, cofounder and chairman of the Black Panthers, finally produced his oeuvre, it was Barbeque’n with Bobby. Karleton Lewis Armstrong, jailed for a 1970 University of Wisconsin bombing that injured four and killed one, now runs a fruit-juice business in Madison, Wisconsin. And Katherine Power, expert chef and cooking instructor, was renowned in her adopted Oregon for her recipes. Power’s therapist, reports the New York Times, found it impossible “to believe that this bespectacled cook with the terrific polenta recipe … had spent 14 years as one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives.”
It starts with people power. It ends in polenta. A fitting finish to the radical ’60s.
But it is not quite right to close the book with this touch of cute domesticity. Let’s remember who Katherine Power was and what she did. This was not a flower child caught up some wild afternoon in a robbery. She was found to have in her apartment three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun and a huge store of ammunition. She is accused of having firebombed a National Guard armory. She took part in a bank robbery in which a hero cop, father of nine, was shot dead. This is someone very hard who has now softened—out of feelings of loss, principally for herself.
“After all these years,” concludes Newsweek, “it’s hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for: the [Schroeder] children who lost a father … [or] the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the ’60s.”
That’s a hard one? Reflecting on the man who learned to like himself in prison, Bloom notes that in the mind of this ex-con, “the problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.”
Except for the orphans.
Time, October 4, 1993
ANNALS OF “ART”
Culture wars, chapter 36. The Brooklyn Museum of Art readies an exhibition of high decadence called “Sensation.” The mayor of New York threatens to close down the museum if the exhibit is not canceled. The mayor is pilloried by the usual suspects—a consortium of New York museums, the ACLU, the highbrow press—for philistinism and/or First Amendment abuse.
The exhibit itself is nothing very special, just the usual fin de siècle celebration of the blasphemous, the criminal and the decadent. The item that caught Rudy Giuliani’s attention is a portrait of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung and floating bits of female pornography. The one that caught my attention is the giant portrait of a child molester and murderer—made to look as if composed of tiny children’s handprints.
The culture-guardians scream “censorship.” The mayor makes the quite obvious point that these artists can do anything the hell they want, but they have no entitlement to have their work exhibited in a museum subsidized by the taxpayers of New York City to the tune of $7 million a year.
It is an old story. Art whose very purpose is épater les bourgeois is at the same time demanding the bourgeois’ subsidy. Of course, if the avant-garde had any self-respect, it would shock the bourgeoisie on its own dime.
But how silly. Self-respect is a hopelessly bourgeois value. The avant-garde lives by a code of fearless audacity and uncompromising authenticity. And endless financial support. The art world has sustained this cultural blackmail by counting on the status anxiety of the middle class. They are afraid to ask the emperor’s-new-clothes question—Why are we being forced to subsidize willful, offensive banality?—for fear of being considered terminally unsophisticated.
This cultural blackmail has gone on for decades, with the artist loudly blaspheming everything his patrons hold dear—while suckling at their teats. Every once in a while, however, someone refuses to play the game. This time it is Giuliani. And sure enough, he has been charged
with philistinism, or as the New York Times editorial put it, with making “the city look ridiculous.”
“The mayor’s rationale,” says the Times with unintended hilarity, “derives from the fact that the city owns the Brooklyn Museum of Art and provides nearly a third of its operating budget.”
Rationale? It is self-evident: You own an institution—whether you are an individual, a corporation, or a city with duly elected authorities acting on its behalf—you regulate its activity. This is no “rationale.” It is a slam-dunk, argument-ending, QED clincher.
Let’s be plain. No one is preventing these art works from being made or displayed. The only question is whether artists have a claim on the taxpayer’s dollar in displaying it.
The answer is open and shut: no. It is a question not of censorship but of sensibility. Can there ever be a limit to the tolerance and generosity of the paying public? Of course. Does this particular exhibit forfeit whatever claim art has to public support—and the legitimacy and honor conferred upon it by the stamp of the city-owned Brooklyn Museum?
The Virgin Mary painting alone would merit an answer of yes. Add the child molester painting, the 3-D acrylic women with erect penises for noses, Spaceshit and A Thousand Years (“Steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, insect-o-cutor, cow’s head, sugar, water, 213 x 427 x 213 centimeters”), and you get a fuller picture: an artistic sensibility that is a peculiar combination of the creepy and the banal.
Of course everyone loves to play victim, the status of victim being, as Anthony Daniels put it in the New Criterion, “the personal equivalent of most favored nation.” But the idea that art of this type is under assault or starved for funds is quite ridiculous. Art of this type is now the norm. It is everywhere. Galleries, museums, private collections are filled with it.
It is classical representational art that is starved for funds. Try finding a school in your town that teaches classical drawing or painting. As James Cooper noted some years ago in the American Arts Quarterly, “A modest grant to a small art academy was recently denied by the National Endowment for the Arts because, the terse NEA memo explained, ‘teaching students to draw the human figure is revisionist and stifles creativity.’ ”
Add some dung, though, and you’ve got yourself a show.
The role of the artist has changed radically in the last century and a half. It was once the function of the artist to represent beauty and transcendence and possibly introduce it into the life of the beholder. With the advent of photography and film, the perfect media for both representation and narration, art has fought its dread of obsolescence by seeking some other role.
Today the function of the artist is to be an emissary to the aberrant: to live at the cultural and social extremes, to go over into the decadent and even criminal, to scout forbidden emotional and psychic territory—and bring back artifacts of that “edgy” experience to a bourgeoisie too cozy and cowardly to make the trip itself.
This has been going on for decades. It must be said, however, that at the beginning of the transformation there was an expectation that the artist would bring skill and a sense of craft to his work. Whether their conceit was dandyism, criminality or sexual adventurism (free love, homosexuality and the other once shocking taboos of yesterday), artists of the early modern period still felt a need to render their recreation of shock with style and technique.
Having reached a time, however, when technique itself is considered revisionist, anti-creative and, of course, bourgeois, all we are left with is the raw stinking shock. On display, right now, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
It is important to note that the artists and promoters who provoked the great Brooklyn contretemps are not feigning their surprise at Giuliani’s counterattack. They genuinely feel entitled to their subsidy. They genuinely feel they perform a unique and priceless service, introducing vicarious extremism into the utterly compromised lives of their bourgeois patrons.
Ah, but every once in a while a burgher arises and says to the artist: No need to report back from the edge. You can stay where you are. We’ll have our afternoon tea without acid, thank you.
And then the fun begins.
The Weekly Standard, October 11, 1999
“NATURAL” CHILDBIRTH
Nancy Miner wanted to give birth to her baby at home. The fact that she was 39, that this was her first child, that there was no electricity in her “rustic Middleburg cottage” did not daunt her. Assisting her were her husband, a friend and a lay midwife. During the delivery, the baby’s umbilical cord became compressed. The baby died. The midwife has now been charged with manslaughter.
Lay midwifery is not certified and not legal in Virginia, but the midwife’s lawyer says she should not be held liable because she was simply doing what the parents wanted. I’m with the lawyer. If there was real justice in this world, it is the parents who would be in the dock, charged with criminal self-indulgence.
“This case is all about the rights of parents to make decisions about the welfare of their children,” says Erin Fulham, a Maryland nurse and member of Maryland Friends of Midwives. Welfare of the children? If Nancy Miner had had the slightest concern about the welfare of her child, this at-risk 39-year-old primigravida would have had her child in a hospital where, when the breech birth and compressed cord had been discovered, she could have had an emergency C-section and a good chance of saving her child.
“Should parents have the choice about the health care of their newborn?” asks Fulham rhetorically. Of course. But the Miners’ choice, as the subsequent tragedy proved, was hardly about the newborn’s health care. It was about the mother’s karma. It was about the narcissistic pursuit of “experience,” the Me Generation’s insistence on turning every life event—even those fraught with danger for others—into a personalized Hallmark moment.
Miner protests in her own defense: “Everyone was born at home a generation ago. Now they act like it is outrageous.” More like 80 years ago, but no matter. Yes, 80 years ago babies were born at home. And they died in droves. Almost 1 in 10 newborns died then. Fewer than 1 in 100 does now.
Yes, childbirth used to be natural. But so were the accompanying death, disability, deformity and disease. A parent’s duty is to avoid these “natural” phenomena by all possible means. Today we have those means. They are called modern medicine.
The whole natural childbirth phenomenon is an astonishing triumph of ideology over experience. Pain is normally—indeed, “naturally”—something humans try to avoid. And the pain of childbirth is among life’s most searing. It is also, today, entirely unnecessary.
My older brother was born 50 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Postwar Brazil not being a mecca of high-tech obstetrics, my mother delivered without anesthetics and suffered accordingly. Four years later in New York, she had the opportunity to give birth differently. She quite sensibly chose to deliver (me) in a state of blissful unconsciousness. To this day she has no doubt which was the more desirable experience. (As for me, I must have entered the world as zonked as Janis Joplin left it, but with no apparent side effects. I don’t even like beer.)
In the ’60s and ’70s, natural childbirth made a comeback, fueled by a peculiar combination of New Age mysticism and macho feminism. Today, thankfully, some feminist writers argue that hospital childbirth is alright, that it is not a betrayal of sisterhood, that there is no earthly reason to willfully embrace pain for the mother and danger for the child as a protest against the alleged patriarchal structure and technological tyranny of modern medicine. They could usefully use as text the case of Nancy Miner.
I will no doubt be charged with lack of sympathy for a bereaved mother. I plead guilty. I reserve my sympathy instead for the lost child. Perhaps if we reserved for these wanton parents less sympathy and more scorn, less understanding and more opprobrium, we might deter some and save a few children.
The Miners have every right to be Luddites, free spirits, foes of modern technology. But the original 18th-century industrial saboteurs sought to destroy
the satanic textile mills by throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machines. They didn’t throw their children.
The Washington Post, May 24, 1996
THE INNER MAN? WHO CARES
As Bob Woodward likes to say, he is the gift that keeps on giving. Richard Nixon, that is. And an endless source of amusement he is. We have all been having a great chuckle listening to Nixon again. More tapes, more titillation, most notably his ranting and raving about Jews. (“Generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards,” etc.)
As a Jew, I have been asked several times about these revelations. I am entirely unmoved.
First, I wonder how anyone would fare who had an open microphone in his office for 3,700 hours running. Second, Nixon was suspicious and paranoid about everyone. So what else is new?
Third and most important: I don’t really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. Tell me about his outer acts.
And what were Nixon’s outer acts vis-à-vis Jews? Well, in 1973, he saved Israel from possible destruction with his massive weapons airlift during the Yom Kippur War. He even put the U.S. military on worldwide alert to keep the Russians from intervening on Egypt’s behalf.
I feel about Nixon the way I feel reading about Truman’s occasional ethnic lapses. “In private, Truman was a man who still … could use a word like ‘kike,’ ” writes David McCullough, “or, in a letter to his wife, dismiss Miami as nothing but ‘hotels, filling stations, Hebrews and cabins.’ ” So what? Truman remains a hero to Jews for having recognized the State of Israel at the crucial moment of its birth in 1948.
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Page 8