So Much To Learn: Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Social Justice

We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution.
--Bill Ayers, referring to Hugo Chavez, Caracas, Venezuela, World Education Forum, November 2006

by Jerome du Bois

Since Barack Obama came into the national spotlight last year, I've often asked myself what lies behind his popularity, but I didn't bother to do any serious research about it. I thought he was a jumped-up empty suit draped in moribund socialism. I skipped news stories about him and changed the channel every time he showed up. Only recently, after the Bill Ayers connection came up, have I begun to dig into his background, specifically his relationship with Ayers, and their common ground, which is social justice in education. And right there, I believe, is the source of his popularity. To state my thesis succinctly: Obama's largest demographic is the college-educated young, and those people have been schooled in social justice because their teachers have been schooled to teach social justice by Bill Ayers and his allies in the educational establishment. And social justice is the core of Barack Obama's message.

In other words, Bill Ayers et. al., along with Barack Obama, have, working side by side, cultivated the ground and sowed the seeds for the fruit now ripe for the picking.

Three years ago, prompted by human stinkbomb Ward Churchill, I wrote five pieces about rebarbarization in the academy. The last one, with links to the first four, was called "So This Is Where They Come From: The Zombie Dispositions." In that piece I described how graduate education students are required to prove that they have absorbed social justice dispositions before they will be accepted as teachers. This is how I defined those dispositions, in another post about "community engagement" at Arizona State University's Herberger College of the Arts:

It was century-old Progressivism, now wearing jeans and a hoodie: everyone should serve the common good (as defined by the experts), including those in educational institutions; they must do what they can to right the injustices and inequities of racism, sexism, poverty, health care, education, homophobia, the environment . . . all those Moral Equivalents of War on the Agenda.

Nowhere in my readings for that series did I come across Bill Ayers.

But in the last few days, prompted by Barack Obama's continued deceptive brandishing of the ten-foot pole between himself and Ayers, I got out my Google shovel and easily uncovered the findings of a few people who have already done the serious digging. What they unearthed indicates that Barack Obama is well aware of the mindset of his core constituency. He embodies that mindset, and that's why he's their mirror, their megaphone, and their messiah. They have been carefully taught.

Easy As Apple Pie

by Jerome du Bois

I found a number of funny things in the press release for "THE OTHER MAINSTREAM II: Selections from the Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn," an exhibition coming up at the ASU Art Museum this September. Mind you, the people behind the exhibition don't share this attitude. They're as solemn as Solomon about it all. That's what I find so funny.

To begin with, there's the fiction that it's been curated.

Originated by the ASU Art Museum and curated by Heather S. Lineberry, senior curator and interim director, and Marilyn A. Zeitlin, with assistance from Lekha Hileman Waitoller, MA student in the ASU School of Art.

Curating usually begins with an idea, a theme, a notion, no matter how attenuated or lame, originated in the mind of the curator. Or the curator notices a trend developing and seeks to focus on it. Then the curator explores the art world for examples of the theme, finds out what's available for lending, determines if there are enough works to justify an exhibition, and then does the hard work of lobbying the owners of the works, making insurance arrangements, and having them shipped out to the venue.

Not so in this case. Lineberry and Zeitlin, with Waitoller trailing behind carrying their Blackberrys probably, just drove up to the Weithorns' Scottsdale house, then flew to their place in New York City, and did an eenie-meenie-minie-moe on all the stuff this well-heeled couple has collected over the years. Tough job. And this is the second time Lineberry has carried out this Sisyphean labor. No wonder she's the interim director now. Come on. It was the Weithorns who did all the curating here. The ASU trio just scooped some of it up. Easy as apple pie.

So what have they wrought?

True to its name, the exhibition reflects the dominance in the contemporary art world of artists from diverse backgrounds working with new issues of identity - a new “mainstream.”

Using the word "new" twice won't revive an old dead horse. I don't know the exact works that will appear in the exhibition, but I've surveyed online images of works of all the artists listed at the end of the press release. With the sole exception of the Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, every other artist is flogging moribund identity aesthetics: politically correct, liberal fascist notions of white oppression and capitalist injustice. As Barack Obama is learning --too late and to his dismay-- most of the American people have grown beyond such retrograde myopia.

But not the artists, because there's still some gold in them worn old hills. They have to mine them, because they have nothing else to offer except ethnicity and old history.

The bi-racial couple [McCallum and Tarry] confront continuing concerns of racism in America drawing on photography from the early twentieth century of lynchings and the Civil Rights Movement. Their video installation, Exchange, poetically and powerfully refers to the “One Drop Rule” in which a person with one drop of black blood in their heritage was considered “colored.”

That is so last millennium. What's funny to me is the solemnity and gravitas with which it's presented, as if they're revealing to us the real skinny, the deep news we must be made aware of. But they're the only ones with "continuing concerns of racism," because that's the only subject their impoverished imaginations can conjure for their so-called art. Without it, they've got nothing to offer. Instead, they proudly advance the simplistic as the profound. And that just makes them look silly.

More pompous solemnity:

With most of the works in the exhibition created since 9/11, the collection is bold in imagery and in its commentary on global societies. It reaches beyond simply examining the assigned powers in politics, gender, and race, and moves to a broader examination of our humanity through humor or fantasy or blunt honesty.

These "curators" never get tired of trotting out the limited elliptical vocabulary of the social justice dispositions --issues of identity, commentary on X, assigned powers, broader examination, continuing concerns-- but if you examine the output of all forty-eight artists, as I have, all you find is cartoon surrealism, pop-culture appropriation, and nihilistic collage, and an abiding contempt for humanity. In this exhibition you will find no nobility, no beauty, no mystery, no wonder, no tenderness, no psychological complexity, only cookie-cutter stereotypes spoon-fed to these fools by their charlatan teachers. If you can get away with it, it's a lot easier than dealing with reality.

Not long ago I would have been outraged and angry at such a narrow view, such a blinkered, astringent tunnel vision of the human race. But now I know these artists are just commenting on each other. And they don't even know it. While they rise up harrumphing and point accusatory fingers at "the other," their shriveled souls don't recognize that they're pointing to a mirror. There is no other but themselves.

Call me perverse, but I think that's funnier than hell.

[Eudora crapped out on us just as Movable Type did, so if any reader wants to respond, scroll down to find our new gmail address.]

Still Waiting

by Jerome du Bois

We haven't posted much lately about art and culture in Phoenix because there aren't many good examples of either here. And nobody seems interested in responding to our criticisms. It may be because our comments section is closed due to bad software. The drive-by anonymondos can't drop their dud bombs and have them sit there for everyone to see until we delete them. They would have to email us and wait in frustration until we decided whether to post them as updates. Unlike the comments sections at New Times and azcentral.com, this blog is not a wastebasket for off-the-cuff clichés.

I could have written a caustic fisk of Lilia Menconi's recent review of Gregory Sale's "Love Buttons," in which she enthusiastically misidentifies luv for love, and superficiality for significance. But why bother? Her schmoozy embrace of Sale's silliness merely confirms what I had already written just below. "Love Buttons" is an example of one my wife's mantras: People love mediocrity best.

Chris Santa Maria wrote in his blog a propos our position in this town:

Phoenix boasts a small handful of individuals that are sincerely interested in dialogue about the visual arts. It's a fundamental issue of dynamics between those that feverishly engage in meaning and those that lazily encompass posturing. I think that both of them are in the circle of engagement.

But there really isn't any dialogue, or sincere interest, and not much engagement. When Catherine tried to engage him, in "Fisking Chris," he declined any public discussion. He wanted to have coffee instead, in private. Amy Young's blog on azcentral.com went bye-bye a long time ago. Maybe our piece "Let's Get Verbal" had something to do with its folding. Or maybe not. But "Art Attacks" is gone, and we're still here, still waiting for answers to our questions.

We do get lots of readers checking out earlier criticisms, most recently the one about Adam Allred from more than two years ago. And just this morning somebody looked up "On Being A Leper And A Tar Baby," about Rick Barrs and Amy Silverman from the Phoenix New Times. In that piece I wrote that "our purpose is to get the right eyes to the right words." That still is our purpose.

But we have no illusions about a circle of engagement. As Catherine wrote at the end of "Fisking Chris,"

And as for changing the community in a meaningfull way, at the risk of being accused of crassly attacking your person, I submit you really are naive, Chris. Don't hold your breath waiting for the local scene to change in a meaningfull way. Because it'll be a million years before anything that I do makes any difference at all, man. Later.

The artists and curators in this town just want to lazily posture in their comfort zone, meeting for coffee and congratulating one another. We will continue to challenge them in print, but until they challenge themselves, nothing will change.

We're still waiting, but the coffee's gone cold.