The Line Between The Arts and Politics

 Crossing the line between the arts and politics: John Semley's Kneel Before Zod (The Baffler). An idea that has been growing with me is that there is an intertwining of politics and the arts. Not in the sense of electoral politics, but in the idea that politics is how people live together and flourish.

Given the broader withering of American authority and its leaders’ seemingly inexhaustible capacity for both violence and buffoonery, is it any wonder that Naked Gun strikes a chord? As political satires go, it’s probably not quite as “sophisticated” as Pizza Man. But it’s a self-poke in the eyes, a blow to the nation’s nutsack. Naked Gun is the rare modern film to pronounce—through wall-to-wall jokes about Pam Anderson’s buttcheeks and unchecked police brutality—that, yes, we are the Freedonians, the Boravians, the baddies. 

We are not perfect; art lets us see that. In a world where principles no longer matter, the lack of them can get you elected as President, art that points us to our better selves is necessary.

This is the real issue behind the Kimmel story (Senator Ted Cruz says US broadcast regulator acted like 'mafioso' on Jimmy Kimmel  - BBC) - suppressing the Frist Amendment so that art cannot comment except at the permission of the government.

About our common need to create, please consider Periklis Angelopoulos's essay, An Impossible Resurrection A Review of Panagiotis Thomas’s Commentary on Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Public Orthodoxy). It opened my mind, even if I have read of similar ideas from Orthodox Christian writers.

In Thomas’s aesthetic theology, beauty is not an abstract quality but a personal, ontological reality. God, as poetic and decorative cause, creates in harmony, friendship, and communication. The uncreated and the created meet in a relationship of care and love. Beauty is incarnated in the person of Christ; it is the mystical radiance that, as Dostoevsky prophesied, “will save the world.” Aesthetic theology is not confined to the categories of charm or taste; it includes the ugly, the painful, the decaying, and the finite. In the figure of the Suffering Servant, ugliness is received, healed, and transfigured into eternity.[4]

Thomas interprets the protagonist’s transformation in Kafka’s novella within the context of the family and social system. Illness reveals the dysfunction of relationships, the sacrifice of the unrecognized and unloved member. Resurrection arises as a possibility of existence. The protagonist’s conscious freedom is claimed through his transformation: “I am.”

The family does not embrace difference but tolerates it from a distance. Tolerance does not achieve the daring of relationship—it fails to bridge the gap to the Other. The father figure, in Kafka, violently rejects the weak child, who reflects his own frailty. Thomas connects this dynamic to the theological tradition: fall, guilt, exile, and ultimately return to God through the Resurrection of Christ. Repentance is not a psychological act but an ontological one—it enables the union of the infinite with the finite; grace inaugurates a new mode of existence. 

 I finally had a chance to read Jenny Erpenbeck thanks to The Yale Review. Her story Junk is short but ever so strong. Its conclusion bothers me; having left me uncertain of her point. Her prose makes me despair of my own prose and inspires me to write better. In a few words she packs in history, current life, and a look into the future. A different intersection of art and politics.  

There is wisdom - a neglected virtue in this country and time - in this video:

And this is how to teach history, tying it not to abstractions but to lives lived, to the lessons we need to remember about humanity:

 History is an art - not just a subject that bored you in high school because it was taught by teachers who had no love for the subject - so consider Scott W. Stern's review, Writing Their Prison’s History (NY Review of Books) with its subtitle of "A recent study by a group of incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison reveals how progressive reforms turned into profitable abuse."

“Consider the plight of the incarcerated historian,” Michelle Daniel Jones writes at the start of Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, a remarkable collaborative history of the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis: no Internet access, a tiny library consisting mostly of romance novels, no ability to travel to view archival material, captors legally authorized to censor your writing and foreclose your education. For more than twenty years, Jones—a highly regarded scholar and artist who has been profiled in The New York Times and recently completed a doctorate in American studies at New York University—was confined in the Indiana Women’s Prison as prisoner no. 970554. During that time she began working in the law library, became a paralegal, earned a bachelor’s degree, audited graduate courses, and ultimately embarked on her own historical research. 

Most of the remainder is behind a paywall, but consider what I have quoted; it is the opening paragraph.  The censorship of information going in and going out. The limiting of intellectual life. How the government neuters the education of its person inmates.

Also, notice how a person finds their own motivation to rise above the efforts of the government to keep them down. Humanity has its creative needs. Frustrating those needs should not be the purpose of our government, or beyond the crude powers of government, of our culture. Yet, that is what we have had even before the stifling of algorithms and the bigotry of MAGA. Think about it. 

Then what will you do to change this strangulation of humanity?

sch 9/20