Take this speech from the newly appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. I'd think that it would be stodgy and sort of raised pinky cultured what with symphonies and marble statuary and oil paintings and performance art of religious icons in buckets of slop next to desecrated American flags. But, I'd be wrong. This is serious humor:
Art Will Save Us All
Doesn't that simply split your sides? Weren't you rolling on the floor at this:
This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.
Like all humor we've got a shred of truth for an anchor. The incumbent President does have his name on two books. One his about his perfect father who abandoned him at age two and the other is Mein Kampf. Whoops. My bad. The other is Audacity of Hope which speaks of the struggle of his life as an affirmative action elitist in college. We assume that he wrote them because his name is on them. We can't really check them for style consistency because all of his other writing is unreleasable to the free world despite his having been editor of the Harvard Law Review. Unlike most professors of major universities, apparently he did not have to publish or perish.
And, of course we know that Julius Ceasar did write some of his own stuff. So, we've got humor. What is unanswered is what being a chief executive of a powerful nation has to do with the power of ones writing. I avoid the use of the term "leader" advisedly here.
But, the knee-slappers continue. Try this one:
And Chicago, Illinois? Don’t even get me started. Mayor Daley should be the number one hero to everyone in this country who cares about art because he was a visionary in this field before it was a field.
His work, I should add, began in 1989, 13 years before New York City’s great arts advocate, Mayor Bloomberg, was even elected. Daley spent public money to restore the old vaudeville houses in Chicago and created a bustling, downtown theater district, he built Millennium Park, with its dynamic arts installations, and connected it to the Art Institute of Chicago and now both are powerful attractions for Chicagoans and tourists. It sometimes seems like he has created an arts festival for every neighborhood in the city.
Mayor Daley may love art, but he’s a tough guy, and don’t think he’s not focused every day on the ledger of the city’s economy.
That's right, you fools! The Daley legacy in Chicago isn't about corruption, kick-backs, pay-offs and the murder-rate, it's about the cultural achievements of Da Mayor! He may be a tough guy, but he's got a heart of gold. And, he's so focussed on the city ledger that he knows who is making the pay-offs and who isn't without a second glance. If you don't pay, you don't play.
Why with Daley in Chicago and Obama in the White House, we're certainly in the midst of a grand renaissance that will put us right up there with Dubrovnic, Kabul and Harare.
If you don't think that Landesmann's speech is funny stuff, you don't have a sense of the ridiculous.
2 comments:
The Borgias were patrons of the arts also. But we do not toss their names around with high praise because of all their political machinations and dirty deeds. Its called baggage and the Daleys have that in spades.
This does show how tone deaf Obama and his supporters can be. Hubris and pride seem in abundance.
Disgusting. I'm reminded of A Clockwork Orange for some reason--our government is approaching the level of corruption portrayed in that film.
And yes, it's going to get worse....
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