Category: Art

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Here and There: Neo-Puritanism and the Dutch

I am prompted by this ridiculous story about a young woman training to become a teacher. She had once posted a picture of herself drinking, wearing a pirate hat, at a party, on her Myspace page. later in life, while in placement as a prospective teacher, her supervisor googled her and spotted the picture and expressed his deep, solemn, disapproval. He and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, in their ultimate, beneficent, instructional piety and wisdom, decided that Ms. Stacy Snyder was thereby not worthy of a teaching job, and denied her a teaching degree.

Ms. Snyder went to court and, stunningly– to me– lost. (Of course, this was a U.S. court, where judges are elected by the same people who made Britney Spears a household name). The ruling was that this was not an infringement of her right to “free speech”. Is that what they thought the issue was?

How dare they? How dare those puritanical, self-righteous, stupid zealots deprive this young woman of her dreamed-of career because she didn’t meet their fanatical standards of purity and innocence?

I’ll bet those gentleman are patriotic. I’ll bet they are pious. I’ll bet they are believers. I’ll bet they would feel far more comfortable living with a bunch of Islamic extremists than they could ever imagine. I’ll bet that deep down in their tiny, crispy, blackened little hearts, they would love to force Ms. Snyder to wear a burka.

* * *

One thing I’ve always liked about the Dutch– and one reason a lot of people don’t like them– is this kind of pragmatism that was apparently too rational and sensible for the delicate Americans.

July 9, 2010

[I’m going to note in fairness here that getting accurate, detailed information about this well-worn story about the six-year-old kissing his classmate is difficult, and there are websites out there that believe the offense was more serious than just one kiss. On the balance of things, however, I still think giving the six-year-old a suspension was a tacit confession that the adults in charge had no clue about their jobs, children, or life. While I’m at it, let me note that as for the woman who sued McDonald’s because the coffee was too hot– I’m on her side. There’s a lot more to that story than the media generally admits. It’s become a stalking-horse for conservatives who want to relieve corporations of liability for their defective or dangerous products.]

Speaking of alleged urban myths… has there been a single confirmed use of the “date rape” drug yet?

We appear to have quietly entered an era of Neo-Puritanism in North America. While you can show any kind of violence, blood-letting, torture, cruelty, dismemberment, and murder on television or movies at any time or place, we have become extremely weak-minded and hysterical at the idea of sex.

Part of this is due to the unfortunate, unholy alliance between feminist psychology and Christian fundamentalism in the 1980’s. Off-hand, you might think these two cultural streams had very little in common. They did. But there was one thing they shared: an almost frantic paranoia about sexuality. The result: a kindergarten student is suspended for kissing a classmate on the cheek. Another student is taken away in handcuffs are drawing pictures of weapons. And another student is busted for waving a chicken-finger like a gun.

But the most egregious sins of this ilk are committed by middling managers– people who have some authority because they are astute suck-ups with a bit of education who can fill in forms and transfer money to consultants. They are afraid to make real decision and, therefore, not really smart enough to evaluate advice either. They always tell you, “the consultant said…”, or “the expert said…” So they see the 6-year-old kissing a classmate and they are too crumblingly stupid to realize that this was not ever what was intended by the term “sexual harassment”. * * *

What if your school day consisted of playing guitar, making papier-mâché “aliens” for your Mars project, dropping eggs from the roof to see how they splattered, and learning how to create puppets? Insanity, right? That’s how St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights operates.

I don’t know why it’s taken me 54 years, but I have finally begun to realize just how arbitrary so many of our social and cultural institutions are. In the 60’s and 70’s, we often talked about how schools basically train us to be mindless consumer drones, but, only a few years later, we began to “realize” how impractical it would have been do things otherwise.

And here is St. Ann’s, a towering affront to conventional wisdom. St. Ann’s does not award grades. There are few rules. Students are encouraged to explore their creative sides. And the kids are all right– they go on to good colleges and universities. The sky does not fall in on them.

I have no problem believing that a school like this would be quite successful, and that the students who spend all of their high school years in this institution would be capable, accomplished, and competent, and ready to take on the world.

I think thirty years ago I would have believed the products of this system would be nearly illiterate. Just as I would have believed that someone without access to surgery would die young. Or that a nation without a military (like Costa Rica) would be invaded by its neighbors.

At the same time, the Obama Administration is pushing the Bush educational program: teaching to the tests. Firing teachers and principals if a school does not meet the minimum average. Not an iota of effort made in the direction of teaching children how to actually think: we’ve gone back to the 1950’s where we only want them to read, write, and show up at the assembly line– or, more likely, Walmart, for their minimum wage jobs– and consume, consume, consume.

Go into debt — the modern form of indentured servitude.

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Streep’s Choice

Sophie is not a Jew, of course: she is a Pole. In fact, it is at times suggested that she is an anti-Semite, and Nathan certainly accuses her of it.

Hollywood simplifies. Reality is complex. Read this document about the remarkable experiences of Eleonore Hodys. I respect “Sophie’s Choice” for leaving intact the complexities, and thus giving us a taste of the astonishing ability of real events to confound our expectations.

As I said, I basically like “Sophie’s Choice”, but if you are a bright young author out there and you’re writing your first great book, please resist the temptation to have your characters fall over themselves praising your talent, as Styron does in “Sophie’s Choice” (Stingo is obviously a stand-in for Styron as a young man in New York); Sophie and Nathan, of course, think he is brilliant.

* * *

The mystery of Meryl Streep: it’s a great performance… that constantly calls attention to itself. It’s hard to describe what is meant exactly by that phrase– “calls attention to itself” — but I know it when I see it. (Dustin Hoffman — in “Rain Man” for example– is another great practitioner of the art of calling attention to himself being a character.) She’s so good in other respects, it’s almost possible to completely ignore it. But there are scenes when Streep is so much the actor being a brilliant actor that you almost forget the character: all you see is technique. Brilliant technique, but still technique. It’s so obvious in her performance that I could never believe in the relationship with Nathan– there doesn’t seem to be room in her technique for him, let alone a real passion.

The greatest flaw in actors like Streep (Ryan Gosling is another) is that they intuitively demand that every scene be absorbed into their performance. I always felt that any actor could have played Nathan– all you had to do was stand there an let Streep paint the colours of her day on your canvas. It’s the kind of technique that wins awards.

Streep is a very, very good actress at times, but one of the least generous actors I’ve ever seen. By generous, I mean giving the other actors and the film-maker space within which to do their own work. I mean studying the other actors to see what they’re doing and how you can contribute to the overall effect, rather than just call attention to yourself.

Kate Winslet is the opposite of Streep– look at her in “Heavenly Creatures” or even “Titanic”–: not as accomplished as Streep, but far more generous, and often more convincing. In “Heavenly Creatures”, she makes Melanie Lynskey, her co-star, look brilliant.

Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Amy Adams– all generous.  Rachel McAdams is usually generous.  Meg Ryan is generous in “When Harry met Sally”: she gave Crystal room to ham it up.

Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams and especially Jim Carrey: utterly selfish. Every scene they are in is always only about them.

Next time you’re at a movie, ask yourself if the actor you are watching intently on the screen is contributing to the impact of the other actors.

And one more note: according to Wiki, Streep obtained an unauthorized copy of the script before it went into production and went to Alan Pakula’s house and threw herself onto the ground and begged for the role.

Smart girl: she knew it would win her an award because,

a) it has Nazis,
b) it has an accent.
c) it’s a period piece

[added 2019-11-20]

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The Orwellian Camera

On one of the new Sony digital cameras, you can choose a setting that will prevent the camera from taking a picture unless it detects a smile on the face of your subject.

We have reached the ultimate of the nanny corporation: telling you when to take a picture, when someone’s face is worth of immortalization, when you will be suitably charmed by the results.

As cameras get better and better at basic tasks, it becomes more and more difficult for professional photographers to distinguish themselves from a reasonably astute– and cheap– amateur.  In the world of art, this incubated the developments of expressionism, cubism, and abstract art.  If anyone (with a camera) could create a reasonably accurate image of a face, then what makes a work of art “valuable”?  Something you can’t do with a camera: expressionism.

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Method John Adams

I am presently enjoying the mini-series “John Adams” from HBO. Paul Giamatti plays Mr. Adams, and Laura Linney his wife, Abigail. It’s a superb series– I recommend it.

It’s marred, in my mind, by only one thing: Paul Giamatti’s bizarre performance.

Once upon time, actors learned techniques, for voice and gesture, intonation and rhythm, and how to evoke character. This worked very well on the stage, where a large number of people had to not only see you, but hear you. In the movies, however, the excessive embrace of technique sometimes led to ridiculous results–look at “Dr. Zhivago”, for example. The “drama”– especially during scenes that were supposed to be extremely emotional– is, by today’s standards, stiff and constrained. Clearly, the actors are applying technique, not instinct, to their performance. Watch Marlene Dietrich in “Witness for the Prosecution”. It’s hard to believe this performance got past the director and into the final cut. They make the formal gestures, but you can see that there is no intensity or spontaneity in their faces– as there would be in real life. It’s like those stage kisses still often used– the illusion is temporarily shattered.

Along came “the method”, popularized by Lee Strasburg at the Actor’s Studio in New York in the 1930’s, and, later . Strasberg, in turn, picked up the idea from Konstantin Stanislavski, the great Russian actor. In the words of wiki: In Stanislavski’s ‘system’ the actor analyzes deeply the motivations and emotions of the character in order to personify him or her with psychological realism and emotional authenticity. Using the Method, an actor recalls emotions or reactions from his or her own life and uses them to identify with the character being portrayed.

Now, I personally can’t remember which is “sense” memory and which is “emotional” memory and what the Meisner technique is, but suffice to say they are all variations on the idea that one should mumble one’s lines so that nobody in the audience can understand what you say and, therefore, will conclude that you are incredibly deep.

This is not all bad. Some of the most compelling performances of the past 30 years have come from method actors. And some of the worst.

The problem is this: Marlon Brando was a method actor. Marlon Brando used the method to arrive at a character, in the movie “On the Waterfront”, who happened to be inarticulate and shy. Brando mumbled. Brando received widespread acclaim and a new era of realism was heralded in. Therefore, great acting consists of mumbling.

So we have Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and– worst of all of them– Ryan Gosling. All mumbling and whispering and looking painfully introverted as they do their best imitation of what they think made Brando successful: mumbling. It’s as if an athlete came to the conclusion that the way to train for a race was to practice ascending the podium. [2011-03: Just saw Ryan Gosling in “Blue Valentine”. No actor of his generation is less fun to watch than he is. I’m not saying he can’t act– it just isn’t fun to watch.]

Even when your character is in a large room full of people to whom he is trying to speak: mumble softly. Even when the character you are speaking to is talking normally because otherwise you couldn’t hear him. Mumble anyway– he’ll know what you said because he has a script.

So we have the spectacle of Paul Giamatti– who is not a bad actor, by the way– whispering to his fellow revolutionaries– and being close-miked in order to be audible. You can actually hear them change over to different miking when he speaks. Why? What has possessed the man to such ridiculous lengths? To make his character more “real” he makes him utterly implausible and, at times, ridiculous. It hurts every scene he’s in… except, when he and his wife are in bed together– the only time his vocal mannerisms make sense.

There are obvious reasons for an actor’s preference for “the Method”, especially for actors who are more talented– at least, more ambitious– than average: the method relies on the actor ransacking his own memories and emotions to evoke the character’s actions and expressions. When an actor takes his “art” seriously, it helps to be able to explain that he or she has tapped into some incredibly deep emotional experiences in order to portray the character required. He’s deep; I’m deep; we’re all deep. You like me? You really like me?

I actually don’t mind the method, when sensibly applied. If you watch enough Leslie Howard and Richard Burton, you might start longing for “the Method”.

But you don’t see Phillip Seymour Hoffman whispering when his character is speaking to a large gathering. The Method has its limits.

The Diminished Ego of Dustin Hoffman

“Dustin [Hoffman] told me that if the director wants you to do something, and it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Do what you want. It was nice to hear it from a vet.” Canadian actress Liane Balaban kindly informing directors everywhere just who will make the final decisions on the set.

Hoffman, whose own career has steadily descended into sustained mediocrity (quick: tell me the last really great film he was in), hasn’t created a memorable character since… well, “Tootsie”. And even that was implausible– they insisted on an actor completely physically unsuited for a transgender role because the actor was famous. The same goes for Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire”.

Is Dustin Hoffman still a good actor? I don’t think so. Watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman for a comparison. You can believe, at times, that Phillip S. Hoffman is the character he is playing. It’s very hard to see Dustin Hoffman without thinking right away, “that’s an actor in the twilight of his career”.

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Have You Heard of Hugh Thompson

Hugh Thompson, Larry Colburn, Glenn Andreotti. You probably don’t know their names. I didn’t know their names, off hand, until just recently.

Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer and helicopter pilot in Viet Nam in 1968. He happened to be flying over My Lai at the time of the massacre. When he realized what was going on, he lowered his helicopter between William Calley and several women and children and demanded that he stop the killing. Calley was a Lieutenant, and Thompson a mere warrant officer. Calley stopped, for the moment, and Thompson was able to evacuate several women and children. When Thompson returned to his base, he demanded the someone intervene to stop the slaughter. Nobody did much of anything.

It’s human nature that today we all know the names of Mark Spitz and Jessica Simpson and Michael Jackson and Regis Philbin…. but I’ll bet most people could never tell you who Hugh Thompson is.

The Remarkable Lt. William Calley apparently massacred more than 500 civilians all by himself. No one else has ever been convicted of participation in the My Lai massacre.

Calley, nevertheless, was only charged specifically for the deaths of 109.

What is the punishment for 109 counts of murder? This is America, the land of law and order, remember? This is the bible-believing Godly nation of belt-buckle blustering bible-thumping believers… The nation that believes justice should be swift and true…. the nation that sentences drunk drivers to life in prison, and video-tape thieves to 30 years, and charlatans to 144 years…

So what should be the sentence for 109 cold-blooded murders?

Three and one half years of house arrest.

And then there was an outcry from the “Pro-Life” Christian community and our evangelical leaders that this sentence made a mockery of the lives of those innocent Viet Namese civilians….

Well, no, not that I remember.

I think most of our evangelical leaders were actually calling for Calley to be pardoned. After all, you know, boys will be boys.

I’ll bet you didn’t know

  • Calley is 5′ 4″ tall
  • He’s still alive today.
  • Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a 31-year-old Major, was part of the cover up. He investigated complaints about U.S. behavior towards Viet Namese civilians in the region and came to the conclusion that “relations were excellent”. In fact, they were a slam-dunk of good relationships.

So I went home and talked to my friends and my relatives and all of my people who I thought had been my mentors. They all, almost to the person, said, ‘Shut up. Shut up. This is none of your business—leave it alone.'” – Ron Ridenhour.

We think we are a moral people, a nation with principles and integrity. But Ron Ridenhour came home from Viet Nam aware of an awful atrocity that had been committed by U.S. soldiers and he asked his friends and relatives what to do and they did not say: speak up, report it, let justice be done. They had been to the parades and monuments and speeches and dedications, and they all knew that all of it was a lie. Freedom? Democracy?

Ridenhour ignored his friends’ advice and followed his own conscience and reported what he had heard to his congressman, among others. Eventually, at the insistence of Morris Udall, an investigation was initiated and the My Lai Massacre was exposed.

How does a soldier decide if the orders he has received are lawful or not lawful? From the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, 1971, the United States vs. William Calley:

[16] The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.

[19] Colonel William Winthrop, the leading American commentator on military law, notes: … Where the order is apparently regular and lawful on its face, he [the subordinate] is not to go behind it to satisfy himself that his superior has proceeded with authority, but is to obey it according to its terms, the only exceptions recognized to the rule of obedience being cases of orders so manifestly beyond the legal power or discretion of the commander as to admit of no rational doubt of their unlawfulness. … Except in such instances of palpable illegality, which must be of rare occurrence, the inferior should presume that the order was lawful and authorized and obey it accordingly. … Winthrop’s Military Law and Precedents, 2d ed., 1920 Reprint, at 296–297.

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Hallelujah

I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality.

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Allan Bloom & Leo Strauss and Real Political Correctness

The 20th was a century unlike any other.

I am this moment interested in one particular difference– the democratization of knowledge– the massive influx of middle-class and poor students into post-secondary institutions of higher learning that occurred in the 1960’s, and our ever-so-sweet, controversial, apocalyptic moral decline. Here we are. We’ve declined. We have the morality of alley cats. How did we get here?

For all the white noise and rhetorical flashes over the issue, it’s really not all that complicated. Until the 20th century, only the children of very rich, very privileged people could receive a higher education. These were children of people who benefited from the status quo. They were the status quo, either the church or the aristocracy. And all intellectual conversation took place on their terms, in their language, in a manner congenial to their ultimate self-interests, especially when it concerned noblesse oblige.

And then suddenly you have democracy and a prosperous middle class and suddenly children of hard-working middle-class parents get to go to college, and buy records, and go to movies, and read books, and suddenly Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are whining about the tragic loss of culture and learning when what they really mean is that their privileged little ivory towers no longer command the landscape, and those suckers, those helplessly inane but physically peerless farmer’s boys, were no longer mindlessly willing to go immolate themselves on spears and in trenches in order to preserve Allan Bloom’s right to buy $4,000 dinner jackets, smoke Cuban cigars, and troll the streets of Paris looking for rough trade.

The same elitist attitudes certainly exist today. There has been no decline. If anything, there is probably more elitist achievement and behavior today than there ever was before. But the elitists are outnumbered. And they hate it. They just can’t stand the fact that Bruce Springsteen sells more copies of his songs about seducing New Jersey girls named Sandy with tight unzipped jeans, than the Chicago symphony will ever sell of any work by Beethoven. More people have seen “Blade Runner” than will ever see “Hamlet”. Besides, I’m not all that sure that “Hamlet” really is more important, or more of an indication of sophisticated and developed taste than “Blade Runner” is.

The bottom line is never surprising. Neo-cons like Bloom and Strauss and their disciples (who don’t occupy quite as many positions within the Bush administration as they used to) want to build a world in which their social and political class get to dictate culture to the masses. For all their bitter complaining about the “nanny state”, they are far more authoritarian, and far more willing to over-rule popular taste.

They are and always have been the real advocates of “political correctness”: patriotism, chastity, prurience, and consumerism.

 

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Wedding Videos

Have you looked at a “cutting-edge” wedding video lately? It looks a bit like Tarantino crossed with Fellini. “My Wedding Day 1/2”.

What might be going on is the same process that happened to “art” at the end of the 19th century. For about 2000 years, the goal of painting seemed to be to replicate, as accurately as possible, the image of something. A lot of technical break-throughs, like the use of perspective, the development of different paints and mediums, were the result of artists struggling to unlock the secrets of making a painting look real. Popularly, art functioned like early photography, as record-keeping, information transmittal: here’s a portrait of the pope– in other words, this is what he looks like.

Once photography began to replace that function, artists began to change their styles, and the meaning of art changed. Van Gogh’s sunflowers don’t tell you about what sunflowers look like, but what he felt like looking at them. Monet’s famous pond got more and more abstract as he immersed himself more and more deeply into his backyard.

Professional artists had to find something new to distinguish themselves from hacks and photographers. The hacks continued to try to paint representational images, or, worse, narrative. They were regarded as uncool (like Norman Rockwell). Same with photography: now that anyone can take decent, well-lit, and auto-focused pictures, what’s cool? Out of focus, blurry, badly coloured prints. I can’t wait ’til they start selling instamatic cameras again– to professionals.

In the same way, now that almost anybody can buy a video camera and can master the basics of using a tripod, the “professionals” have to find something new to distinguish themselves from amateurs and hacks. So they imitate film journalists from war zones, and documentarists and Dogma95.

I’m not saying it can’t be used well. I would say, though, that when it is used “for effect”, when a tripod is perfectly available and appropriate, that it has gotten silly.

When a style gets carried too far, as in, arguably, modern art, it becomes ridiculous and irrelevant. The most absurd thing I saw in the last year was a wedding video that featured a wobbly camera, sepia-toned segments, dust and scratches, fast-cutting action sequences, out-of-focus zooms—– it was hilarious. All of these shots taken not in the heat of action, but in the bride’s backyard, and all the scenes were posed. They were phony. But the guy who made it thought he was a genius, and, if I remember correctly, so did the Association of Wedding Videographers which gave him a prize. Probably, so did the bride, whose friends probably took one look at it and — this is America, folks– promptly demanded that their wedding videos be out-of-focus, black and white, dirty, hairy, and wobbly. Why not just hire a drunk?

Anyone remember the sequence in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” where that is exactly what happens? A film-maker is hired to do a bar mitzvah. He is an alcoholic, and seriously demented. He produces a bizarre montage of scenes from the holocaust, an actual circumcision, and various other weird shots– avant garde film-making at it’s “finest”– intercut with scenes of the actual bar mitzvah. At the end, the crowd of family members sit in stunned silence. Painful seconds tick by…. until a rabbi perks up: “I thought it was edifying”. Then they all leap up and applaud, and Duddy gets all the new customers he can handle.

I happen to think that most– not all, but most– current hand-held camera work is ridiculous and annoying. It’s a bad imitation of artists who might have had a good reason for using that style at the time, but those reasons don’t exist in someone’s backyard on their wedding day. Why not just go handheld, without deliberately shaking all over? In ten years, I think it will look damn silly.

By the way, Stanley Kubrick used it for action sequences in one of the greatest films ever made “Dr. Strangelove” (1963), and rarely used it again. That puts it well ahead of “Hill St. Blues” and “MTV”.

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Bamiyan

A few years ago, the world watched in horror and disgust and contempt as the Taliban, those freaky arch-Victorians of the Islamic imperium of Afghanistan, destroyed the massive sandstone carvings of Buddha in the side of a mountain in Bamiyan.

The statues were not remarkable artistically, but they were deeply significant for historical and cultural reasons. (Sorry if you do think they’re beautiful– I don’t. They look like something a bunch of monks without great artistic talent would create.) In the seventh century AD, there were over 5,000 Buddhist monks living in the caves around the statues. Islamic Arab tribes drove the Buddhists out by the ninth century– they didn’t destroy the statues, though.

That would be barbaric.

The destruction of them by the Taliban was an act of mindless, philistine thuggery that astounded the world. If one was not, until then, convinced of the barbarity of the Taliban, this one act did it.

The Taliban repressed women, of course, and was famously intolerant of freedom of expression, diversity, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, or any kind of fun whatsoever. But those statues were just sitting there, harmlessly, impressively (175 metres high). It takes a peculiarly vindictive and petty and malicious mindset to destroy something like that.

In 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq. The marines that arrived first in Baghdad immediately secured the oil ministry buildings and guarded them diligently during the first weeks of the occupation. Down the road, the Baghdad Museum featuring an absolutely priceless collection of some of the world’s most important antiquities sat there, unguarded.

The Americans stood by as Iraqis of unknown affiliation or devotion destroyed and looted the museum. The marines did nothing. They didn’t even seem to care.

It is not that the Americans were unaware of the significance of the collection. Well, maybe they were. But they certainly knew that cultured and educated people in the U.S. and elsewhere regarded the collection as invaluable and irreplaceable. Experts from around the world had made efforts to ensure that the Americans didn’t bomb it by mistake, and had taken measures to protect the collection once they occupied Baghdad. The Americans said, “yeah, yeah, fine, we’ll take care of it.” Then they didn’t.

The Washington Times uncovered a March 26 memo that showed that the Pentagon had communicated, to the coalition commanders, a list of important sites to be protected during the war. The Baghdad museum was number 2 on the list. Somebody in the Pentagon had a brain.

The world should never forget or forgive Donald Rumsveld for sloughing off the destruction of the Baghdad museum as just “so many vases”. It was a wonderful moment, if you think shocking revelations of the deep-seated idiocy are “wonderful”. He really didn’t care. He really didn’t grasp the significance of the collection. He really could not imagine why anyone would worry about the loss of these absolutely unique examples of the art and expression of mankind’s earliest civilizations.

That’s fine, really. Nobody cares if some asshole called Donald Rumsveld sits in his cave somewhere picking his teeth while contemplating the eternal symmetry and beauty of a plum pit.

But George Bush, during his election campaign, never once informed the voters that, given the opportunity, he’d appoint people who would happily stand by and do nothing while priceless antiquities are looted and destroyed. Donald Rumsveld surprised us.

Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), goes around the world berating governments for supporting local film industries at the expense of Hollywood productions. He wonders why anyone would bother with indigenous film, when they can have as many copies of “Ernest Saves Christmas” and “Dumb and Dumber” as they want.

Bush should hire him. He belongs in this White House working with Mr. Rumsveld. They can both be put in charge of the world’s priceless antiquities.

Do you think any of these leaders of the free world care about the beauty of the rain forest, or a pristine wilderness area, or coastal wetlands, or a medieval cathedral, or a rare endangered species, or live theatre or the ballet, or opera, or Mozart’s birthplace, or humpbacked whales, or snowy owls, or Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, or Shakespeare’s original theatre, or a Scottish castle, or the Great Wall of China, or mummies, or cuneiform tablets, or anything at all, other than the stock market and McDonalds and Disneyland?

Think again. When they come to your neighborhood promising the delights of democracy and free enterprise, get ready for drive-thru’s and golden arches.

If you never knew it before, you know now that George Bush and Rumsveld and Perle and Cheney are to culture and history and civilization what McDonald’s is to gourmet cooking.