I am often accused of being an optimist. I write “accused” because I take it as a mistaken characterization. I think it suggests that I am naïve and unrealistic. And as it happens, I don’t think I am naïve or unrealistic, and don’t feel particularly optimistic. I actually have a rather dark view of the human prospect, one of the reasons I am more conservative than many of my friends and colleagues. That said, I do know why people think I am an optimist. It is because I understand my intellectual challenge to be to find the silver lining within the clouds, to try to find ways in which it may be possible (even if unlikely) to avoid the worst. Thus, my study of the politics of small things, which started with the proposition that after 9/11 “it hurts to think,” and also thus, my investigation in my new book of the possibility of “reinventing political culture,” showing that political culture is not only an inheritance that constrains possibility, but also one that provides resources for creativity and change.

In Reinventing Political Culture, I make two moves: I reinvent the concept of political culture and I study the practical project of reinventing political culture in different locations: Central Europe, the Middle East and North America. I plan to use the book to structure a deliberately considered debate early in the new year.  At this year’s end, I thought I would highlight some past posts which examine the power of culture and the way I understand it pitted against the culture of power, which also exemplify the course we have taken this year at Deliberately Considered and a road we will explore next year.

First, there is the link between small things and the power of culture. In a small corner of Damascus we observed people creating an autonomous world for poetry. Clearly the present revolution there is not the result of such activity, though it did anticipate change. But I think such cultural work makes it more likely that the post authoritarian situation will be democratic and liberal.

I am convinced that art as art, rather than art as propaganda is crucial to the power of culture. Quality rather than political purpose, conveying a partisan message, is the fundamental basis of the power of culture. The independent value of cultural work makes it most politically powerful, informing our understanding of the world, helping us see alternatives. This is the case near and far, now and then.

Yet, I know that the instrumental use of cultural quality, wit for example, can be powerful, most clearly revealed in satire. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have helped me survive our maddening times. I became a Daily Show – Colbert Report junkie as a way to maintain my sanity after the re-election of George W. Bush. But Colbert and Stewart’s shows are so powerful because of the excellence of their work itself. Thus a cultural highpoint in television history was Stephen Colbert’s White House Press Corps roast of President George W. Bush (video below). He speaks truth to power, on the cultural grounds of humor. A big surprise is how this humor still is so important during the Obama years.

I think when it comes to the power of culture text is more important than context. But context still can matter. Much of what we say makes sense only when we consider where we say it and with whom. Thus I appreciate the posts by Vince Carducci on Detroit, its art scene and its meaning.

Vince and I disagree about the role of propaganda in art. He thinks, drawing upon his readings of the Situationists, and other radical cultural theorists that all art is one kind of propaganda or another. I think, drawing upon such imaginative writers as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, that art, when it is art, is not propaganda. I know that I am shaped in my judgment by my intensive experience in the culture of Central Europe, while he is shaped as he is by his experience in his home town, as its troubles intensely reveal  the crisis of global capitalism and its culture. I think that neither of us knows the truth, that our debate opens deliberate consideration of the power of culture, as an alternative to the culture of the powers.

This has been an ongoing debate this year at Deliberately Considered in the posts linked here but in many others. I hope we will continue in the New Year. Do have a happy one. I am not particularly optimistic, but, as Leszek Kolakowski once put it, I “hope against hopelessness.”

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”  I have enjoyed Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows.  Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity.  In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television.  I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.   Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor.  I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard.  The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed in Bill Maher’s response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, the critics point out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself.  The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action.  This, of course, just before the midterm elections which promised to lead to broad Democratic losses and Tea Party gains, and which proved to be the case.  The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.”  It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways last night.  His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted.  He is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively.  His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way.   Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers  of Sharia law in Oklahoma,  and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all coming from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day, do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   But we have to watch their tongues as they go into their cheeks.

The correlation between fact and party

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in our political culture.   There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification.  One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions.  Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue.   More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of TARP is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that government action was imperative.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the myths that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate these myths or do little to criticize them.  One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions.  Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles.  But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma.  How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?  And the “fictoids” keep coming , the latest from Fox News – President Obama’s Asian trip is costing $200 million dollars a day, $2 billion for the whole trip, with 3,000 in his entourage, and 34 war ships providing protection, as Stewart was quick to ridicule, following his defense against his liberal critics in his program last night.

A modest suggestion

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts.  The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers.  And as I tried to argue in my last post, they, we, are going to have to organize ourselves to act not only against policies we disagree with, but also against the lies.  As the Republicans obstruct responsible governance, I hope to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization.  A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.   And I have a suggestion for how we might start contributing to this cause at Deliberately Considered, by collecting and analyzing fictoids.  The floor, or at least the blog, is open for contributions.

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.