If you haven't seen Andrew Bacevich on Moyers yet, go check it out. Get yourself whacked with the truth stick.
Bacevich is pessimistic--and with good reason. He says that nothing in Washington will change until the American people change. We have become so accustomed to getting something for nothing that we have actively transformed our government from a tripartate democracy into an imperial presidency with professional military and totally ineffectual congress. No magic, just democracy in action. We chose this form of government with our actions. Dissing Jimmy Carter and voting only to ensure that we can keep buying crap from China and driving huge cars in and out of cheaply-built exurbs--that's what got us where we are today. We broke the Middle East by declaring the Persian gulf such a strategic hot spot. And the only reason Carter did that is because we couldn't just put on a freaking sweater.
Bacevich is pessimistic because nothing will change until we--the American people--take responsibility for our actions. We elect our government, and so government is necessarily, structurally reactive. If we decide we want sacrifice on a large scale; if we stop living beyond our means; if we look to government in terms of setting our own house in order--then and only then will our government start to setting the house in order.
If, on the other hand, offshore drilling polls well, then Barack Obama will change his mind about it, even though it won't help. This is not a flip-flop. This is what leaders do. They listen to the people.
Bacevich comes to the end of the line with a mournful, hanging head because he cannot imagine how to get a uniquely selfish people to stop thinking in terms of short-term gain, stop allowing themselves to be pandered to, and start doing the work of fixing the "yawning disparity between what Americans expect, and what they're willing or able to pay." I feel it too. This is a feat of imagination on a grand scale.
Art should be able to help here.
I mean, this is what artists do--we imagine the unimaginable. The problem is that art operates in the same consumerist fog that drives policy. Everybody hates propaganda. Detachment is cooler than responsibility. And Roberta Smith writes both consistently and eloquently that good art is intrinsically selfish--done simply because the artist is driven to it. She is right to long for the excess, passion and drive so often missing in an art marketplace full of carefully regurgitated art-school lessons that mimic actual excess, passion and drive.
But does art need to be selfish and excessive in order to be good? Can an artist make art
that makes things right instead of wrong? That balances its existential books? That finds urgency and intrinsic worth in something other than the individual artist? In a larger moral vision?
That kind of art won't look anything like what we do right now. But anyone whose art history classes ventured outside Europe and America, and/or further back in time than Leonardo daVinci is already impatiently screaming:
Of course! In all the civilizations of all the world, there is much more art that harnesses itself to what can be right or good than there is art that must, in order to be meaningful, declare itself deviant, excessive or otherwise wrong.
But can we actually do it? Can we make the shift from modernism, not to the rococo of "postmodernism" but to whatever really truly lies beyond? Are we up to this task of grand imagining?
