My mailbox is being flooded with panicked messages from artists across the country. By executive order, the governor of Kansas has abolished the Kansas Arts Commission (KAC). The governor of Texas wants to defund that state’s arts agency, as does the governor of South Carolina. Republicans want to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts …
I’ve been mesmerized by a five-minute video shot in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, part of the Zero Silence documentary project, focusing on young people using new forms of organizing to change authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. In the clip, an unseen interviewer questions an unnamed young woman in the midst of a vast sea of …
It’s too soon to say about Tunisia, of course: will its revolution succeed? Will a democratic coalition endure, establishing a new order of government by consent? Will that spirit spread through the region? Who knows? But it is not too soon to suggest some possibilities and implications emerging from the chain-reaction of liberation that has …
The word of the week is blame. Who should be blamed for Jared Lee Loughner, the loony white male devotee of the Sovereign Citizen Movement who shot nineteen people outside a Tucson supermarket on Saturday, killing six and wounding fourteen, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords? What happens when scapegoating overtakes a culture, as it has overtaken …
In my last essay, I wrote about class diversity. From an intensely personal perspective, I questioned the practice—just as prevalent in our national discourse as in the realm of family secrets—of entering into tacit agreements to normalize what should never be considered acceptable. I said that it was time to break the pact upholding the …
We are having a conversation about class in this country, but not everyone knows it. For instance, joblessness means one thing to a person whose unemployment insurance has run out and quite another to, say, a business leader who worships constantly growing profits, repeatedly cutting jobs to expand them. Our national conversation about class is …
The phrase “culture wars” has been popcorning to the surface of the cultural landscape lately, the renewal of a trope from the late eighties and early nineties. Many people are perceiving a re-emergence of the eighties/nineties culture wars, in which art—especially art depicting homosexuality and/or religious images and artifacts—provides the setting for combat over freedom …
We are suffering from an epidemic distortion of reality, the byproduct of commercial media addiction to shock and awe. What are we going to do about it? I recommend an immediate moratorium on believing the sensational garbage blasted through the mediaverse simply to sell airtime; and a reality-check that helps liberals and progressives kick the …
A tidal wave of hindsight washes over the country after every election, drenching us in a not-quite-drinkable cocktail of hypothesis and certainty. When things go badly—as they did for Democrats, especially conservative ones, in some key races—it is consoling to believe we know precisely how the outcome could have been reversed. But that particular consolation …
Election time brings it out, I suppose: the deafening clash of certitudes. However vainly, I find myself wishing to hear a candidate ask a question without a foregone conclusion, actually engaging us in discovering new answers. But no matter how clueless they may feel inside, politicians act like they know it all. And no matter …