by va
Genitals! Genitals in museums, genitals in public! Genitals on parade! Such are the visions of wingnuttians as they anticipate Elizabeth Alexander reading at the inauguration tomorrow. Apparently Alexander had the nerve to use the word "genitals" in a poem about Saartjie Baartman called "The Venus Hottentot." This poem has gotten mad play since Alexender's reading was announced, and wingnuts hate it. The fevered imaginings began long ago at The Corner with "The Inaugural Poet's Magic Vagina Tricks." PhiBetaCons calls Alexander an "X-Rated Yale Poet." One editorial speculates, perhaps this will be "An X-Rated Inaugural?" (Answer: Maybe!!) Brent Bozell III allows that Alexander "won’t read a pickled private-parts poem at the inauguration." But! "It’s not only sex, but race, that offers controversy in this appointed poet." Intriguing! Tell us more, John Derbyshire! "You could sum up [Alexander's] thematic range as: 'I’m black! Black black black! And I have a vagina!'"
WOW. What a wonderous shithead museum these people inhabit. It must be a true luxury to condemn the word "genitals" without condemning the practice-- which is the very subject of the poem--of anatomizing a human being and displaying her as a freak. You get the sense that our wingnut friends are not just gawking at Alexander's "The Venus Hottentot," but in their attempt to gin up controversy about it, are actively agitating for the public to view Alexander and her work with the same phobic fascination Saartjie Baartman was meant to arouse. It's like the most offensive conflation of author, narrator, and subject matter ever.
FUCK. THEM. This leads me to wonder, how have art, culture, and taste fared at the hands of the Bush administration? Several items after the jump.
The Baghdad Museum has been stripped and looted of a priceless collection.
"Poet Laureate Billy Collins". FUCK Billy Collins. (This is of course just my opinion, which is based on his horrible cliché-ridden unthinking stupid-ass poetry.)
How about the blowing-up of an old book market in historic Baghdad? It looks like this now:
Or what about Bush keeping Saddam Hussein's gun as a collector's item? Yeah, Goebbles heard "culture" and reached for his gun; Bush thinks Saddam Hussein's gun is culture.
Then there's Bush's singular taste in representational art. To decorate the Oval Office, Bush chose an illustration in a 1916 edition of The Saturday Evening Post called "A Charge to Keep." According to Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy, Bush "came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century." That in itself would be damning enough. However, IN FACT "The story [the picture accompanies] is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: 'Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.'"
One might speculate that this repressed narrative returned at the unveiling of Bush's own portrait. It is not unlikely that Bush transferred his identification with the cowboy in "A Charge to Keep" to the only other painted figure he had ever thought about--himself--inducing him to make the very strange comment, "Welcome to my hanging." In any case, given the long list of things Bush has given us to feel ashamed of, the installation of mis-interpreted kitch at the center of Western power may not seem worth mentioning. But, keeping in mind kitsch's sadistic underside, it is.
Finally, on the day of Colin Powell's Aluminum Tubes of Future Mass-Destruction presentation to the U.N., it was decided that the reproduction of Guernica there should be covered over lest the cameras catch it. In Slate's report on that decision, it was suggested that putting Guernica behind a veil to argue for war is not as big a deal as the "innumerable portraits of Saddam Hussein and Bamiyan-sized replicas of his arms" in the "fateful streets of Baghdad." W.T.F. An Austrailian U.N. delegate had a different take on the veiling: "We may well live in the age of the so-called 'smart bomb,' but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica. Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that." Little did she know.
Above: A destructive age can only erect valid monuments to destruction
