The Bush Legacy?

“War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."
President George W. Bush speaking directly to the Iraqi people during a national address, 2003-03-17( Source:Wikiquote)

FOREWORD.

We consider ourselves the elective brothers and cousins of Henry David Thoreau, Ambrose Bierce, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Art Buchwald, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Charles Chaplin…and all their past and present elective brothers and cousins.

A French saying teaches us to “connaître ses classiques” (know your classics). Today in America, we should say: "know your comics". Jon Stewart,Steve Colbert, Lewis Black (when he plays in solo), and Bill Maher and other witty jesters, represent the best of Modern Creative American culture.

More recently, some of those with whom we share both indignation and hope include: Bill Moyers, Eric Alterman, Amy Goodman (her moral courage have made her a most beloved heroine!) Howard Zinn (children and adults should study his books on American history), Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Naomi Klein… and many other inspirational dissenters.

We do not need to mention those we oppose, as you must already have guessed those we despise and with whom we disagree!.

And speaking of those with whom we disagree…or despise, let us talk about the exploits of the B ig Bertha of Republican think-tanks: Bill Kristol, who mockingly criticized an art fund of 50 million dollars requested from the newly-formed Obama government. A week later, 177 Republicans and 11 Democrats were voting against this portion of the stimulus package. Among their objections: the art fund being allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts and the 142 billion dollars given to Education. The next day, the Heritage Foundation, another heavy Republican think tank, published an article claiming that increased federal spending for education would not improve economic growth.

Probably, we wouldn’t agree with all the decisions made by a bureaucratic institution such as the National Endowment for the Arts, but 50 million dollars allocated to any form of art would be well spent. Even minor cultural growth achieved by giving jobs to a few thousands of penniless artists is a worthy goal. Fifty million dollars is a paltry sum of money compared with the enormous sums distributed elsewhere. We sincerely admire Bill Maher. But to our dismay we have heard him claim that art should obey free market laws. We would have been deprived of most of the masterpieces ever produced by humanity if their authors had been forced to comply with the laws of the market. We will come back to this subject – more than once.

Let us hope that new generations will chose instead to live in a constantly mutating world where “artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. And if by themselves they can do little to save humanity, without them there would be little worth saving.”(Jimmy Ernst)
Perhaps this “little worth saving” is of little importance to those holding traditional values; those who live in a world which hardly looks beyond the armored walls built by the Bible, Koran, or Torah. But looking further, through the use of the all-powerful human imagination, is what propels humanity forward, towards the dream of a better world.

To be continued in our next issue…