Post date 07.25.05 | ROBERT BRUSTEIN ON THEATER
In a political version of the color wars we used to wage at summer camp, our country has been divided into red states and blue states ever since the 2004 election. So, I fear, is our culture. I mean this in a psychological rather than a geographical sense: I am talking about red and blue states of mind. This kind of culture clash is nothing new. It is an extension of that age-old American conflict between the puritan and the artist--the most recent version, dating from the NEA flap over Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, being the continuing moral backlash against real or alleged obscene and irreligious art. What is new is the intensity of the conflict, and the fervor with which religious prejudices are being channeled through judgments of taste.
Much has been written about the growing power of the evangelical right, whose tentacles reach into the executive office, the legislature, the military, the judiciary, even the local schoolhouse. In publishing, movies, museums, and the media, these zealots have been proceeding to counteract, and sometimes to suppress, whatever is considered transgressive or "liberal" in the culture. The attempt by Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to tilt the funds of PBS and NPR toward more conservative programming because of their "liberal bias" is only the most recent example.
The attack on "liberal bias" is often a revival of a traditional American crusade against controversial thought and radical art, a condition previously dramatized in the Scopes trial, personified in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and in the "boobocracy" of H.L. Mencken, and precipitated in the voluntary expatriation of so many American artists and writers during the 1920s. In the McCarthyite 1950s, it was recapitulated in the involuntary exile and even imprisonment of many Hollywood people following the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
But the right-wing perception that the culture is controlled by liberals or radicals does have some basis in fact. Despite the recurrent dominance of red-state politics, the blue state of mind has been predominant among artists and intellectuals for at least a hundred years. True, it intensified during the late 1960s and 1970s as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements, but its newly unbuttoned spirit had already found a voice in the upstart stand-up comedy of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, in the satiric literature of Philip Roth and Joseph Heller, in the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer, and in the anarchic comedy of movies such as Dr. Strangelove. Explosive sexual and political themes came somewhat later to the theater, in such Off-Broadway provocations as MacBird and Dionysus in 69, before finding their way to Broadway in erotic revues like Oh! Calcutta!
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050801&s=brustein080105
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