Why Artists Are Rallying Against Bush
Even creative types who aren't hot for Kerry are uniting in their concerns over civil liberties. Americans should take note
O.K., so Whoopi Goldberg isn't the greatest political theorist to come along since Thomas Hobbes. But it's not insignificant that the comedian -- who, like many other entertainers, writers, and artists, is against President Bush -- lost her gig as a Slim-Fast spokesperson because of her anti-Bush rant at a John Kerry fund-raiser in New York City. What happened to Golbderg demonstrates how vulnerable to reprisals creative people are when they speak out politically.
President Bush used the Goldberg incident as an excuse to tag Kerry as an out-of-touch Hollywood liberal. Before you knew it, newspapers in Middle America were calling on the Democratic candidate to apologize -- as if Kerry, or anyone else for that matter, could control a Goldberg comedy riff. And while it's true that her crotch jokes were crude, that's not what the Bush campaign focused on.
Rather, it was the event's association with the creative communities in Manhattan and Hollywood and their vague undertones of louche practices and decadent thinking. That it was a Kerry event, said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman, proves the Democrat doesn't "share the same values" as the rest of America.
"NATIONAL EMERGENCY." It's a shame the dispute gave way to the usual culture-war cliches because it's more important than ever that Americans pay attention to what creative people have to say. Not since the height of the Vietnam War have so many actors, writers, artists, and musicians mobilized politically during an election year -- the vast majority of them against Bush. It's not just the usual liberal Hollywoodites, either, like Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, and Rob Reiner.
Artists of every type are speaking out, from the hip-hoppers involved in impresario Russell Simmons' nonpartisan voter-registration drive to literary lions such as novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Franzen to respected visual artists such as Matthew Barney and Cecily Brown. Lots of these folks haven't gotten involved in politics in the past. The fact that so many are now says something important -- and disturbing -- about where the country is headed.
Set aside the partisan anti-Bush rhetoric, and it's clear that they're mainly worried about the erosion of civil liberties and threats to freedom of speech they believe are occurring because of media concentration and the war on terrorism -- especially under the guise of the Patriot Act. "There's a sense that the country has gone down the wrong road, that things have gone awry," says Bronwyn Keenan, a New York art-gallery owner and image consultant who is active in Downtown for Democracy, a grass-roots group of artists, writers, and other creative types.
SIMILAR THINKING. Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections won a National Book Award in 2001, says that feeling has motivated many artists to set aside any doubts they may have about Kerry and the Democrats. "A lot of writers are to the left of the Democrats," he points out. "What has happened this year is that a national emergency has caused a lot of us to act like adults and get actively involved in the political process rather than just vote for Nader or some weird third-party candidate."
In addition to civil-liberty concerns, Franzen cites the disputed 2000 election and what he calls the Bush Administration's "radical agenda" of big tax cuts and massive budget deficits as being among his major worries.
Edmund White, who's now head of Princeton University's creative writing program, was the only artist I contacted who expressed concern about the relative uniformity of political views in the American artistic community. "In France, there are many respected writers on the right," he noted when I tracked him down by e-mail. "In America or England, it would almost be impossible to be a writer on the right."
However, even White quickly added that he shares the general viewpoint: "I do think Bush is against all social progress, the sanctity of the environment, the arts, education, and culture in general -- so it's no surprise that thinking people are against him."
START PAYING ATTENTION. Obviously, some conservative artists are out there, too -- the actor Charlton Heston and novelists Mark Helprin and Tom Clancy come to mind -- but they're few and far between. The hot young writer Jonathan Safran Foer was scarcely exaggerating when he claimed at a literary reading/Democratic fund-raiser in Manhattan on Mar. 25: "We've got just about every writer, actor, musician, artist, and pop personality there is on our side."
Why should anyone -- especially conservative Republicans -- care what these people have to say? Because their numbers include some of the absolute best and brightest of American culture, people whose novels and paintings your great-grandhildren may be studying decades from now. And because they're raising important issues that should be of concern to the right and left alike. My hope is that voters of all political stripes will start paying more attention to the broad civil-liberty issues the artists are raising.
When those freedoms are threatened in any society, artists are usually the first ones to notice. Arthur Goldberg (no relation to Whoopi), a retired New York money manager and prominent contemporary art collector, paraphrases Marshall McLuhan in explaining why artists may have some unique political insights to offer. "McLuhan said that the difference between artists and the rest of us is that we go through life looking in the rearview mirror and artists go through life looking through the windshield," Goldberg says. If that's so, what many artists see down the road isn't a pretty picture.
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