Our non-issues this Sunday...

For all the excitement packed into Meet the Press's "Our issues this Sunday..." voiceover, what a letdown to find out that the issue last Sunday was not "issues" but "tone."

David Gregory: All right. But let’s talk about the tone of the
[healthcare] debate. There have been death threats against members of
Congress, there are Nazi references to members of Congress and to the president.
Here are some of the images. The president being called a Nazi, his reform
effort being called Nazi-like, referring to Nazi Germany, members of Congress
being called the same. And then there was this image this week outside of
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town hall event that the president had, this man
with a gun strapped to his leg held that sign, “It is time to water the tree of
liberty.” It was a reference to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants.” That has become a motto for violence against the government. Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had that very quote on his shirt the day of
the bombing of the Murrah building when 168 people were killed.

Perhaps Gregory would do away with the global warming apostles' "get pollution down to zero" motto too. Because if carbon is a pollutant, then this has become a motto for violence against everyone. At least that's how Charles Manson saw it: "Why don’t you tell them what’s really going on? Why don’t you tell them the water’s so bad the fish can’t live in it? Why don’t you tell them that the polar caps are melting because they created so much heat with this machine? The truth is, simply, the planet earth is dying."

It has been startling for some to see the Commander-in-Chief painted like Heath Ledger's demented Joker in posters in Los Angeles. Others view the President's depiction as Hitler or as the Joker with perspective: same old hyperbolic politics as usual. This debate is new to Gregory, but some of us took it on a couple years ago.

Protest exhibit fails question: Is this art?
Pat Knapp, November 1, 2007

Try as they might with their rigid rubrics, the No Child Left Behind technocrats have yet to devise a plan to test young artistic talent. If government officials cannot agree on what the meaning of the word "is" is, surely they cannot judge the value of art. Judging what art is not is easier. Last week's vandal spray-paint exhibit on an Evansdale school - a "KKK" and a "go home" in 2-foot letters - was not art. It was "hate mongering," Waterloo Human Rights Commission Director David Meeks told the Waterloo Courier.

Perhaps if the Evansdale punks had painted a giant swastika made up of little George W. Bush faces, Meeks would have eagerly called this unlawfully hateful too. What a world of difference a consenting forum like Luther College makes. Preus Library, a building funded by Luther students' tuition, currently lends 36 square feet of wall space to such a swastika. This is part of a 27-piece agglomeration of conspiracy vim that the college calls an art exhibit.

Each piece of the traveling "We Protest: Iowa Speaks Out" exhibit, according to participating "artist" Pam Echeverria, protests the war in Iraq. "Not all art is pretty or neutral," said Gallery Coordinator David Kamm. "Much of it grapples with the most fundamental issues of life - in this case, what does it mean to live in a democracy with unprecedented political and military power?"Yes, while Michelangelo's pieta may not be neutral and Picasso's Guernica may not be pretty, both are art. But what to make of the "We Protest" piece with captions below Bush faces seething "hates gays," "hates black people," "hates Muslims" and "hates art" (ostensibly this "art")? "It's clever," wrote Rudyard Kipling, "but is it art?"

The National Endowment for the Arts grant for the tersely put "lighght" (that's the whole poem) prodded Americans to ask the same questions decades ago. Just as NEA life-support took the vanguardism out of the avant-garde, politics began taking the life out of art. "There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Alexis de Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art," wrote Allan Bloom 20 years ago. "Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause."

Many liberals promote art because its subjectivity breeds creativity. Yet the clear-cut "We Protest" message stifles interpretation. On Iraq, pro-war writers such as Christopher Hitchens sculpt colorfully reasoned arguments, while "We Protest" artists spill black-and-white emotion. One "We-Protest" piece is a mere answering machine labeled "Warrantless Wiretap." Another, "Fruits of War," depicts decapitated heads in place of Caravaggio's fruit. Yet another has President Bush painted like the Joker, carelessly juggling a burning globe. Goethe's Mephistopheles said "life is short and art is long." These short-sighted "artistic" protests aren't making life any longer for Iraqis.

So aside from bludgeoning the essential immortal quality of art, "We Protest" poses a problem for Meeks, who presides over a city containing many of the contributing "artists." As he may well know, a crucifix in a man's urine is NEA-sponsored art, but a Koran in a toilet is a hate crime. The virgin Mary covered in cow excrement ran in the New York Times, but the Danish Muhammad cartoons were too offensive. And now hate language a fraction of the size of the swastika decorating Preus has landed a few teens in more dung than the Times' Mary. Meeks might spare the we-protesters, but the test of time won't.