IS ART A SYMPTOM OF EMOTIONAL REPRESSION?

Events in my personal life have led me to question why I, as a sometime playwright, felt the need to share stories with other people and why I don't so much anymore (though all things are in flux).

I think it's safe to say that today's world doesn't afford too many people, particularly men, a place to express and interact with their feelings. The result is the cliched but apt vision of the repressed straight male whose inability to grapple with his own emotions is legendary. As a further consequence, men become deeply alienated from themselves, from their own desires, and are crippled by their insecurities, anxieties and fears. We erect titanic defenses to shield ourselves from being hurt, we unwittingly design entire personalities to deflect the emotional hazards of everyday life. Maybe we can't stop making light of everything (nothing can hurt you if you can laugh at it right?), maybe our shield is irony, cynicism, or an empty and giddy optimism. Regardless, these defenses are real impediments to knowing others, to fully engaging with life's volatile mix of pleasure and pain, and to constructing an identity devoid of the disfiguring effects of fear. We're never really taught how to interact or understand ourselves the way we're taught how to read or write. If anything, we're encouraged to seek comfort in the material world to assuage our existential dread. Buy a computer, an anti-aging cream, a car, a dress, a nice suit, a house, it'll make you feel better; the sheer act of accumulation will make you feel better. And if it doesn't, be quiet about it. Suffer in silence. This message has been encoded into popular culture. Heroic figures talk little, suffer much. Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Keeanu Reeves and others teach us that real strength comes from an avoidance of ourselves and our feelings. Genuine longing and hurt, devastation and exultation, are regarded with disdain and discomfort. We feel uneasy in the presence of true emotion, it unhinges us, exposes us, opens us up to the possibility of getting hurt. Of course, our squeamishness is simple cowardice, an understandable cowardice, but cowardice all the same, and hardly the embodiment of fortitude we think it is. In our everyday interactions with society we're expected to work and produce, not to reflect, or just experience in the purest sense of the word. Our society values speed and efficiency, not mental health. And what we're left with is the modern artist's principle subject: the breakdown of communication and understanding.

I wonder if art then doesn't become a socially acceptable way of interacting with and expressing our feelings. It's not really okay for a man to be distraught by, well, anything (unless it's the Redskins losing), but it sure is cool when he writes a song about it! Or a book! In fact, the artistic sphere of life is the only one where the individual is allowed to fully and honestly engage and dialogue with his true emotional self. He can even make a fortune while he's at it! The problem is that this particular form of interaction seems inert. While society has no difficulty with Morrissey or Thom Yorke emoting on stage, they better shove those feelings back down their gut when they unplug their guitar, or the writer Don DeLillo better shut right back up after he closes his laptop. Are sculptures made of cold stone, reams of paper stacked to the sky, rolls and rolls of beautified celluloid, are these barren fictions the only monument to our emotional lives? What if our lives themselves could be living, breathing expressions and negotiations of feeling, what if we found a way to integrate all our feelings into a work of art that was us, every day, in every word and thought and action? Would art become irrelevant if society weren't so emotionally repressive and repressed? If you begin to find a way to connect to yourself, to know yourself, if you can express your feelings to yourself and those around you, does art become irrelevant? Aren't artists just dodging the tough work of getting to know themselves? Isn't everyone else even worse off?

WOULD HE END AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?

Liberals made cynical by the election and re-election of George W. Bush argue that there's no way the American electorate would ever put a black man in the oval office. The thinking goes that the country is just too racist to countenance a minority in a major position of power, that the so-called 'red states' are too enthralled with their own messianic and white vision of Christian hegemony to even consider electing a black man president, even if he did go to Harvard. These liberals are wrong.

It's easy to understand why they'd feel the way they do. Bush's active disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida in 2000 certainly seems to suggest that, at a minimum, the Republican leadership at the state and local levels would do everything they could to ensure a Republican victory. But in the end it's the voters who decide and elect our officials, not the political elite of the governing party, and polls from 1996, over ten years ago, already demonstrated that America was willing to vote for a black leader. Colin Powell, who at the time declined to run, consistently polled better than either Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, sometimes by margins as great as 5-8 points. How can this be? I thought our 'red states' would never allow a minority candidate to win?

I think we need to give the American people some credit. Fundamentally, Americans desperately want to believe in the American ideal of a diverse and ethnically just society. It doesn't mean they're always willing to elect officials who feel the same way, or that they don't sometimes fail to live up to their own professed ideals. But the reason the American model has been so successful at integrating other cultures into our own, the reason I'd argue why we don't have the kind of homegrown Islamic terrorism we see in Britain for instance, is that the the message of America as a place of real opportunity for people regardless of their race or ethnicity has a robust vitality to it, even if in reality our country has a long way to go before we achieve the kind of social equality we prematurely claim to already have. Despite our Katrinas, our Sean Bells, despite our Rodney Kings and the embarrassing confederate flags flying above certain state capitals, Americans want to believe in egalitarianism, they want to at least think we live in a tolerant country. They believe in the democratic principles of the Constitution, in the idea of a 'country of immigrants' that values hard work and effectiveness over the color of ones skin. If the right candidate comes along, and assuages certain, admittedly racist, concerns, I think a black man can easily win enough white votes to become president...and Barack just may have an ace up his sleeve to help him pull the whole thing off.

So the whole blogosphere is buzzing about a comment Barack made regarding affirmative action. Here's what happened during an interview when he was asked on ABC's This Week if he thought his own children should benefit from racial preferences:

On affirmative action, Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, said he thinks that someday when his two young daughters apply to college, they “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged” and there is nothing wrong with that.

“I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed,” he added. “There are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling.”

Obama said that “if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it, that affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.”

What's significant of course is that it seems Obama is suggesting a switch from traditional race based affirmative action to a more class-based system that would give assistance to poor whites as well as to poor blacks. To me and many others,
this could be the kind of brave and singular policy position that separates him from the rest of the Democratic contenders, and which positions him in a place to secure not just the poor white vote, but also the middle/upper class white vote that harbors the soft racist fear that Obama's an angry black man. Look, this idea of the black man out to punish white America for its racist transgressions is one that, rightly or wrongly, strikes fear into the heart of many moderate to slightly right of field Americans. If Obama bucks the paleo-liberal establishment and rejects affirmative action, he'll score huge points with moderate whites as someone who clearly won't let their race interfere with their principles. In the end, that's all certain parts of white America want to be assured about. As racist an idea as not trusting a black candidate who is justifiably upset by racial inequality is, you can win as an African-American candidate if you tack to the right on precisely the issue of your race. No other democratic candidate could pull this off without losing the black vote as Mickey Kaus reminds us. Obama could do it simply because he's black.

Now, while it's a great strategic move politically, is it morally right to include white racist 'concerns' into your political calculus? I'd argue you have to if you're serious about winning. Play the game, get power, change the game. You certainly can't change the game if you lose...

Another equally important question then becomes whether or not replacing affirmative action with a class-based alternative is the right thing to do. Right or wrong, affirmative action has grown increasingly untenable as it breeds all kinds of white resentment. A class based alternative still redresses political inequality, but it does so in a way that alleviates racial tensions, and for that alone it bears some merit.

Can Barack do it? If he plots the right course, yes. It remains to be seen whether or not Obama will elaborate on his ostensibly spontaneous remarks and incorporate them into a larger policy that rejects affirmative action. But if he does make this a part of his platform, he just might wind up making history.

OH YEAH, RIGHT!

Has anyone else noticed their indie music collection getting a little stale recently? I don't know, some albums aren't holding up as well as they used to for me. Worse, my interest in new albums from bands I used to love immediately fades in under a week. The Shins, Modest Mouse, Wilco (gasp), Flaming Lips, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire (I insert mad caveats here however), Radiohead among others all released fairly mediocre albums over the last couple years. Now, what existential dread can I wring from the very marrow of this catastrophe? That way I dare not tread for it is a path fraught with dangerous rumination, arthritic knees, and discount antacid. Suffice to say, you must have also noticed recently that your old jazz albums from high school (the ones you have because you played in a high school jazz band--you may have even been terrible) have been sounding better and better. Check out Basie's tunes on the upper right and I defy you not to grin wider than you have at a song in like four and a half years.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE EVER FILMABLE PAST

A recent trend in movies is to take well-publicized and often times well documented and photographed moments in history and recreate them on the big screen. The first time I saw it was with Man on the Moon, that biopic about Andy Kaufman starring Jim Carrey. But Good Night and Good Luck, the recent play Frost/Nixon and The Queen are also examples of the kind of appropriation that takes video footage and, well, has actors imitate them, word for word, and hollow gesture for hollow gesture. Help me. I just don't get it.

It seems to me if you're going to do a movie about real events, especially ones that have occurred quite recently, then you better have some new insight or information or interpretation to offer your audience. Perhaps there are some offstage machinations that cast the historical moment in an entirely different light or a recent revelation that somehow upends our understanding of an important figure. But those aren't the movies we usually see (except for this one, which is incredible and the perfect example of how to handle material that's been previously televised) Instead, all of the above flicks take documented moments and simply have their actors mimic the real event...which begs the question: why not just go and watch the real event? When it comes to the antics of Kaufman, or the Frost/Nixon interviews, or Edward Murrow's grilling of McCarthy, these incredible parts of our history are available to us, in the flesh, most likely on YouTube if not Netflix. So why do we give Oscars and kudos to what is necessarily a poor impersonation? In the case of Good Night and Good Luck there wasn't even much of a movie to watch, nearly the entire film was a series of word for word reenactments of what actually happened. It was like watching the World Trade Center version of the Twin Towers coming down, computer generated approximations and all, when you could just go on CNN's website and see the real thing. Even worse is the recent translation of a very good documentary called The Staircase into a television show. Now we're taking TV reality entertainment and fictionalizing it...for TV. Are screenwriters, producers and studios so bereft of creative ideas that they're starting to devour themselves like the proverbial snake? What's next, a movie about American Idol with Al Pacino playing Simon Cowell? Can't we just watch American Idol? Does anyone in the world think that Frank Langhella or Helen Mirren or Jim Carrey can even roughly approximate the drama that only real life can and, in this case, actually does offer for our video hungry eyes? Can somebody tell Al Pacino to stop yelling?

RUDY!

A call to my legions of readers! After spying this Slate piece I thought of a question which I think might elicit some interesting answers from you all. Considering Rudy's horrfic personal life story in which he marries his cousin, gets an annulment (or a Catholic divorce as we sometimes say), marries again, admits to cheating on second wife, divorces said second wife from a press conference (calling her a 'whiny stuck-pig'), marries third wife and abandons children, and considering Rudy's predilection for women's clothing, my question is: If you were a political operative working for Hilary or Barack, would you attack Rudy's personal life in speeches, ads, etc... and smear him with his own personal immorality? Or, on the contrary, do you subscribe to the notion that one's personal life has no bearing on one's fitness or lack thereof to be president? If you would attack him, how would you go about it so as to not offend those Americans who think a man's personal life isn't any of the public's business? If you wouldn't attack him on these issues....why not?! They're gold! Or are we trying to practice a new kind of politics? But think of what those ads would do to potential Republican Giuliani supporters in the Mid-West, the Bible belt, and how it would effect his ability to get out the evangelical vote. Could you really not use this stuff?

MCCAIN AT THE GATES OF HELL

After watching John McCain at the Republican debates recently, I couldn't help but notice how awkward, detached, and forced he seemed. Once the Republican front runner, McCain's poor fund raising, his excessive age, and questionable public comments have seriously undermined his bid to be the GOP's Reganesque savior. One can't help but wonder how much McCain really wants to win. By turns sober and winsome, McCain never seems to evince the right emotion at the right time. He was nervous and out of breath at the beginning of the debates which did little to dispel the notion that he's too old to be president. But moreover, his shortness of breath speaks to his overall comfort level with himself. He's a seasoned politician who's already been through one presidential campaign. Where is the self-assuredness of a man who's navigated the harrowing gauntlet of going up against no less than Karl Rove? Whither McCain's even hand and steady leadership in the face of a minor primary debate when the stakes couldn't be less important--at least in terms of what's to come?

A single moment in the debate may provide some illumniation on what appears to be McCain's self-destruction. Notice in the video clip how he begins by light-heartedly (and superciliously) demeaning Tancredo, after which he launches into a seemingly innapropriate and ill timed rant about hunting down Osama bin Ladin to the 'gates of hell'. Forget, for a moment, the tonal incongruity of making a joke and then seguewaying into a discussion of murdering terrorists. What's so interesting about this isn't so much the forced change of tone, but rather McCain's reaction to it. He seems chagrinned and embarrassed at his own insincerity, as if wakened from a dream. There is a moment of clarity in his eyes, and in the sorrowful smile that follows the realization that his plastic words ring hollow. After all, this is a man who once stood up for his values regardless of how his own party reacted. His campaign finance battles were noble and politcally risky, yet he proved himself a man of integrity who stood up for what he believed. But now, after aligning himself with the same Bush administration that smeared him in South Carolina in 2000 by suggesting he had an illegitimate (and black) child, and which also outrageously implied that he was mentally unstable because of his time spent in a Vietnamese prison camp, by forcing himself to 'make nice' with Bob Jones university, by compromising some of his core beliefs in order to appeal to his conservative base, I think McCain has lost his soul. And I think he knows it. His subsequent strategic and rhetorical gaffes in the campaign symbolize what has become clear to nearly everyone except, until now, McCain: he's lost his way and doesn't believe in himself anymore. It remains to be seen whether or not he can rediscover the man who built up such a wealth of bi-partisan political capital and rebuild what was once an unimpeachable character.