The simple proposition, “there is a time and place for everything,” which I take to be not only a popular saying but a fundamental condition of modern life,  is challenged in our present media environment.  Now on different fronts, the significance of the challenge is becoming most apparent.

I’ve already observed this in thinking about the spread of economic logic to more and more spheres of our social life (link), (compactly named by Jurgen Habermas as the “economic colonization of the life world”  in his Theory of Communicative Action) And clearly the issue arises in the case of WikiLeaks.  But it also appears in surprising moments and locations.

There is the strange case of Steve Martin’s latest visit to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, leading to the embarrassment of all involved. (link)  Martin went to an institution known for serious discussion about all sorts of issues, but was not permitted to have such a discussion with Deborah Solomon, a writer for The New York Times and art historian and critic.

At the Y, the demand for the entertainer silenced the collector and writer.  I think the primary reason for this was that the event was telecast nationwide and the email messages from that electronic audience did not permit the live event from developing as it otherwise would have.

Solomon is an expert interviewer, Martin an expert performer.  The interview apparently started unsteadily.  They wanted to frame their discussion about art and not entertainment.  They needed to reframe audience expectations.  In that Martin and Solomon are accomplished professionals who have worked together before, it is predictable that they would have succeeded.  And this was important for all involved, given what they have in common, and the character of the location of the event.  But because they were not permitted to freely work their audience, the event was derailed.

Martin in an op.ed. piece described how he experienced the event:

When I arrived for Monday’s talk, I was informed that it would be telecast on closed-circuit TV across the country. What I wasn’t told was that the viewers were going to be encouraged to send in e-mails during the discussion; what I didn’t expect was that the Y would take the temperature of those e-mailed reactions, and then respond to them by sending a staff member onstage, mid-conversation, with a note that said, “Discuss Steve’s career.”

This was as jarring and disheartening as a cell phone jangle during an Act V soliloquy. I did not know who had sent this note nor that it was in response to those e-mails. Regardless, it was hard to get on track, any track, after the note’s arrival, and finally, when I answered submitted questions that had been selected by the people in charge, I knew I would have rather died onstage with art talk than with the predictable questions that had been chosen for me…

I have no doubt that, in time, and with some cooperation from the audience, we would have achieved ignition. I have been performing a long time, and I can tell when the audience’s attention is straying. I do not need a note. My mind was already churning like a weather front; at that moment, if I could have sung my novel to a Broadway beat I would have.

People sending the email messages were outside the situation. They could observe Martin and Solomon, but Martin and Solomon couldn’t in turn perceive them and their reactions.  The interaction between performer and interviewer with their audience was stifled.  Because the electronic audience, the audience present, and the performers could not work together to calibrate the framing of the event, the event failed.  The place and time for discussion about art and writing couldn’t be established in the face of a demand for entertainment .

Being concerned with the time and place for things seems old fashioned.  But without it, I think, many valuable activities can be reduced to mass entertainment and spectacular display, from world diplomacy to an evening at the “Y.”

The battle between intelligence and ignorance has intensified since the election of Barack Obama, and it often has a surreal partisan edge, centering around the biography and the identity of the President.  A disturbing report in today’s New York Times: “a new poll by the Pew Research Center finds a substantial rise in the percentage of Americans who believe, incorrectly, that Mr. Obama is Muslim. The president is Christian, but 18 percent now believe he is Muslim, up from 12 percent when he ran for the presidency and 11 percent after he was inaugurated.” (link)

This is puzzling.  “Obama is a Muslim.”  “He is not an American citizen.”  Can people seriously believe such things?  Apparently they do.  They ignore the facts to the contrary, either cynically or because they allow their convictions to blind them from the stubborn truth of factuality.  Mostly this seems amusing.  The material for nightly satires on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  But in that a major source of news, Fox News, regularly confuses fabrication with facts and many people base their opinions upon this confusion, suggests that there is a cultural crisis, a cultural war worth fighting.

It is not primarily a partisan battle, or at least it shouldn’t be.  It is a struggle to make sure that factual truth is the grounds for public life.  It is in this context that I think the case of the so called Ground Zero Mosque should be understood.   The controversy itself indicates a major cultural and political defeat.  The struggle is to get beyond the controversy, and it seems to me that the only outcome must be to build the Park Islamic Cultural Center.

It should be clear to anyone who wants to know the facts that Barack Obama is an American citizen, born in Hawaii, raised by his mother and grandparents, with an absent father from Kenya.  He became a practicing Christian as an adult in Chicago.

It should also be clear that the Islamic Center planned is the work of Muslims who are seeking inter-religious understanding.  It is two city blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center.  It is modeled after the 92nd Street Y, and has been planned in consultation with 92Y officials and representatives of a broad range of religious and cultural groups in New York City.  It is planned to be a fifteen story structure, with a prayer room on two floors, but also included will be a library, a gym and a restaurant.

Far from being a mega mosque in the shadows of the former World Trade Center, in that neighborhood, in lower Manhattan, it is a modest structure.  Far from being a monument of Muslim triumphalism, everything the planners of the center have said and done indicate it is dedicated to oppose such a position; they are against Fundamentalism.

The religious leader behind the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a Sufi Imam, who has worked and continues to work with the State Department, both of Barack Obama and George Bush, in the attempt to win the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world.

These are indisputable facts.  These facts about the planned Islamic Cultural Center are as solid as President Obama’s citizenship.  When political positions are asserted that deny facts, a sensible democratic politics becomes impossible.  More thoughts to come.