22 January 2013

Identity Politics and Criticism



I am linking to a video of the inaugural poem written by Richard Blanco. Poetry is a difficult thing to evaluate, always has been. No one read John Donne until he was resurrected by T.S. Eliot 100 years ago, and by my lights he is the best (short) poet of all time. Yet he went unnoticed and unappreciated for 300 years. That's how it works. Tough to judge.

About Mr. Blanco's poem the most I can say is that it was, mercifully, better than Maya Angelou'spoem from Clinton's inauguration. But so were most of the poems I heard at the Manhattan dive bar's dismal weekly poetry night. Apart from that, I can't get too excited about it. There is a difference, after all, from being like WaltWhitman and being Walt Whitman. All in all, just not my thing.

It was also not RodDreher's thing. Dreher is a blogger at The American Conservative, one of the world's best magazines, and one of my favorite writers. Here was his most scathing comment, following an excerpt: "Yadda yadda. Bleah. Why do we even have inaugural poems? JFK had one written for him by Robert Frost, but after him, only Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have had them. I prefer the Republican strategy." He prefaced the excerpt with the equally odious "I just can't bring myself to enjoy [the poem]." That was all he said. 

He then issued a challenge to his readers to write their own inaugural limerick in the comments section so, disregarding my standard refusal to read blog comments, I decided to see what people came up with. Instead of good-natured response to his challenge, the comments section had been hijacked by liberal commenters charging Dreher with homophobia and anti-gay bias for not just love, love, loving the poem. Dreher's response was that he didn't even know the poet was gay, he just didn't like the poem. (Cards on the table: I did know Blanco was gay before I heard the poem, AND still found it wanting; surefire evidence of my bigotry.)

What I noticed in these critiques of Dreher's assumed homophobia was that no one was defending the merits of the poem (except for repeating the ad infinitum comparisons to Whitman), they were merely arguing that the only reason one could have for not approving was hate. And I was struck by how monumentally ridiculous that was. And then I was reminded of a clip from an episode of last year's Parks and Rec, when Leslie Knope is being interviewed by the dry host of a public radio program. After her segment she is asked to introduce the musical group the station will be playing next: Nefertiti's Fjord, a Norwegian lesbian duo. She takes off her headphones and complains about how terrible the music is. The host agrees, "Yes, it is quite awful. But they are lesbians." It is a perfect sendup of the less tolerable moments on NPR (an organization I love and give money to annually) and tells a salient truth of our culture--we are almost unable to critique anything produced by an aggrieved minority group. Much of what is praised in our culture is diversity for the sake of diversity. 

This is really easy to do in the arts because the experience of them and evaluation of their merit is so subjective. It would be hard for a physicist to be given the Nobel Prize for being gay or Latino (think of how condescending that would seem), but in the realm of arts being a member of a countercultural/minority group identity can certainly be an aid to recognition and praise. If the work is critiqued it is either because the critic just doesn't get it or the criticism was surely personal and motivated by hate. In other words, there is no way to critique stuff. 

I remember trying to read Toni Morrison's Beloved and only being able to make it through about 20 pages before I was mind-numbingly bored and refused to go on. And the thought flashed through my mind: are you only rejecting this book because it was written by a black woman? Shouldn't you give it a bit more time? The answer of course was much simpler: I just didn't enjoy it and didn't want to use my limited free time to read something I didn't enjoy. That was five years ago. Maybe I would like it better today. I loved Kerouac when I was 22; I read an excerpt from On the Road last year and wanted to go back in time and punch that smug sonofabitch in the face. Art is weird. At different times things have struck me as brilliant that I later come to look back on with embarrassment.

Perhaps 150 years from now cultural historians will hail Blanco's occasional verse as the sine qua non of early twenty-first century American letters. More than likely people will forget that it ever happened. However it is viewed, how ludicrous is it that any critique of it is viewed automatically as a critique of the author's sexuality and most likely veiled racial hatred towards the man of the day? When all criticism is personal, criticism is dead as an art form in its own right. Reasoned criticism or even mild dislike is met with pure emoting, and in our culture emotion trumps reason.

I suddenly realize that I have more thoughts on this subject but have already exceeded the proper bounds for the length of a blog post. More thoughts on our weird relationship toward criticism and the club-wielding use of identity politics to follow.

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