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Conservative Tastes
Behind the Headlines
“Nothing is what it seems” is all the rage these empty-headed days.
Here in Washington, it is hard to go anywhere where tourists also go, such as the Metro, without seeing advertising for one of our capital city’s most successful tourist traps, which grandly calls itself the International Spy Museum. All of it is marked with the museum’s motto: “Nothing is what it seems.” The more you look at it, the more nonsensical that claim would seem—that is, if it were a claim and not a slogan. On the contrary, for most of us, for most of the time, nearly everything is what it seems. At least, so it seems to those of us who are not among the increasing number of people who hope to make a profit out of showing people that it isn’t, because they know what no one else does. This claim to secret information is of course what spies share with the media, conspiracy theorists, and intellectuals, and those who patronize the supposed possessors of this information are very often prestige-seekers, eager only to claim a precedence over their neighbors by virtue of knowing something they don’t know. The opportunities for chicanery and fraud are obviously enormous, as the curious history of the “birther” and “truther” narratives in recent years has shown.
Yet even the craziest of stories have some truth value if enough people are prepared to band together in an unspoken pact to believe in them. If these belief-groups are otherwise identified as privileged in some way, say by victimhood or persecution, they are likely to be unmolested in possession of their voluntary absurdities. Thus, according to some estimates, a third of American blacks believe that AIDS was formulated in government laboratories to decimate the black population. Well, since quite a lot of other things have been done by American governments to victimize blacks, nobody is going to spend a lot of time trying to disabuse them of the notion, even if nobody outside their community believes in it either. Believing as they do has other benefits for them with which the mere knowledge of the truth can hardly hope to compete.
Lately, however, the claim to victimhood has itself become privileged information. The protesters calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street” and their imitators across the country and around the world are making a claim to victimhood against corporations or banks or Jews or “the rich,” or some combination of them that mainstream society, long accustomed to recognize these things and people as respectable and even admirable, does not recognize. If the Occupiers are themselves dysfunctional and unemployable in the corporate world, someone other than themselves must be to blame. Who else but the corporations? With luck and a bit of cold weather, the protests will have fizzled out by the time you read these words, but their claim to legitimacy lingers on, backed by the increasing conviction with which people regard the Spy Museum’s claim that nothing is what it seems. Those big corporations might seem to be producing goods and services that people need and want while providing employment to millions, but underneath that benign exterior there must be supposed to lurk the oppressive power that is preventing 26-year-old theatre majors with $50,000 in student loans from enjoying the American dream, as they know they are entitled to do.
That kind of thinking is a kind of addiction and must feed itself with the arcana of conspiracy as retailed by the media, respectable and non-respectable, who have in common a pecuniary interest in promoting the belief that nothing is what it seems. But it also requires a constant reinforcement of its most basic assumption from the arts, which are as always the purveyors of our most cherished myths. As the “Occupy DC” protesters gathered in Freedom Plaza in late September, there was opening at the National Gallery just a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue an exhibition called “Warhol: Headlines.” All or most of Andy Warhol’s canvases and other installations ripped, literally, from the headlines were gathered in one place for the first time to demonstrate how the artist sought, in the words of one of the contributors to the exhibition catalogue, to “dramatize the attempts—and subsequent failures—of both contemporary painting and the mass media to structure or give narrative to everyday life.”
Savor, for a moment, that idea of “giving narrative to everyday life.” It’s not, of course, that there are not narratives aplenty in the news stories from the papers which Warhol reproduced, often in fragmentary form. It’s that those narratives are multiple and superficial. Nothing is what it seems, however, and so Andy Warhol provided new and hidden narratives to these simple tales of disasters and celebrities interspersed with the kind of commercial art in which Warhol got his start by giving them new contexts. The whole show amounts to one facet of Warhol’s customary technique of playing with context in order to alter meanings, which is what irony does. A Campbell’s soup can means one thing in the supermarket and quite another in Andy’s silk-screened repetitions hanging on a gallery wall. Yet, says Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, “Warhol was no irony-soaked provocateur mindlessly importing pop pizzazz into the sanctums of high art for pure shock value. He was strategic, intelligent and brilliantly adept at analyzing and indicting the world we live in today, a world he seemed to both predict and forge through games of representation we now know by the encompassing shorthand: Warholian.”
The idea of “indicting the world we live in today”—as if it were possible to live in some other world—is evidence of sloppy thinking on Mr. Kennicott’s part, but it is a customary sloppiness of some mythic significance. “Elton John: I want Zachary to grow up in a world without homophobia,” headlines this morning’s Guardian. Good luck with that, Elton. Those protesters, too, don’t want to live in a world where—well, where bad things happen, like mean bosses and moms who kick you out for smoking dope. Mr. Kennicott is doubtless right to give Andy Warhol some credit for the ubiquity of this conceit since he did, indeed, make an implicit claim through his art to a proprietary “world” of his own as a platform—not so much for criticism of the boring old world of those who read newspapers unironically but for mere anarchic mockery of it and them. If only we could all be as clever as Andy, we should none of us have to endure the pain of living life as it must be lived in the world that they used to call real. Now, however, the exciting quality of the Warhol fantasy world has lost some of its “pizzazz,” since fantasy worlds have multiplied to the point they have a quarter century after his death, as we can see from a stroll down the street to Freedom Plaza.
YET SINCE ART, including popular art, declared its independence from reality, what choice do we have but to live in the new reality of endless fantasy worlds? We have to get what pleasure we can from them, at any rate. What struck me about the movie Anonymous was how it made no attempt to make a serious case for the Oxfordian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, assuming there is one, by integrating its “narrative” with the known facts of the lives of Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth I and William Cecil, Lord Burghley. As, I suppose, not one in a hundred of the expected audience for the film will know or care anything about those facts, Roland Emmerich, the director, and John Orloff, the screenwriter, appear to have decided to make everything up and abandon any pretense of plausibility or truth. Thus, for example, the film has the Queen (Vanessa Redgrave in age, Joely Richardson in youth) giving birth to a string of bastard children, at least one of them incestuously, as if our discovery of the joys of sexual laissez-faire in the 1960s had happened 400 years before it did—and without anyone’s knowledge except the scheming villain, William Cecil (David Thewlis), and his bunch-backed son Robert (Edward Hogg), said to be the model for Richard III.
But of course this secret—as preposterous as the idea of Shakespeare’s true identity being a secret for hundreds of years—is the best thing about it for those who have the addiction catered to by the Spy Museum. That’s why those who see the picture will want to see it and why such luminaries of the English stage as Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, to say nothing of the Misses Redgrave and Richardson, have lent their names and their talents to such a sorry farrago of historical and literary nonsense. It’s not really a movie about Shakespeare or anyone who might be claimed to be the author of his works but about those doing the claiming: their talents, their intelligence, their superiority to the ruck of mankind who accept the world of appearances, mostly, at face value because they haven’t the wit to know, as those of the Ruling Class do, that “nothing is what it seems.”
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (38) | Leave a comment
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Petronius| 1.28.12 @ 7:06PM
And who was the Clinton staffer in the west wing who said, "truth is what you want it to be?" Let them and the Occupiers go on in blind belief that reality has been repealed when "the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return" to a downtown city park or public square near you.
Alan Brooks| 2.2.12 @ 5:58PM
So move out of DC, Mr. Bowman:
"they said Californy is the place you oughta be;
so they loaded up the truck and moved to
Bever- lee. Hills that is, swimming pools, movie stars..."
Occam's Tool| 1.28.12 @ 9:46PM
That was Kipling's finest poem, I believe, and the greatest poetic defense of Conservatism ever penned.
Diogenes| 1.29.12 @ 8:10AM
So THIS is what writer's block looks like on paper.
Diogenes| 1.29.12 @ 8:12AM
Pontius Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?" Even CHRIST couldn't answer him. i noticed he hasn't come back to tell us what he learned in the 200 years of eternal life he has enjoyed.
Must be too nice a vacation spot to leave or, he was DEAD wrong about that. LMAO
P.Smith| 2.2.12 @ 8:18AM
He didn’t answer because it was a pointless question that has been asked for ages by feeble minded liberals who have no concept of truth, and would reject it even when standing before them.
Timothy L. Pennell| 2.2.12 @ 10:58AM
Which is why you just wasted your time with Idiotgenes.
Al Adab| 2.2.12 @ 4:11PM
Tim, Smith:
Diogenes (the original) was a Cynic. So be it.
Christ earlier answered the same question in context to Mary, "I Am (note the use of YHWH to answer) the way, the truth ..." It was clear. Pilates question Quid est Veritas remains the saddest event of all. Truth stood before him and he did not see it.
James Solbakken | 2.2.12 @ 7:38PM
>>>Pontius Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?" Even CHRIST couldn't answer him. i noticed he hasn't come back to tell us what he learned in the 200 years of eternal life he has enjoyed.
James Solbakken | 2.2.12 @ 7:41PM
"Pontius Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?" Even CHRIST couldn't answer him. i noticed he hasn't come back to tell us what he learned in the 200 years of eternal life he has enjoyed."
John 14:6 "6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. " Also, make that 2,000, not 200, silly wanker you.
Appleby| 1.29.12 @ 8:21AM
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”[14]
Maddox| 2.2.12 @ 12:27PM
...and we have elected Humpty Dumpty POTUS.
Kenneth Olsen | 1.29.12 @ 1:17PM
Sobran's "Alias Shakespeare" on the Earl of Oxford is funny and compelling and highly recommended.
I would take issue with Bowman's casual dismissal of the "birther" movement, as the treatment of the pretensident's records as sacred relics raises suspicions, and the bizarre document he posted on the internet raises more questions than it answers.
Where does Jack Cashill's "Deconstructing Obama" belong in the taxonomy of things being or not being what they seem to be? The American Spectator has published a cover story on Ayers, yet has scrupulously avoided the compelling and obvious literary relationship between Obama and Ayers. By cowardly ignoring Cashill's game-changing thesis, AmSpec demonstrates it is less than it claims to be.
Lastly, Larry Sinclair's "Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder?" is also worth a read. If it's true, then it is another work that the American media and the public has to ignore in order to maintain pleasant fictions rather than deal with unfortunate facts. Of course it may not be true, but many of the allegations in the book are well-documented and can be confirmed or exposed as false through archived records. Rather than this course, the effort is on in official circles to ignore the book entirely.
When the obvious truths are so diligently ignored, it's little wonder that fabrications of every variety multiply.
Dai Alanye | 2.2.12 @ 9:36AM
We can agree Obama doesn't have the skill and experience to write Dreams From My Father, but why does the author have to be Ayres? It's quite believable that some anonymous editor, probably working for his publisher, cleaned up and reorganized Barack's quasi-literate MS or sketchy notes.
Mike Hawk| 2.2.12 @ 12:15PM
SObran's book was 'funny'?? How so?? If one looks at the overwhelming evidence and analysis, it is quite obvious Edward DeVere 17th Earl of Oxford was know by the pen name William Shakespeare and it was not an illiterate bumpkin from Stratford.
Random Dude| 2.2.12 @ 7:42AM
Yes, but where does the *American Spectator* fit into the grand plan? Despite Bowman's [near] transparent attempts at denial, the magazine is clearly is a *false flag* advancing a crypto-Stalanist liberation theology designed to free the opressed masses through its unrelenting subversion of the capatalist meta-narrative. Nice try, Bowman, but we're on to you...
Poppakap| 2.2.12 @ 7:54PM
"...crypto=Stalanist liberation theology..."
What a load of horsesh*t.
CRW| 2.2.12 @ 8:13AM
"... I cannot speak will enough to be unintelligible."
(Catherine Moreland in Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey")
The Big E| 2.2.12 @ 9:05AM
It is easy for people to embrace fantasy when they look around and the reality they see is so absurd. In a world where Right is decried as wrong, where depravity is lauded as morality, and where telling the Truth is the only sin, what do we expect?
People today are desperately seeking a world which makes sense to them, but for many, their world view is so skewed that there is no sense to be made of things. They've been taught since birth to shun the beliefs and morals of their ancestors, and now, without those mooring principles, are unequipped to comprehend the chaos into which the world is rapidly sinking. But rather than embrace those tried and true principles--which would mean embracing the idea that man is not the master of the universe and than Right and Wrong matter--they choose to embrace fantasy and conspiracies. It is the only way they can make "sense" of things in a manner that is consistent with the lies about the nature of God and Man that have been drilled into their skulls by their "superiors."
Timothy L. Pennell| 2.2.12 @ 11:38AM
"People today are desperately seeking a world which makes sense to them......."
We have a President with a VAULT, in Hawaii, full of all of his Pertinent Papers, about Him. His Passport. Hie Medical Records. His College Entrance Paperwork. His College Scholarship Paperwork. His College Thesis.
When he ran for his Senate Seat, he had a Federal Judge UNSEAL, his Republican opponent's SEALED Divorce Records, on the grounds that: "The people have a Right To Know who they're voting for".
He refuses to "UNSEAL" his papers, and the Media refuses to call him on it,
We have a President who's Mother was an Atheist and a Communist. His Father was a Muslim and a Marxist. His Maternal Grandparents were Communists. His 1st Mentor - John Marshall Davis - was a Communist. His 2nd Mentor - Jeremiah Wright was a White Hating, Jew Hating, America Hating, Marxist. Barack Hussein Obama spent 20 Years in that White Hating, Jew Hating, America Hating, Marxist's Hate Church.
We have a President who is "Friends" with the White Hating, Jew Hating, America Hating, Nation of Islam Leader - Louis Farrakhan.
We have a Commander In Chief who began his Political Career, and is Close Friends, with two Unrepentant DOMESTIC TERRORISTS. Two people - Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who Murdered Police Officers, Blew Up Recruiting Stations, and BOMBED THE PENTAGON.
He was Raised, until the age of 11, in the Muslim Schools and Mosques, of Indonesia. "Death To America!" "Death To The Jew!" He knelt on his Prayer Rug, facing Mecca, and Prayed to a God of MURDER and DEATH, and CRUELY and SLAVERY 5 times a day.
In the 3 years since he's been in Power, the Middle East has been transformed in to a Prelude to Armageddon.
Tunisia has gone over to the Islamists. He abandoned Mubarak, in favour of the Muslim Brother hood, who's first words upon toppling the old regime were: 'Now we go to WAR, against the Jew.'
He toppled Khaddafi, who was not a threat to anyone. Now, one more Jihadi Piece, is added to the Chess Board.
He REFUSES to do anything with IRAN. He REFUSES to do anything about SYRIA. Only the countries NOT in Jihadist's hands, does he deal with.
A Blind Man could see what's coming.
What? You need more?
Hamas sells Drinking Mugs, on its Official Web Site. The Mugs are adorned with the Face of OBAMA. He is wearing a Traditional Arab Hat, and the Traditional Muslim Dishrag around his neck. Hamas believes that he has been "SENT BY ALLAH" to Destroy the Jews. They believe that he is The DELIVERER, and that he will Deliver Jerusalem, back to Muslim hands. They have even given him the name: ABU HUSSAIN - Son Of The Father.
This is the President of the United States of America.
This THING, sits on the Throne of the Largest, Most Powerful Christian Nation on the Planet, and Israel's only Ally.
Does that make any sense to you?
And, if things are really "More than they seem to be"? Barack Hussein Obama has to be at the TOP of that List.
The Big E| 2.2.12 @ 12:08PM
Timothy L. Pennell,
Your post, as with all your posts, make perfect sense to me. No need to be hostile.
Please note, my post was about people accepting conspiracy and FANTASY because they've become un-moored from the moral foundations upon which our civilization was built. The election of Barack Obama is a perfect example of my point because millions of people bought into the FANTASY of Barack Obama. They didn't care about the reality. The reality was just too absurd, and the FANTASY was so lovely, so beautiful, and fit so nicely with their carefully constructed fantasies about people and world in general.
They refused to judge the REALITY of Barack Obama by those basic principles which, when applied by you and me, told us that this man Obama was a fraud, a liar, an incompetent, and downright Evil.
But millions, it was the FANTASY that mattered, not the REALITY.
Timothy L. Pennell| 2.2.12 @ 4:07PM
If you took this as hostile to you? That was not my intention. I agree with you. If it came out wrong? I apologize. That was not my intent.
The Big E| 2.2.12 @ 5:37PM
If the error was yours - and I am not certain that is the case - then apology accepted.
If the error was mine, which is the more likely scenario, then it is I who apologize to you.
Conservative Bob| 2.2.12 @ 12:12PM
Well said!
Renaissance Nerd | 2.2.12 @ 9:18AM
Your excelelnt essay reminds me of why I dislike the present trend of mixing fantasy with the real world. I much prefer science fiction and fantasy stories to take place somewhere else, alternate universe or mythical world, somewhere besides the real world. Mixing them so thoroughly misses the point; fiction in general offers almost the only glimpse possible of what the inside of another mind looks like; fantasy and to a lesser degree science fiction, have the potential to see even more clearly, because it includes a whole world seen from the perspective of the author. Taking a fantastic tapestry and throwing it over the real world defeats the purpose. It obscures instead of clarifies the author's vision and insight. Fantasy has the potential to be the apotheosis of fiction, though so far it's never come close. I've written 11 fantasy novels, all unpublished for the moment, and I certainly don't claim that any of them approaches the apotheosis I speak of. However mingling reality with fantasy, instead of displaying reality through fantasy, just confuses the mind, and I avoid it at all cost, placing my own stories not only in another universe, but in a place stolen from many universes.
Conspiracy theory of every sort is inherently false, but like fantasy it gives one a view of the believer's inner life. Conspiracies may be real, and may abound for all I know, but conspiracy theories area always false. They are an example of the mixture of fantasy and reality, and give their believers a warm fuzzy feeling of being in the know while all the poor ignorami wander foolishly in the dark. They gives failures somebody to blame for failing, and the powerless an excuse for their laziness. It seems very strange that so many highly educated persons would fall into this trap, but then education only improves the mind when it's based on reality. Knowing things that ain't so is not a basis for wisdom.
PolishKnight| 2.2.12 @ 10:05AM
I like James' reviews and have gone to films over them but sometimes he really needs to lighten up. I'm reminded of English teachers during the 50's going crazy over the cigarette slogan: "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!"
The "Nothing is what it seems" slogan, my guess, is the notion that spies used common objects and behaviors to mask secret behavior similar to the Anna Chapman spy ring where shopping bags where exchanged. I do agree with him that the museum is way overhyped but that's common in DC. Don't get me started about the Cherry Blossum Festival!
Bill| 2.2.12 @ 10:05AM
It requires a rather unique approach to the realities of life, and to the strictures of language, doesn't it, to think at the same time that there is an American DREAM and that one is ENTITLED to partake of it?
Or is that just my twisted sense of things at work once again?
Jim Hlavac | 2.2.12 @ 12:08PM
That's funny, the world of fantasy, conspiracy, fabricated stories, myths, legends, made up things, and just plain ol' fiction has been with humankind since the beginning. We only notice those in our own times; as they noticed and complained in their times, whenever long ago it was. There was actually probably far more "theory" and precious little fact a long time ago than there is today. That's one reason we don't bleed people to get the bad humors out of them anymore. This alleged past where things were what they seemed, and everyone agreed with what things were, and there was no flimflam and chicanery in the arts, well, that world too is a fantasy.
Piyama-radu| 2.2.12 @ 7:40PM
Bowman has a tendency to take a good premise and then beat the crap out of it so thoroughly you can't recognize it when he's done. At the end it just lies there on the page, a misshapen blob, leaking insight. It's what happens when grouchiness contaminates intelligence.
POST American| 2.2.12 @ 9:42PM
------------------THERE IS NO PRESS-----------------
-------------THE REPUBLIC HAS FALLEN----------
Globalism, TREASON and full-blown police
state EUGENICS are on the go.
And speaking of 'on the go' ----one and all
will want to check out yesterday's Alex Jones
coverage of the exit of the elites ----from
America.
Rats always desert a sinking ship.
-----------------------------------RATS KNOW. . .
Marc Jeric| 2.3.12 @ 12:22PM
The unemployable bottomfeeders of Occupy Wall Street and other places are infesting our cities. They have degrees in "Women Studies", "Black Opression Studies", "African Women Poetry", and other favorites of our tenured professorships.
shipley130| 2.3.12 @ 1:39PM
Don't know why you call Obama's unconstitutional election to the POTUS as a conspiracy. He simply is not qualified to be president because he is not a natural born US citizen. To take it a step further, why do YOU think the founding fathers wrote the requirement into the US Constitution? Perhaps to avoid what we are now experiencing? A lunatic president with no allegiance to this country.
POST American| 2.3.12 @ 9:36PM
-----------------TO THE CONTRARY------------------
---things are quite what they 'seem'---
Actuarial psychopathy (ie capstone USURY
is deadly ABOMINATION that manifests
TREASON and more ABOMINATION.
USURY subverts ALLLLL culture and
begets bottomless EUGENICS.
Bottomless EUGENICS ----bottoms out
with YOU-genics -----and GENOCIDE.
The Bible, and human history itself,
tells us so.
IT REALLY DOES