Putting the Elephant on TV

This morning something occurred to me…sort of the type of thing that knocks you right off your feet. It’s difficult to explain its significance without providing context. Yesterday, I finished rereading Dirty Girls Come Clean, a book written to help women cope with their pornography addictions. Although I think the author, Crystal Renaud of Dirty Girls Ministries, is weak on a number of key points, I admire her courage and insistence on waking up the Christian community to an ever-mounting problem.

Crystal spends a lot of space discussing confession and being honest about your failures as a major step towards healing. This will probably always be something that Christian leaders promote but people find difficult to do. From my own experience, I can say that admitting sin and asking others for forgiveness is probably the most scary thing ever…Okay, second to actual brushes with death.

Anyway, that idea was probably floating around in my head when I was reviewing some documentaries, hoping to incorporate them into my history class. When lecturing on World War II, I usually don’t discuss pro-Nazi sentiment in America – since someone will invariably mention it in the class discussion anyway – but I was in the mood for a change. The Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley has a nice little documentary that includes a short segment on pro-Nazi activities in the area north of Los Angeles. This would be my opportunity to use it.

However, the German American Bund is best known for its Madison Square Garden rally in 1939, an event mentioned in passing in other documentaries. In addition, it was an organization that had been bred and spent its best years in New York, so I turned to Ric Burns’ monolithic New York: A Documentary Film (site), wondering why I didn’t remember anything about the World War II episode. I soon discovered why: There is no World War II episode.

Since my parents had once been involved in the John Birch Society, conspiracy theories must be in my genes. I immediately suspected a PBS cover-up. How can a seventeen and a half-hour documentary that delves head first into a not-so-clean past fail to mention such a famous event? It’s not like this is the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in Manhattan. The eight episode series covers the Dutch slave trade, the Civil War draft riots, and enough political corruption to make a Latin American dictator uneasy. These events I’d consider more problematic precisely because of the large percentage of people who believed them to be acceptable. Having garnered limited interest among German Americans and failed to receive Nazi Party recognition, the German American Bund seems to be causing more controversy than would be expected from any other short-lived fringe political movement.

This brings me to my main point: Are the filmmakers behind Rancho La Cañada, Then & Now: The History of the Crescenta-Cañada Valley (site) courageous for being honest about the community’s history? Or are Ric Burns and everyone else involved in the PBS New York documentary cowards for sweeping something out of the textbooks and under the rug? After all, the majority of those likely to see Cañada were probably elderly people who might wish to forget the rallies. It’s not as if many people know about, or care, what went on at Hindenburg Park, sad as it may be. Everyone has heard about New York though, and there were some top historians interviewed in the latter.

Now, suppose there’s a really, really good reason for playing dumb about the Madison Square Garden episode. That still doesn’t explain why World War II is for all practical purposes skipped. I’m sure they could’ve edited out a few minutes about building bridges and skyscrapers to talk about the wartime industrial boom or Italian Americans facing discrimination or one of a billion other things. The fact remains that someone purposely erased an important chapter of New York history.

Ayn Rand the Hypocrite

Today, Tax Day, a remake of Ayn Rand’s best seller opens here in Orange County. As might be expected, there’s been a lot of excitement among the local Objectivists, libertarians, and other pro-capitalists, who cherish having a feature film to call their own. I, on the other hand, am not exactly jumping up and down for joy.

Although I’ve self-identified as a libertarian for a nearly a decade now, my opinion of Ayn Rand has not improved as I’ve gotten to know more about her. Her position on religion was blasphemous, making man into God. Her tyrannical nature was antithetical to principles of liberty. And her greatest legacy is a Stalinistic personality cult that can only be described as laughable.

But most people prefer to focus on Ayn Rand’s libertarian ideas rather than her more embarrassing views. Whenever I met a faithful follower or passing admirer, I avoided conversation because a critique against her was always twisted into a rejection of laissez-faire economics and individual rights. But something changed this past January.

The Boston snow prevented me from doing a lot of sightseeing, so I spent time off work browsing at Borders and cooped up in the hotel reading my purchases. One was Ayn Rand and the World She Made. The author, Anne C. Heller, although confessing to be a non-Objectivist, is clearly an admirer and at times even an apologist for the literary icon. I expected to get a better understanding of Rand’s life, but I found more. Ayn Rand was no supporter of free markets.

Heller tirelessly recounts Ayn Rand’s unsuccessful career in Hollywood, editing others’ screenplays and trying to promote her own work. It’s not surprising that her books and screenplays were often not well received. She unabashedly wrote propaganda for her own views when audiences wanted to feel good about themselves. Her characters lacked proper development, primarily because she – like many female romance novelists – shied away from tarnishing her precious flawless heroes. And just like B-moviemakers today resort to tasteless jokes for cheap laughs, Rand fell back on an age-old promotional ploy: exciting “non-rape” rape scenes, the only reason why highschoolers ever read her books now.

Now, were many unfavorable reviews of her work a liberal media plot? Possibly. Was the mockery she received by the critics justified? Maybe not. But it still stands that the literary and film industries were unimpressed with her talents, and she was just too stubborn (or perhaps too perfect in her own eyes) to improve.

Any free-market economist worth his salt would say that the producer (Rand) should change to meet the wants of the consumers, find new consumers, or go out of business. Instead, Rand used the strong arm of the law to eliminate the competition and essentially force studios to purchase her work. How? By testifying for the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Heller makes it clear that Rand’s stance towards real and imagined members of the Communist Party was unfair and inconsistent with her own political views. However, Rand did her best to discredit her opponents so that Hollywood was rid of screenwriters and screenplays that promoted ideas different from hers. And in the aftermath, when studios were frantically searching for “pro-capitalist, anti-Communist screen material,” Heller tells us that Rand was only too happy to comply.

So why even argue? Ayn Rand was not a champion of free markets. She actively used the state to gain monopolistic control when few people were interested in consuming her product. I’m not naïve enough to imagine that her many followers will ever come to terms with this fact, just as they choose to be blind about her deception and disregard for others’ individual rights. But perhaps from their perspective, the Objectivist she-god is not subject to her own laws.

When the Museum Becomes a Kiddie Park

There’s a lot of talk about the commercialization of museums and the arts in general. The Art of the Steal tells one story – the destruction of the Barnes Foundation, the last great private art collection – about self-congratulatory patrons and money-hungry politicians and trustees bent on sacrificing educational vision for a quick buck.

For other institutions, bigger (or more) is better. Quantity, overcrowding really, whether in Beethoven-padded concerts given by a local symphony orchestra or in Degas ballerina sculptures cluttering the local art museum, is appreciated more than quality. Snappy captions so poorly worded as to make English teachers cry entertain with trivia more than educate visitors about artifacts. Most docents are, at best, well-read amateurs. (I’ve been one and talked with plenty of others.) Gift shops proudly market gaudy jewelry and expensively-priced cheap reproductions to willing buyers. And all of this is done in the name of promoting the arts.

All this commercialization, the cheapening of the arts, is disheartening, but what has increasingly bothered me over the years is something similar but what may very well be more damaging: what I’d call the juvenilization of art, museums, and other institutions. If you go to any museum during the day, you’ll undoubtedly see flocks of school children “learning” about art, science, and adult topics. Their teachers get to feel good about organizing fieldtrips; their parents get to feel good about exposing these young video game-warped minds to “culture.” The nonprofit gets a pat on the back and millions of grant dollars for helping out our schools and giving back to our community. And in the end, the kids only remember getting pushed by Johnny or seeing Suzy’s new sticker tattoo.

Kids like Disneyland. Museums have become little Disneylands in a desperate attempt to get repeat visits. Some recent exhibits, although cleverly designed by knowledgeable curators and education directors, have left me worrying that we’re teaching kids to expect that anything worth appreciating must be all fun and games. It’s even worse in the science museums. Thousands of years of advancement are reduced to “Interactive stations” with blinking lights and rock muzak.

And, lest you think that this can be blamed on Southern California, where jeans and t-shirts have replaced black tie and movie studios are as numerous as educational institutions, I’ve noticed this problem in many other states. It’s a national emergency. A recent trip to Boston and Cambridge proved to me how even major historical and intellectual centers can catch the bug. All the while, it’s still unclear as to why children, unwilling consumers who are not inclined to make donations, are the target audience of what should be adult industries. By “dumbing down” arts and commercializing it, merely to appeal to those it wasn’t designed to reach en masse, something precious is lost. We might very well ask, “What’s the point?”