Sarah Palin Is Gonna Party Like It’s 1989

I. “That Culture”

Sarah Palin’s performance in her interview with Katie Couric convinced me that she’s qualified for the job she seeks.   I’m not talking about the Vice Presidency, she will totally suck at that job – I’m talking about a much more powerful job and one that lasts a lifetime.  Rainmaker-in-Chief of the Christian Right.[1]

Palin is born for this gig, check out her response when Katie Couric asked her why she didn’t get a passport until two years ago:

“I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.”

Aside from Gov. Palin’s belief that parents have federal authority to issue passports to their adult children, this response is brilliant; it hits every xenophobic note in the Christian Right’s hymnal of phony populism.

In Sarah Palin’s world, do you know who passports are for? Passports are for “that culture” — the culture of the media, entertainment, and the arts. “That culture” is inhabited by hyper-educated spoiled trolls who spend their parents’ money on multi-continent, GHB-fueled sex tours where they learn how to sell our kids PS3s and fetish porn.  Do you know who passports are not for? The rest of us who don’t have time to get passports because we’re too busy protecting our families from “that culture.”

This is not the first time we’ve heard Sarah Palin pop off about “that culture.” The code breakers of the punditocracy spent weeks breathlessly reporting the obvious about Palin’s convention speech:  “community organizer”, “media elite” and “San Francisco” was code for blacks, Jews, and gays, respectively.  Their conclusion?  The Christian Right is tooling up for another “culture war.”  

Decoding “culture war” is a tricky business. The term is not so much code as it is a socio-political Rorschach test: To the Christian Right, “culture war” means “stop that culture from turning our Wal-Mart into a gay dance club that doubles as an abortion clinic.” To big city types “culture war” means “OMG! Did you see that thing on the Daily Show about ‘culture wars’?”

But to the American arts community, and this is where it gets serious and very real, “culture war” means “oh no, not again.”

At some point, sooner than later, Palin will empty the pockets of the Jesus Camp crowd by once again legitimizing their racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny by waging a major battle in the culture wars – the battle against “indecency.”  The proxy enemy this time will be the same as it ever was:  Artists.

For those of you know what I’m talking about and agree with me, you can stop reading now and resume building the secret Anne Frank room in your attic so you can hide your artist friends. For the rest of you, take a break from Facebook-stalking your high school sweetheart and check out a story I cooked up called “Puritans-Gone-Wild: How a Racist Right-Wing Death Cult Plotted to Destroy the American Arts Community.”

II. A Story I Cooked Up Called “Puritans-Gone-Wild: How a Racist Right-Wing Death Cult Plotted to Destroy the American Arts Community.”

One of the traditional beliefs of the American conservative movement is the supremacy of the white, Anglo-European, heterosexual male culture.  The founders of the movement knew that they wouldn’t get very far with white hoods and swastikas, instead they legitimized and mainstreamed their ideology by masquerading as Christians and declaring war on “communist elements” in American culture. These “communist elements” were always civil rights activists, intellectuals and artists – who, of course, happened to be blacks, Jews, gays, women, and all immigrants who didn’t come from Western Europe.

This strategy worked great. At the end of the 1980s, under the leadership of guys like Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, the conservatives successfully marketed themselves as the “Christian Right.” They had a googol dollars in the bank, they were the most powerful street gang in the country and had transformed the Republican party into a front company from which they conducted a massive money laundering operation.

In 1989 the landscape changed. The cold war was winding down; nobody was buying into the “fighting communism” ruse anymore; their beloved Reagan was termed out[2] and they were stuck with Bush 41[3], a Connecticut blueblood whose allegiances were to the CIA and Big Oil, both of which were far more powerful than the Christian Right. The conservatives were in danger of losing their power, they needed a new proxy enemy that would keep their race and gender war running at full speed.

Sen. Jesse Helms, the Christian Right shot caller in the U.S. Senate, had a plan.

Somebody told Helms that an obscure federal agency called the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) gave 15,000 taxpayer dollars to a black Cuban photographer named Andres Serrano. Helms was told that Serrano used the money to take a photograph entitled Piss Christ, a photo of a crucifix immersed in Serrano’s own urine. The photo was displayed at an art museum in Helms’ home state of North Carolina. Helms also believed that the NEA had given taxpayer money to a photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe who used his grant to take some homoerotic photos, including a photo of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip shoved up his butt. These photographs were going to be a part of an exhibit in Washington, DC.

It didn’t matter that these photographs weren’t really “taxpayer funded” (Mapplethorpe died in 1989, the bullwhip photo was from 1978), nor did it matter that the content of the photographs was taken completely out of context, nor did it matter that the two artists, Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, were internationally respected artists whose work, including these photographs, had hung in galleries and museums across America and the world with no complaints.

The Christian Right had what they needed. Helms took to the floor of the U.S. Senate, threw a series of elaborately choreographed temper tantrums about Serrano and Mapplethorpe, and made it very clear that the new code word was no longer “communist”; the new code word was “indecent.”  The target?  Artists.

Within days, more new code words for the same old enemies were put into play: “violent” and “dangerous” meant black; “filth” meant gay; “the sewage of popular culture” meant Jews; “obscene” and “immoral” meant feminists. The whole lot of them lived in “the salon’s of New York City” far away from the “real Americans who lived beyond Broadway.” The list goes on and on.

The code words turned into harsh action. In Cincinnati, a museum director was indicted on federal obscenity charges for exhibiting Mapplethorpe’s photographs[5]; a record store owner in Ft. Lauderdale was arrested on obscenity charges for selling 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be - even though the album had already sold over 2,000,000 copies nationwide; Rap group NWA was harassed by the FBI over the “violent” and “dangerous” content of their lyrics. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago lost their government funding over conceptual artist Dread Scott Tyler’s piece, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? Over at the NEA, officials caved to the Christian Right’s pressure and revoked the grants for 4 performance artists – 3 of whom happened to be gay and 1 of whom was a straight woman whose work dealt with sex and feminism. These are only a few examples of what the Christian Right hailed as victories in their “culture war.”

From 1989-1992, the American arts community was a mess.  Museums and theater companies were forced to consider the political and funding implications of the work they presented. In turn, artists had to consider the political implications of their work or risk not working at all –  many artists sat out these years by taking teaching jobs at universities, others went to Europe.  Life as an enemy artist combatant is a noble life,  but artists need to pay the rent too.

Paying the rent was no problem for The Christian Right.  The Christian Right was energized, their followers seemed to forget all about the horrendous economy and gladly sent the little money they had to conservative action committees.  It turned out that the the war on decency was just as lucrative as the war on communism.

The war against artists ended abruptly in 1992 when Pat Buchanan broke the #1 rule of the Christian Right: He got on television and went full-Nazi. At the ’92 Republican Convention Buchanan told a prime-time audience that not only was America in the middle of a “culture war” in which “a battle raged for the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture”, but also a “religious war” where the Christian Right was fighting for the “soul of America.” He even said that this “religious war” was “as critical as the cold war.”

To the rest of America, this religious war stuff sounded like all the non-Christians were going be rounded up and shipped off to Fresno. Everyone got scared and elected Bill Clinton. The conservatives spent the next 8 years trying to overthrow Bill Clinton and brainwashing Bush 43 – this meant they had no time for the war on decency. The artists were off the hook, until now.

III. Epilogue.

Today looks la lot like 1989: The Christian Right needs a new enemy – the horror show of Iraq and Guantanamo makes the “terrorist” enemy a tough sell; Bush 43 ruined the economy even worse than Reagan; and McCain is a spazzier version of Bush 41. As for Sarah Palin, she’s Pat Buchanan 2.0 – updated, debugged and fully aware that when it comes to fund raising by fear mongering, there’s no business like show business.

American arts community, you must be vigilant and must be ready to fight back. If you want to try a different country for awhile, that’s understandable.  Since you’re part of “that culture”, I’m sure you already have your passport.